On December 25, 1999, an unassuming new website was created on the Angelfire platform, dedicated to highlighting the most momentous albums of all time - the gems certified Diamond (for shipments of 10 million copies in the US) by the RIAA. The Diamond list itself now exists as a link to the more relevant Wiki page for it (Wiki being a remote idea back in '99), and is overrun with a bunch of Post Malone singles in a perversion of the original list's purity. Indeed, attempting to keep up with the RIAA's certifications and then updating the list in HTML format lost its novelty quite quickly, and I decided to turn my efforts into something more worthwhile and in keeping with being a self-righteous white male: writing about music! From that humble project came a quarter century of cutting-edge musical editorializing on the year's finest. I had been a curious consumer of new music since the releases of Mellon Collie and, ahem, Van Halen's Balance in 1995, but 1999 is when I discovered the Diamond list and quickly picked up key releases from Guns n' Roses, Def Leppard, Nirvana and the Beatles.
Since 2000, I have compiled a list of anywhere from 15 to 50 of the year's best albums, and although the first decade of writing has been removed from this page for space purposes, it still exists in its HTML format awaiting a glorious return somewhere. But wait...since 2000?
WHAT OF 1999?
Indeed, that very first year I did not compile a list - and this is a mistake I have not rectified. UNTIL NOW.
1999 was a critical year personally, rife with complex teenage emotions, great music and a miraculous slew of cinema (at a time when I attended movies very often), and the transition from junior high to high school - a self-learning high school at that, and one where I did not know 90% of my class as most of my junior high classmates went to a different school. The one thing I had that could identify new tribes, at a time when tribalism was lord, was music.
Because this list is being written with a quarter century (Christ...) of hindsight, I'm not going to retcon the list and pretend that I was blasting, say, Mule Variations or The Soft Bulletin or Neptune's Lair at the time. Don't get me wrong; I was already a junior music snob who would head to the bookstore or the library to peruse their copies of Spin and Rolling Stone and Q, and even dipped my toes into the wild frontier of the internet to follow Pitchfork, having discovered them for their now-scrubbed 9.9 rating of Bjork's Homogenic that instantly sold me on both Bjork and verbal hyperbole. I could very easily float my own boat and rank The Dismemberment Plan's Emergency & I as number 1 of the year, but I did not get around to it until Pitchfork's 2003 publication of their best albums of the 90's had it in the top 20 and got me rushing to the store to pick it up and have my college-aged brain scattered on the floor. Sometimes I was scared to go out of my comfort zone; sometimes picking up an album wasn't an option.
That pre-Y2K moment was a liminal space for music being released in tandem globally, with regional releases very often not making it to North America until a year or even two later; Agaetis byrjun may be a miracle of an album and an easy 5-star classic, but for me it was strictly a 2001 release, and it would be disrespectful to my memories of dating my wife with Sigur Ros as the soundtrack to claim it for 1999. Travis' The Man Who? Absolutely critical release and still the only CD guaranteed at least one play every year (as I always play it during the daylight hours of NYE). However, I only picked it up when it was released in my region of the world in 2000, and it was one of the top albums of my initial list. Ditto for Basement Jaxx's life-affirming post-genre dance explosion Remedy, whose grooves I wore into oblivion, but only starting in the spring of 2000. I feel fairly certain that I was exposed to the Beta Band's self-titled debut during my hours of surfing Astralwerks' website and taking advantage of their free audio samples, but I will err on the side of not picking up the CD until the next year.
1999 was also the early days of Napster and file sharing; as joyous as it was to log on and slowly download a song to the family computer, I did not have the tech to burn a CD until well into 2000, and it was still much easier to go to the giant chain stores to pick up CDs in the hopes that the critics were right. Discovering the eternal joys of the Beatles validated my idea that they were - I would be lying if I said that Revolver or Sgt. Pepper or Rubber Soul weren't the most important pieces of music for me that year. I spent a frozen New Year's Eve 1999 not worrying about the future, or Y2K causing our technology-dependent world to crash; rather, I was standing in a crowded downtown plaza hoping to sync up the countdown to coincide with the final orchestral crash of "A Day in the Life", only to find that my Discman's batteries were dead. I had to face reality, but ever since then music has been a guiding light. Here were my ten best of that glorious year.
Albums of the Year
10. Limp Bizkit, Significant Other
Look, nobody said this would be easy. Fads come and fads go, but breaking stuff springs eternal.
9. Collective Soul, Dosage
Fun fact - the band swung through on a tour for this release, and made an in-store appearance at the neighborhood Music World, so the CD copy I have is fully signed by Ed Rolands and the gang. As far as late-90's post-grunge alt-rock with big heart and bigger melodies, there are some real good tracks on this one; "Run" especially is quite a memorable ballad.
8. Robbie Williams, The Ego Has Landed
I had been only passingly familiar with Robbie through his work with Take That, and North America wasn't particularly allured by the band. Thus it was probably a surprise to most that Robbie was already two albums deep into a successful solo career when his label attempted to break him into the American market with this collection of tracks. What a stunner - this remains one of my favorite "greatest hits" albums, a great no-skips assortment of massive pop hooks ("Millennium", "Strong", "Old Before I Die"), soaring ballads ("Angels") and endlessly quotable lyrics.
7. Air, Premiers Symptômes
To this day, Moon Safari is in the upper echelon of my favorites of all time; little wonder that a year after its release, Astralwerks would re-release the French band's earlier EP and it was in ways even better than the debut LP. I will not soon forget spending a sick day at home from school, listening to "Modular Mix" in a feverish state, standing inside an opulent spaceship as an alien band struck up the horn section and transported us past Saturn. It may only be five tracks, but every single one is incredible, and this EP does more with its brief 27 minutes than most artists do in an entire career.
6. Eminem, The Slim Shady LP
Eminem himself summed it up perfectly a few years later: "parents are pissed but the kids love it". Indeed, now that my 11-year old is blasting (a curated, censored list of pre-2004) Eminem tracks, my parental side curdles up at the lyrics' audacity. Perhaps the best gift Eminem got was coming through with his pop-culture-heavy lyrics at the exact moment pop culture calcified - references to Spice Girls, Hilary Clinton, Kurt Cobain and OJ are as relevant 25 years later as they were before the millennium. In amidst the hilarity is the relentless examination of his troubled upbringing and poverty and drug use, wielding his pen like an icepick.
5. Rage Against the Machine, The Battle of Los Angeles
I was too young for their self-titled debut, but Evil Empire made a huge impact on the young me, showing that maybe the carefree springtime afternoon that was my 1990s experience was possibly a mirage, and dark forces lay beneath. Certainly, the Columbine high school massacre in Colorado was a dash of cold water, frightening me to the realities of life. Rage do not mention these attacks on their third and final album, but you could tell from their politics that they would have considered it an unavoidable consequence of America's hedonism. This was one of rock music's great final acts, the most righteously fired up band of their generation hurling a grenade through the facade of freedom with barbed-wire guitars, towering rhythms, and Zack de la Rocha's incendiary lyrics and vocals. They were too good to last.
4. Dr. Dre, 2001
Where were you when the parameters of rap changed? You know, when after a couple of tracks of the old-school syrupy G-funk, Dre said "watch this" and cued up the minimal plinking of "Still D.R.E.", kicking off an album's worth of neck-snapping, airy beats? High school boys ATE with this album. On any given day for the next couple of years, you would hear beats by Dre blasting out of dozens of cars in the parking lots, with approximately zero thought given to the reprehensible lyrical content. If people hadn't yet bought in to the hype with The Slim Shady LP, then they were instantly sold by Eminem's iconic verses on "What's the Difference?" and "Forgot About Dre", and clumsily attempted to rap along. Old friend Snoop was along with his laconic drawl, the magnetic muscle of Xzibit was on glorious display, and although he never parlayed it into a successful solo career, Hittman was all over the record. This was nothing but a gangsta party, and if most of it is vile, the production at least remains some of the most remarkable in recent rap history.
3. The Chemical Brothers, Surrender
Big beat wasn't a huge part of my life, give or take a "Rockefeller Skank", but Dig Your Own Hole was huge across the board, and the follow-up had mighty expectations on it - consider it mission accomplished. Tom and Ed's third album is a masterpiece of songwriting and sequencing, every track containing one element or three to make it an outstanding jam; consider "Music: Response" and the layering of the pounding drums, the Kraftwerk-esque keyboard melody and the ghostly Missy/Nicole sample, or the massive bass drop in "Under the Influence", or the otherworldly synth melody in "Got Glint?". Although it will forever transport me back to summer 1999, this album is timeless.
2. Beck, Midnite Vultures
A year before Outkast claimed so, Beck was the coolest mother-fonker on the planet. I fondly remember wearing out a library cassette copy of Odelay! on a family trip to the mountains, and if Mutations was a little muted for my tastes, Vultures was a glorious Technicolor punch to the face. The plucking banjos over a hot Stax-style R&B beat on "Sexx Laws"! The Middle Eastern coda to "Nicotine & Gravy"! The electro pulse and Vocoders of "Get Real Paid"! The groove-y brilliance of "Milk & Honey"! The absolutely bewitching seduction of "Debra"! This was an album made for instant replays, and my Discman's batteries got destroyed with this one. As nice as it is to still have Beck around making worthwhile music, he's never reached these heights for me.
1. Nine Inch Nails, The Fragile
You had to be a 15-year old boy to truly understand the manna that Trent wove into these tracks. I didn't have the language back then to describe it, but I could feel that this album is vertiginous - it sounds like 10 stories of despair towering over you. There are few more satisfying journeys than the segue from the Left CD to the Right CD, the sequence of tracks from "La Mer" to "Where Is Everybody?", and just generally the gems scattered beyond. "Even Deeper", with Dr. Dre on the drums? Give it to me. "Tried to save myself but myself keeps slipping away"? How did he know?? Walking across the pedestrian bridge to my shopping mall after school, with a couple of guys I didn't know walking just ahead of me, both of them chanting "fragile! fragile!" FRAGILE!" on September 21st? It will probably be one of my final memories as I shuffle off this coil. You had to be there.
Songs of the Year
A song list is something I took pretty seriously back then, and this is what I had crafted at the time, supplemented by modern comments. I did love mainstream pop music, and there is even a smattering of CanCon, courtesy of Stockholm Syndrome, probably.
20. Lou Bega, "Mambo No. 5 (A Little Bit Of...)" - I REGRET NOTHING. Thank God this wasn't number one.
19. Eiffel 65, "Blue (Da Ba Dee)" - great taste is subjective; thankfully I have it in spades.
18. Beck, "Debra" - I usually didn't overlap between albums and songs, but the grand Prince pastiche finale of Midnite Vultures is a real good one. I've been stepping into a Hyundai for well over two decades now based on Beck's come-ons.
17. Def Leppard, "Promises" - As probably the only Slang apologist but also someone who had just heard Hysteria for the first time that year, this new Def Lep track was blindingly bright and very memorable.
16. Method Man & Redman, "Da Rockwilder" - this was credited to Meth and Erick Sermon on Napster so I was none the wiser for a few years, but I knew an absolute head-banger when I heard it.
15. Sky, "Some Kind of Wonderful" - I will ride for this one to this day. "Love Song" is also so good. CanCon you can feel good about.
14. Bloodhound Gang, "The Bad Touch" - yikes; I guess you had to be there.
13. Pearl Jam, "Last Kiss" - I'm positive that you also cried at this profoundly moving track when you heard it for like the 50th time on the radio that summer, don't lie.
12. TLC, "No Scrubs" - I couldn't wait for the future to sound like this track; I wish I had ranked it higher.
11. Ricky Martin, "Livin' La Vida Loca" - just wait until you realize this is actually a ska song masquerading as Latin pop.
10. Santana ft. Rob Thomas, "Smooth" - inexplicable pick. Or was it...?
9. Matthew Good Band, "Hello Timebomb" - must have been the forced exposure on alt-rock stations, but I did enjoy the sparse verses and explosive chorus combo. Anecdotally, I was on a family trip to Vancouver when the video was being shot at a club and there was an open casting call. Naturally, I was not taken to be part of it.
8. Sugar Ray, "Every Morning" - again, this sounds like a springtime afternoon when you're happy and carefree. Sue me.
7. Our Lady Peace, "One Man Army" - your mileage of Raine's voice may vary, but there is a solid groove and some sick bass work in the verses.
6. Backstreet Boys, "I Want It That Way" - to use today's language: "respect the craft". This is the craftiest.
5. blink-182, "All The Small Things" - helped by an iconic video, this one spoke loud to us teenaged boys.
4. Britney Spears, "...Baby One More Time" - 10/10, no jokes. Pop perfection even a 15 year old boy could be flabbergasted by.
3. Madonna, "Beautiful Stranger" - the Material Girl left the 20th century in the dust with this soundtrack cut; a throwback, a wink and an everlasting earworm.
2. Tal Bachman, "She's So High" - the original CanCon nepo baby, but he made his moment in the sun count with this eternal sing-along.
1. Len, "Steal My Sunshine" - pop music peaked here, and this has been the Song of the Summer for 26 years and counting.
Damn, it was a very good year. Thanks for indulging me.
On December 25, 1999, an unassuming new website was created on the Angelfire platform, dedicated to highlighting the most momentous albums of all time - the gems certified Diamond (for shipments of 10 million copies in the US) by the RIAA. The Diamond list itself now exists as a link to the more relevant Wiki page for it (Wiki being a remote idea back in '99), and is overrun with a bunch of Post Malone singles in a perversion of the original list's purity. Indeed, attempting to keep up with the RIAA's certifications and then updating the list in HTML format lost its novelty quite quickly, and I decided to turn my efforts into something more worthwhile and in keeping with being a self-righteous white male: writing about music! From that humble project came a quarter century of cutting-edge musical editorializing on the year's finest. I had been a curious consumer of new music since the releases of Mellon Collie and, ahem, Van Halen's Balance in 1995, but 1999 is when I discovered the Diamond list and quickly picked up key releases from Guns n' Roses, Def Leppard, Nirvana and the Beatles.
Since 2000, I have compiled a list of anywhere from 15 to 50 of the year's best albums, and although the first decade of writing has been removed from this page for space purposes, it still exists in its HTML format awaiting a glorious return somewhere. But wait...since 2000?
WHAT OF 1999?
Indeed, that very first year I did not compile a list - and this is a mistake I have not rectified. UNTIL NOW.
1999 was a critical year personally, rife with complex teenage emotions, great music and a miraculous slew of cinema (at a time when I attended movies very often), and the transition from junior high to high school - a self-learning high school at that, and one where I did not know 90% of my class as most of my junior high classmates went to a different school. The one thing I had that could identify new tribes, at a time when tribalism was lord, was music.
Because this list is being written with a quarter century (Christ...) of hindsight, I'm not going to retcon the list and pretend that I was blasting, say, Mule Variations or The Soft Bulletin or Neptune's Lair at the time. Don't get me wrong; I was already a junior music snob who would head to the bookstore or the library to peruse their copies of Spin and Rolling Stone and Q, and even dipped my toes into the wild frontier of the internet to follow Pitchfork, having discovered them for their now-scrubbed 9.9 rating of Bjork's Homogenic that instantly sold me on both Bjork and verbal hyperbole. I could very easily float my own boat and rank The Dismemberment Plan's Emergency & I as number 1 of the year, but I did not get around to it until Pitchfork's 2003 publication of their best albums of the 90's had it in the top 20 and got me rushing to the store to pick it up and have my college-aged brain scattered on the floor. Sometimes I was scared to go out of my comfort zone; sometimes picking up an album wasn't an option.
That pre-Y2K moment was a liminal space for music being released in tandem globally, with regional releases very often not making it to North America until a year or even two later; Agaetis byrjun may be a miracle of an album and an easy 5-star classic, but for me it was strictly a 2001 release, and it would be disrespectful to my memories of dating my wife with Sigur Ros as the soundtrack to claim it for 1999. Travis' The Man Who? Absolutely critical release and still the only CD guaranteed at least one play every year (as I always play it during the daylight hours of NYE). However, I only picked it up when it was released in my region of the world in 2000, and it was one of the top albums of my initial list. Ditto for Basement Jaxx's life-affirming post-genre dance explosion Remedy, whose grooves I wore into oblivion, but only starting in the spring of 2000. I feel fairly certain that I was exposed to the Beta Band's self-titled debut during my hours of surfing Astralwerks' website and taking advantage of their free audio samples, but I will err on the side of not picking up the CD until the next year.
1999 was also the early days of Napster and file sharing; as joyous as it was to log on and slowly download a song to the family computer, I did not have the tech to burn a CD until well into 2000, and it was still much easier to go to the giant chain stores to pick up CDs in the hopes that the critics were right. Discovering the eternal joys of the Beatles validated my idea that they were - I would be lying if I said that Revolver or Sgt. Pepper or Rubber Soul weren't the most important pieces of music for me that year. I spent a frozen New Year's Eve 1999 not worrying about the future, or Y2K causing our technology-dependent world to crash; rather, I was standing in a crowded downtown plaza hoping to sync up the countdown to coincide with the final orchestral crash of "A Day in the Life", only to find that my Discman's batteries were dead. I had to face reality, but ever since then music has been a guiding light. Here were my ten best of that glorious year.
Albums of the Year
10. Limp Bizkit, Significant Other |
Look, nobody said this would be easy. Fads come and fads go, but breaking stuff springs eternal. | |
9. Collective Soul, Dosage |
Fun fact - the band swung through on a tour for this release, and made an in-store appearance at the neighborhood Music World, so the CD copy I have is fully signed by Ed Rolands and the gang. As far as late-90's post-grunge alt-rock with big heart and bigger melodies, there are some real good tracks on this one; "Run" especially is quite a memorable ballad. | |
8. Robbie Williams, The Ego Has Landed |
I had been only passingly familiar with Robbie through his work with Take That, and North America wasn't particularly allured by the band. Thus it was probably a surprise to most that Robbie was already two albums deep into a successful solo career when his label attempted to break him into the American market with this collection of tracks. What a stunner - this remains one of my favorite "greatest hits" albums, a great no-skips assortment of massive pop hooks ("Millennium", "Strong", "Old Before I Die"), soaring ballads ("Angels") and endlessly quotable lyrics. | |
7. Air, Premiers Symptômes |
To this day, Moon Safari is in the upper echelon of my favorites of all time; little wonder that a year after its release, Astralwerks would re-release the French band's earlier EP and it was in ways even better than the debut LP. I will not soon forget spending a sick day at home from school, listening to "Modular Mix" in a feverish state, standing inside an opulent spaceship as an alien band struck up the horn section and transported us past Saturn. It may only be five tracks, but every single one is incredible, and this EP does more with its brief 27 minutes than most artists do in an entire career. | |
6. Eminem, The Slim Shady LP |
Eminem himself summed it up perfectly a few years later: "parents are pissed but the kids love it". Indeed, now that my 11-year old is blasting (a curated, censored list of pre-2004) Eminem tracks, my parental side curdles up at the lyrics' audacity. Perhaps the best gift Eminem got was coming through with his pop-culture-heavy lyrics at the exact moment pop culture calcified - references to Spice Girls, Hilary Clinton, Kurt Cobain and OJ are as relevant 25 years later as they were before the millennium. In amidst the hilarity is the relentless examination of his troubled upbringing and poverty and drug use, wielding his pen like an icepick. | |
5. Rage Against the Machine, The Battle of Los Angeles |
I was too young for their self-titled debut, but Evil Empire made a huge impact on the young me, showing that maybe the carefree springtime afternoon that was my 1990s experience was possibly a mirage, and dark forces lay beneath. Certainly, the Columbine high school massacre in Colorado was a dash of cold water, frightening me to the realities of life. Rage do not mention these attacks on their third and final album, but you could tell from their politics that they would have considered it an unavoidable consequence of America's hedonism. This was one of rock music's great final acts, the most righteously fired up band of their generation hurling a grenade through the facade of freedom with barbed-wire guitars, towering rhythms, and Zack de la Rocha's incendiary lyrics and vocals. They were too good to last. | |
4. Dr. Dre, 2001 |
Where were you when the parameters of rap changed? You know, when after a couple of tracks of the old-school syrupy G-funk, Dre said "watch this" and cued up the minimal plinking of "Still D.R.E.", kicking off an album's worth of neck-snapping, airy beats? High school boys ATE with this album. On any given day for the next couple of years, you would hear beats by Dre blasting out of dozens of cars in the parking lots, with approximately zero thought given to the reprehensible lyrical content. If people hadn't yet bought in to the hype with The Slim Shady LP, then they were instantly sold by Eminem's iconic verses on "What's the Difference?" and "Forgot About Dre", and clumsily attempted to rap along. Old friend Snoop was along with his laconic drawl, the magnetic muscle of Xzibit was on glorious display, and although he never parlayed it into a successful solo career, Hittman was all over the record. This was nothing but a gangsta party, and if most of it is vile, the production at least remains some of the most remarkable in recent rap history. | |
3. The Chemical Brothers, Surrender |
Big beat wasn't a huge part of my life, give or take a "Rockefeller Skank", but Dig Your Own Hole was huge across the board, and the follow-up had mighty expectations on it - consider it mission accomplished. Tom and Ed's third album is a masterpiece of songwriting and sequencing, every track containing one element or three to make it an outstanding jam; consider "Music: Response" and the layering of the pounding drums, the Kraftwerk-esque keyboard melody and the ghostly Missy/Nicole sample, or the massive bass drop in "Under the Influence", or the otherworldly synth melody in "Got Glint?". Although it will forever transport me back to summer 1999, this album is timeless. | |
2. Beck, Midnite Vultures |
A year before Outkast claimed so, Beck was the coolest mother-fonker on the planet. I fondly remember wearing out a library cassette copy of Odelay! on a family trip to the mountains, and if Mutations was a little muted for my tastes, Vultures was a glorious Technicolor punch to the face. The plucking banjos over a hot Stax-style R&B beat on "Sexx Laws"! The Middle Eastern coda to "Nicotine & Gravy"! The electro pulse and Vocoders of "Get Real Paid"! The groove-y brilliance of "Milk & Honey"! The absolutely bewitching seduction of "Debra"! This was an album made for instant replays, and my Discman's batteries got destroyed with this one. As nice as it is to still have Beck around making worthwhile music, he's never reached these heights for me. | |
1. Nine Inch Nails, The Fragile |
You had to be a 15-year old boy to truly understand the manna that Trent wove into these tracks. I didn't have the language back then to describe it, but I could feel that this album is vertiginous - it sounds like 10 stories of despair towering over you. There are few more satisfying journeys than the segue from the Left CD to the Right CD, the sequence of tracks from "La Mer" to "Where Is Everybody?", and just generally the gems scattered beyond. "Even Deeper", with Dr. Dre on the drums? Give it to me. "Tried to save myself but myself keeps slipping away"? How did he know?? Walking across the pedestrian bridge to my shopping mall after school, with a couple of guys I didn't know walking just ahead of me, both of them chanting "fragile! fragile!" FRAGILE!" on September 21st? It will probably be one of my final memories as I shuffle off this coil. You had to be there. |
Songs of the Year
A song list is something I took pretty seriously back then, and this is what I had crafted at the time, supplemented by modern comments. I did love mainstream pop music, and there is even a smattering of CanCon, courtesy of Stockholm Syndrome, probably.
20. Lou Bega, "Mambo No. 5 (A Little Bit Of...)" - I REGRET NOTHING. Thank God this wasn't number one.
19. Eiffel 65, "Blue (Da Ba Dee)" - great taste is subjective; thankfully I have it in spades.
18. Beck, "Debra" - I usually didn't overlap between albums and songs, but the grand Prince pastiche finale of Midnite Vultures is a real good one. I've been stepping into a Hyundai for well over two decades now based on Beck's come-ons.
17. Def Leppard, "Promises" - As probably the only Slang apologist but also someone who had just heard Hysteria for the first time that year, this new Def Lep track was blindingly bright and very memorable.
16. Method Man & Redman, "Da Rockwilder" - this was credited to Meth and Erick Sermon on Napster so I was none the wiser for a few years, but I knew an absolute head-banger when I heard it.
15. Sky, "Some Kind of Wonderful" - I will ride for this one to this day. "Love Song" is also so good. CanCon you can feel good about.
14. Bloodhound Gang, "The Bad Touch" - yikes; I guess you had to be there.
13. Pearl Jam, "Last Kiss" - I'm positive that you also cried at this profoundly moving track when you heard it for like the 50th time on the radio that summer, don't lie.
12. TLC, "No Scrubs" - I couldn't wait for the future to sound like this track; I wish I had ranked it higher.
11. Ricky Martin, "Livin' La Vida Loca" - just wait until you realize this is actually a ska song masquerading as Latin pop.
10. Santana ft. Rob Thomas, "Smooth" - inexplicable pick. Or was it...?
9. Matthew Good Band, "Hello Timebomb" - must have been the forced exposure on alt-rock stations, but I did enjoy the sparse verses and explosive chorus combo. Anecdotally, I was on a family trip to Vancouver when the video was being shot at a club and there was an open casting call. Naturally, I was not taken to be part of it.
8. Sugar Ray, "Every Morning" - again, this sounds like a springtime afternoon when you're happy and carefree. Sue me.
7. Our Lady Peace, "One Man Army" - your mileage of Raine's voice may vary, but there is a solid groove and some sick bass work in the verses.
6. Backstreet Boys, "I Want It That Way" - to use today's language: "respect the craft". This is the craftiest.
5. blink-182, "All The Small Things" - helped by an iconic video, this one spoke loud to us teenaged boys.
4. Britney Spears, "...Baby One More Time" - 10/10, no jokes. Pop perfection even a 15 year old boy could be flabbergasted by.
3. Madonna, "Beautiful Stranger" - the Material Girl left the 20th century in the dust with this soundtrack cut; a throwback, a wink and an everlasting earworm.
2. Tal Bachman, "She's So High" - the original CanCon nepo baby, but he made his moment in the sun count with this eternal sing-along.
1. Len, "Steal My Sunshine" - pop music peaked here, and this has been the Song of the Summer for 26 years and counting.
Damn, it was a very good year. Thanks for indulging me.