The Hottest Hit On The Planet:
“Yeah!”
by Usher
You already know that “Yeah” is the party anthem of the decade, right?
Beloved by both ladies in the street and freaks in the bed? You know that from a one to ten, it’s a certified 20?
Good. Let’s move on.
Meanwhile, in Sweary Saga Land:
“F*ck It” by Eamon
and
“F.U.R.B” by Frankee
At the time of writing – i.e. a couple of weeks ago – the hip-hop world has become captivated – hell, the entire pop world has become captivated* – by the ongoing saga of what will no doubt go down in history as The Greatest Rap Beef Of All Time:
Kendrick vs. Drake.
A beef in which Drake seems to be getting so utterly owned by Kendrick that he might not dare show his face around the pop charts ever again.
Oh, what I am saying? He’ll probably have another Number One by the time this goes to print!**
Twenty Years Ago, the pop world was caught up in another beef: A beef that (according to her) or alternatively had never even met each other before (according to him.)
It all began with Eamon.
Inventor – and sole practitioner – of a genre of music that he referred to as ‘ho-wop’; one of only a handful of musical genres not to have its own Wikipedia page (I’ll be discussing another Wikipedia-page-lacking musical genre below.)
What, you might ask, Theoretically Speaking, Makes ho-wop, “ho-wop?”
Ho-wop apparently “blends the smoothness of R&B with the grittiness of hip hop.” Hadn’t that already been done 10-15 years earlier? Isn’t that what New Jack Swing was? Or didn’t the New Jack Swingers say “ho” enough?
Eamon said “ho.” As in, “f*ck you, you ho, I don’t want you back.”
So that explains the “hos.” But does it explain the “wop?”
The “wop” in “ho-wop” was obviously a reference to doo-wop, as evidenced by Eamon’s follow-up single “I Love Them Ho’s (Ho-Wop),” which sampled The Flamingos doo-wop classic “I Only Have Eyes For You” (which is a 10). But even such a blatant sample-grab wasn’t enough to turn “I Love Them Ho’s (Ho-Wop)” into a hit.
“I Love Them Ho’s (Ho-Wop)” was obviously rubbish (it’s a 2,) but there was another reason for its failure to hit. That’s because, in the meantime, Eamon had been absolutely owned by his ex-girlfriend Frankee.
Frankee claimed that “F*ck It (I Don’t Want You Back)” was written about her. Frankee demanded a right-of-reply. Frankee demanded the opportunity to tell her side of the story.
Frankee got her wish, singing an answer record using the same melody and the same backing track. And Frankee made it count. Frankee revealed to the world that Eamon had crabs, that she’d faked all her orgasms, that she’d had better sex alone, all of which she summed up with the pithy phrase “your sex was wack.”
These shocking revelations were leaked out into the world when Z100 (“New York’s #1 Hit Music Station!”) received an anonymous envelope one morning. Z100 opened it up, and what did they find?
A tape.
An exclusive expose! The true story! Shocking revelations about Eamon’s wack sex!
But more shocking revelations were to come. Revelations such as – and you will not have seen this coming – the w5hole thing was a scam!
The idea of an answer record had come from Eamon’s team!! They’d had auditions so that they could find the right girl and everything!!!
It was they who had sent the tape to Z100!!! It seems that the initial plan was just to make answer record – purely for the lols – leave it at that and move on with their lives.
But then, Frankee went rogue.
She started giving interviews. She started insisting that she and Eamon had dated. A lot of people believed her. A lot of people believed that Eamon’s sex was wack.
This wasn’t what Eamon had signed up for. Eamon hadn’t signed up for public pubic-lice. Eamon started to backtrack, claiming that he and Frankee had never dated, had never even met.
Since nobody involved in these shenanigans can be considered anything close to a reliable narrator, we may never know exactly what went down. But in the end, whatever the controversy behind it, we have the music.
Unfortunately for everyone involved – and particularly you, the listener – the music was, how did Frankee put it… wack?
I’m pretty sure that nobody other than Frankee was saying “wack” in 2004. I’m pretty sure that nobody had used the word “wack” unironically for over a decade at that point. This makes “F U Right Back” – a song that says “your sex was wack” so many times that it may as well have been titled “Your Sex Was Wack” – completely and utterly wack. It’s almost as though everyone involved in this whole caper was intentionally trying to be as lame as they possibly could.
Everything about “F*ck It (I Don’t Want You Back)” and “F U Right Back (F.U.R.B)” is wack. Wiggety-wack, even. For a franchise that scored back-to-back Number Ones in the UK, the whole thing is brilliantly half-assed.
The ex-boyfriend in the “F U Right Back (F.U.R.B.)” video is clearly supposed to be Eamon, but other than give him the same haircut, they really didn’t bother to make him look like Eamon at all
Incredibly, despite the success of “F.U.R.B.” the record, “F.U.R.B.” never really caught on as an acronym, not even in our acronym-obsessed times.
- “F*ck It (I Don’t Want You Back)” is a 2.
- “F U Right Back (F.U.R.B.)” is a 3.
*One Australian media-outlet is even claiming that Kendrick vs Drake is the biggest water-cooler topic since the final season of Game Of Thrones, but then again, this particular media-outlet does talk a lot of shit.
**Breaking News: Drake’s security guard has just been shot at Drake’s Toronto mansion! This shit is getting serious!! Frankee would never have taken it that far!!!
Meanwhile, in Butt Rock Land:
“The Reason”
by Hoobastank
Doug Robb, the lead singer of Hoobastank – or as I like to call him, ‘Hooba’ – is not a perfect person. You can tell that he’s not a perfect person because he seems completely comfortable with the fact that he is the lead singer of a band that goes by the name of Hoobastank.
And because he has that stupid goatee. The whole band does.
I just Googled “worst band names” and the second result came from Rolling Stone. So did the first result, an article on the “25 Worst Original Names of Famous Bands.”
Did you know that the Red Hot Chili Peppers were originally called Tony Flow and the Miraculously Majestic Masters of Mayhem? Why did they ever change that?
So I click on it, and what did I see there, but a photo of Mr Stank himself. That decides it, then. Hoobastank is the definitive terrible band name, the band you first think of when you hear the words “terrible band name.” Hoobastank is a band name that inspires so many questions, such as who or what is a hooba and why did they stink? What is, the [cough cough] reason for it all?
Hoobastank originated in Aguora Hills:
Currently famous as a Doja Cat hit, Doja also originating from there – on the northern outskirts of Los Angeles.
A suburb which turns out to be a thriving centre for nu-metal. Linkin Park are from there. Incubus are from there.
So I guess it’s more a thriving centre for those more-introverted nu-metal bands who like pick up an acoustic guitar now and then and strum it and imagine themselves as sensitive singer-songwriter types; a sound that seems to have a vague, haunting mass appeal (“Drive” by Incubus is an 8.)
Aguora Hills is the suburb where nu-metal melded into butt-rock.
Butt-rock is not a derogatory term. Or, at least, not totally. There is a theory – I don’t think anybody actually knows – that it was derived from radio station identifier announcements proudly proclaiming that they played “nothing but rock.”
Yes, we are discussing the etymology of “butt-rock.”
So: What, Theoretically Speaking, Makes Butt-Rock, Butt-Rock?
Probably nothing captures the essence of butt-rock quite so precisely as what comes up when you put “butt-rock” into Spotify’s search bar.
Two playlists specifically designed for “divorced Dads.” And one for balding alt-right memes who drink oversized energy drinks.
Wondering what sort of neighbourhood would produce such a nu-metal/butt rock-hybrid, I looked up Aguora Hills on Google Earth and… it’s a sunny paradise!
Every house has a swimming pool!! Half the front yards feature palm trees!!!
When asked by Billboard what they did as kids, Hooba reeled off this list: “skateboarding, riding BMX, snowboarding, motocross, going to the beach, swimming, hiking, baseball, basketball, listening to and playing music” When you are living a life like that, do you even need a reason for you?
Hoobastank had long been looking for a reason for themselves. They were basically butt-rock philosophers. On their debut single “Crawling In The Dark” they were wondering: was there something more than what they’d been handed? They were crawling in the dark, trying to find an answer. Deep stuff. The band logo included an infinity symbol in place of the two o-s. They must’ve felt so proud the day they came up with that one. (“Crawling In The Dark” is a 6.)
Aguora Hills is also not far from Hollywood. Which may explain why so many nu-metallers were able to turn their frustrations about snowboarding and motocross into widescreen blockbuster grandeur. And quite possibly no rock ballad of the 00s achieves this, whilst capturing the redemptive power of karaoke balladry, quite as effectively as “The Reason.”
I have to admit that I’m a sucker for a good butt-rock ballad. And “The Reason” is right at the top of the butt-rock ballad cannon. Just above “Drops Of Jupiter.” Quite a bit more above “With Arms Wide Open.” Way, way, way above Staind’s “It’s Been Awhile.”
If it finds me at the right time, “The Reason” might just give me a reason for me!
“The Reason” is an 8.
Meanwhile, in Yeezy Land:
“Jesus Walks”
by Kanye West
Kanye made “Jesus Walks.” Therefore, he’s never going to Hell.
That’s what Kanye boasted in “Otis,” the lead single from Yeezy and Hov’s buddy-album Watch The Throne. At the time he was simply trying – and succeeding – to top JayZ’s claim that he had five passports and, as a direct consequence of this, he was never going to jail. But honestly, I think Kanye believes it, literally. I think Yeezy truly believes that his making of “Jesus Walks” is a get-out-of-Hell-free card, granting him automatic forgiveness for any moral transgressions he might in commit in the future.
This would explain a lot of his moral transgressions.
The way Yeezy sees it, he was the rapper who dared to rap about God, despite everyone telling him that this meant his record wouldn’t get played. HUH???!?!?
Turns out that Yeezy was protesting too much. Radio – rap radio anyway – was all over “Jesus Walks.” It didn’t take away from either his spins, or his inns. That apparently was the whole plan. He complained about his record not getting played, on the record, to make sure that the record was played. He referred to it as “reverse psychology.”
I’m pretty sure that’s not what “reverse psychology” means, but it’s clever marketing nonetheless.
The whole “look at me, I’m rapping about Jesus” (aka I’m not like other rappers) angle isn’t the main theme of “Jesus Walks” however. “Jesus Walks” is more about Kanye’s inner struggles and inner demons and, by extension, hip-hop’s inner struggles and inner demons – “we at war with terrorism, racism, but most of all, we’re at war with ourselves” – a theme that he’d return to again and again and again: “I had a dream I could buy my way to Heaven, when I woke I spent that on a necklace.”
This struggle between being an asshole and wanting to redeem himself from being an asshole would have been a hell of a lot more convincing if Ye ever did anything more than just rap about it.
But this is Yeezy.
The guy who, on his 2013 album, Yeezus, included a song called “I Am A God,” because he read Psalm 82. Or, more likely, somebody read it to him; Yeezy famously being “a proud non-reader of books” and all.
Specifically, Yeezy read – or was read – the line “Ye are gods.”
Yeezy heard that line and he thought “Hey! That’s me!”
So it’s fair to say Ye’s understanding of religion is… patchy at best.
I mean, “Jesus Walks” is a track that is one second referencing “The Lord Is My Shepherd,” by way of “Gangsta’s Paradise,” and the next second drops: “Sayin’ “We eat pieces of shit like you for breakfast” Huh? Y’all eat pieces of shit?”
It’s a track in which one second he’s discussing the need for rappers to be responsible – “We rappers is role models: we rap, we don’t think” – and the next demonstrating a deeply confusing moral compass – “To the hustlers, killers, murderers, drug dealers, even the strippers.”
Even the strippers? Strippers are worse than murderers and drug dealers? And:
An even more confusing way with metaphors – “The way Kathie Lee needed Regis, that’s the way I need Jesus.”
All of which is just a long way of saying that Kanye has always been confusing. Also, that he’s always been an asshole. He’s admitted that. On multiple occasions.
“I’m an asshole? You ****** got jooookes”
Since being an asshole has so long been a key component of the Kanye brand, he pretty much does have a sort of get-out-of-jail-free card. “As soon as they like you, make them unlike you” has been his motto from the beginning. Which is why 20 years later, after… everything, he’s still able to score hits, still uncancellable.
The same cannot be said for our next guest.
“Jesus Walks” is an 8.
Meanwhile, in Indie Land:
“Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)” and
“Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)” by Arcade Fire
(or the entire Funeral album basically)
Fans were shocked in 2022 when it was revealed that Win Butler of Arcade Fire was a sleaze, just like any other rock star.
This was shocking because Arcade Fire had always appeared better than that. Arcade Fire had always been amongst the most upstanding citizens in rock’n’roll. So upstanding they were practically puritans.
Win Butler almost certainly based his hairstyle on a 19th-century Quaker.
That’s why it hurt. Although not as much as it hurt the girls. And the gender-fluid 21-year-old that he allegedly sexually assaulted.
Arcade Fire were so pure that much of their classic Funeral album came across as a children’s novel. Their instrumentation – a violinist, a xylophone, there’s some accordion in there somewhere, a cello, a harp, and a French horn – suggested that they may have all met in Sunday School.
They didn’t. It was a boarding school.
The fact that Win and Regine were married – actually married, none of this weird White Stripes-esque are they ex-lovers or brother and sister bullshit – gave them an aura of wholesomeness.
Win’s brother – named Will, much to everyone’s confusion – was in the band as well. They were practically a family band. They were practically the indie Hanson. Except that, whilst “Mmm Bop” doesn’t sound particularly meaningful – even though it totally is – Win tended to cry out about trying to name his babies as though the fate of the world depended on it.
Arcade Fire painted a world of Gothic tweeness (my current working definition of twee? toxic niceness.) “Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)” might as well be set at Christmas – ‘tis the season to be a fighting family after all, which is what the parents in “Tunnels” are all doing – even if the song didn’t start with “and if the snow buries my, my neighborhood.”
A lot of snow seems to have been involved in the making of “Funeral”, and for possibly the only time in rock’n’roll history, that doesn’t mean cocaine.
Then there was “Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)” which, due to the hassle of remembering so many neighborhood numbers, I have always just referred to as “the New Order song.” I stand by that description: the “Temptation” style stuttering drums, the low-notes of the guitar being plonked forlornly.
Of course Bernard never howled out Biblical verses like Win does: “Light a candle for the kids!!!/ Jesus Christ DON’T KEEP IT HID!!!” and “And the power’s out in the heart of man/ Take it from your heart, put in your hand” as “the kids” in the video – the purest of the pure – defeat the top-hat wearing capitalists.
More even than the Polyphonic Spree, Arcade Fire felt like a religious experience. And so, more even than the Polyphonic Spree, being an Arcade Fire fan felt almost like being in a religious cult. In a world filled with indie-sleaze, Arcade Fire were the saints.
Until it turned out that Win was as sleazy as everyone else, sent 18-year-old girls dick pics and tried to convince them to send him videos of themselves with sex toys. Then he’d jerk off.
Nobody saw any of this coming. The Win Butler of 2004 probably disapproved of mobile phones, let alone engaged in sexting.
Fortunately, we still have the music. And this time I mean it.
- “Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)” is a 10.
- “Neighborhood #4 (Power Out)” is a 10.
- So is “Neighborhood #2 (Laika.)”
- “Wake Up” is a 10.
- “Rebellion (Lies)” is a 10.
- “Crown Of Love…” is a bit dull, though.
Meanwhile, in Dance-Punk Land:
“Banquet”
by Bloc Party
In the world created by Franz Ferdinand – all angular guitar riffs and thumping dance-beats – a lot of bands would try and do the same thing. Few bands, however, had guitar riffs as angular and beats as thumping as Bloc Party.
Bloc Party were first “discovered” after giving a demo to Franz Ferdinand lead singer Alex Kapranos, but whilst Franz Ferdinand did the whole British cynical raised-eyebrow I’m-cleverer-than-you shtick, Bloc Party were too busy being lost inside a whirling tempest of emotion. Whilst Franz Ferdinand wrote songs for girls to dance to, Bloc Party knocked out beats to dance the stress of modern living away.
In their dedication to propulsive rhythms – to an extent not seen in a British indie band since the 80s heights of New Order – Bloc Party were more akin to the dance-punk bands coming out of Brooklyn – LCD Soundsystem, The Rapture – or maybe even math rock, than anything being played on X-FM.
Few songs other songs on X-FM were inspired by a book called Confessions Of A Flesh Eater (it has a 3.6 on Goodreads.)
In which a character called Orlando Crispe finds the act of eating someone to be an act of love more intimate than sex. And indeed, although there is a lot of sexual imagery in “Banquet”s lyrics – “she’s got such a dirty mind and it never ever stops” – it’s far more intense and conflicted than your everyday sex song.
So we have a song about a flesh eater, performed by a band attempting to break the sound barrier, with swishy UFO sounds on the intro, stuttering machine-gun drum bursts right in the middle of the chorus, squealing guitars ricocheting off in every direction…
It’s pretty much the ultimate indie dancefloor banger! It is, as Kele declares repeatedly, “ON FIRE!!!!”
The number of nights I’ve spent at my local indie disco dancing to “Banquet,” I’m never going to get the smell of Jagerbombs out of my black skintight jeans.
And they achieved all this despite never having heard the Gang Of Four.
“Banquet” is a 9.
What a crazy time to have been alive!
To hear these and other 90s hits, tune into DJ Professor Dan’s Twitch stream on Sunday nights Melbourne time… so about Sunday lunch time London time… breakfast New York time?
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Drops of Jupiter > With Arms Wide Open > The Reason. But Drive (any Drive, actually …. R.E.M., Incubus, The Cars) tops them all.
This Eamon/Frankee beef is completely new to me, and all I can say is that I’m grateful I was studying in Tokyo so I could miss it.
Kanye’s ridiculous claim that rapping about Jesus was somehow dangerous and daring (uh, like 95% of the hip hop community is Christian, bro) was perhaps the first public sign that all was not right in his head.
Or way too far right. That proudly delusional sense of embattled “heroism” is the calling card of fundamentalists and white nationalists both. The state of mind he showcases here was perhaps the seed that blossomed into the strange and bitter plop he is today.
It took me a while to get into Arcade Fire’s Funeral because of how cringeworthy the lyrics were. They jumped from terminal twee to adolescent angst and back again. But it is a great album despite all that.
Win needs to get his shit together. The first step is owning up, and I don’t believe he’s done anything of the sort.
I kind of miss butt rock ballads, as they were some of the last radio rock tunes around that I would actually call “rock.” But I appreciate the distance from them as well.
2004 was weird. Grunge was over, nü-metal was over and wasn’t great to begin with, and the best record of the year was a concept album by, get this, Green Day, the little punk band who could. There was some good EDM but who can listen to that in the car without getting a speeding ticket?
Of the folks listed here, I like Bloc Party, find Hoobastank passable, have never heard of Eamon, and really don’t understand the hype about the others. Nothing I’ve heard by Arcade Fire or Kanye West gave me a reason to listen to them again.
Loretta Lynn’s Van Lear Rose came out that spring, too, and it’s a gem. It still holds up pretty well. I’d recommend Now Here Is Nowhere by Secret Machines, too. I haven’t listened to it in a while but it sounded like Pink Floyd with John Bonham on drums and that can’t be a bad thing.
2004 had some phenomenal music: Franz Ferdinand, Devendra Banhart, Bjork, TV on the Radio, MF DOOM, Madvillain, Sufjan Stevens, Xiu Xiu, Cocorosie, Dizzee Rascal.
(And yes, Arcade Fire too. Eventually I came around to Funeral)
Though this stuff had hardly any chart presence, if at all.
TV on the Radio on the TV, too.
I completely blanked on Bloc Party; I’d somehow missed them entirely, but have replayed “Banquet” a bunch of times now. It feels honest. I like it.
Yeah! Is a Yeah. Good but not worthy of exclamation.
Eamon & Frankee deserve each other. A marketing ploy that succeeded short term and left the protagonists with no hope of an ongoing career.
Hoobastank – I’d have come up with something sarcastic about that name but you said it all so thank you for saving me the trouble. Worthy but dull: I found a reason not to care.
Kanye – if only we could go back to the days when he was just a raging egomaniac rather than whatever he is now.
Neighbourhood was a 10. Wake Up a 10.5. Then you find out your heroes belong to the Kanye school of immorality.
Still, Banquet is great. Though Bloc Party turned out to have the staying power of a slow puncture. A gradual descent into irrelevance that leaves me surprised when I see they’re still a going concern. Or am I being too harsh? It’s only cos the first album was so good, the second was pretty good and then the next not quite as good and by the time album 6 rolled around I couldn’t be bothered tuning in for the (almost) inevitable let down.
In regard to sexual misconduct, the name that absolutely blew my mind was The Posies’ Ken Stringfellow. I remember staring in disbelief at the article on the mothership. For a few minutes, I felt like a R. Kelly stan. No. This can’t be true, followed by the shallow realization that there won’t be any future Posies albums. Dear 23 is a top twenty album for me. I gave myself permission to listen to “Golden Blunders” and “Apology”. It’s the first time I played The Posies since the story broke.
Marilyn Manson, literally, was telling people who he was. If you’ve seen Miranda July’s Kajillionaire, and focus on Evan Rachel Wood, you can interpret her character as being a survivor of sexual trauma. I can’t find any proof that she’s method. I can only speculate. But arguably, July references Wood’s life with Manson. Gina Rodriguez plays her friend, Melanie. She’s propositioned by Old Dolio’s father(Richard Jenkins). “Old” might be code for the age difference between Manson and Wood.
In other words, naively, I thought “indie” guys were automatically nice guys.
“Rebellion(Lies)” is a 10. Being a jackass doesn’t change that fact.
“In regard to sexual misconduct, the name that absolutely blew my mind…”
Q: for JJ:
I can’t imagine growing up and loving a music show, only to find out later in life that the favorite host and hero of my youth was a horrific predator. It’s Cosby-esqe in the worst possible way. It would have ruined TOTP for me.
Was Jimmy Seville universally loved as such, and was it a bombshell when his story was revealed?
Jimmy Saville is perhaps not the best example of having ones youth betrayed. He was hiding in plain sight. It was well known that he was a wrong ‘un (as they say round here).
His persona was weird old guy. There were rumours even in the school playground of what he got up to. Movng to Leeds, his home city I heard plenty of stories of inappropriate behaviour towards women especially and general unpleasantness towards anyone that didn’t fall for his creepy charms.
Everything upto necrophilia was rumoured. It was a running joke until it came out just how true it all was.
By the time I was growing up in the 80s he didn’t appear on TOTP too often, he’d aged up to a more mature radio audience. Though at the same time he was best known with kids for Jim’ll Fix It, an early Saturday evening TV show where kids would write in and he would make their wishes come true. In hindsight, giving a sexual predator that kind of access looks naive at best.
He was protected by having friends in very high places (police, hospitals, government) and raising millions for charity to make him untouchable. Any sniff of an expose would be aggressively stamped out so he wasn’t pursued.
The big reveal after his death was a bombshell only in that it was at last openly discussed and the realisation that the faceless rumours we’d made dark jokes about turned out to be reality. It seemed funny when there were no victims to consider. It wasn’t funny anymore. Although some were more complicit than others in protecting him, in the end we were all kind of turning a blind eye to what should have been obvious.
Cosby-esque doesn’t do justice to Saville. He was in a league of his own when it comes to vile depravity.
The Bill Cosby revelation really was a shock for me.
As a kid, I listened to his comedy LPs all the time, and I loved the Fat Albert show.
I went to the same high school as him, and he even visited us and gave a talk one year. And I went to the same university.
And more than that, he did so much for Philadelphia, and for the black community.
I don’t think I’ve ever had so dramatic a perceptual shift of someone as I did with him upon learning what he did to women over the years. I still can’t quite process it.
It was so truly sad. I think most (except for a remote few in the know) of us were just blindsided.
It’s hard not to read Lisa Bonet’s performance in Angel Heart as a rebellion. Bonet says nothing of the kind in this Deadline article I’m currently reading, and yet, what better way to expose the hypocrisy of the wholesome image that Bill Cosby was projecting? In retrospect, it looks like a cry for help: Stop this man.
Now I’m looking at the IMDb.
Bonet was seventeen when The Cosby Show debuted. By definition, that makes her a child actor. Child actors don’t always make it when they cross the threshold into adulthood. (Damn it, Haley Joel Osment. You made Toni Collette better. It’s usually works the other way around.) Nobody can prove Cosby had her blacklisted. But there is a gaping hole in her filmography between 1987-2000.
Lisa Bonet was a co-creator of Lenny Kravitz.
I think she had more talent than that.
Whoops. Second-to-last sentence makes no sense.
2004 is my 1974. It’s the era of music that I have the least connection with (my kids were aged 2-8) and hip-hop just seemed as nasty as it wanted to be at that point. For sure, the couple years before and after weren’t much different, and there likely were some songs I liked in that era, but as a general rule, it is almost a black hole of music for me.
If I remember right, from my nu-metal days, Hoobastank were originally Hoobustank. You can decide which is better.
2004 is a peak year in my consumption of, and involvement with, music. I was single, working in a CD store, going to a bunch of concerts. If my MySpace page was still accessible, I could post my top 10 from that time, but we will have to settle for my updated list.
2004
1. A Day In Black and White – My Heroes Have Always Killed Cowboys
2. Ted Leo & The Pharmacists – Shake The Sheets
3. Carina Round – The Disconnection
4. Saul Williams – s/t
5. My Chemical Romance – Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge
6. Rilo Kiley – More Adventurous
7. Alison Ranger – Formula Imperative
8. Silent Drive – Love Is Worth It
9. Eyedea & Abilities – E&A
10. Autolux – Future Perfect
11. These Arms Are Snakes – Oxeneers…
12. Willy Mason – Where The Humans Eat
13. Head Automatica – Decadence
14. Interpol – Antics
15. Death From Above 1979 – You’re A Woman, I’m A Machine
16. Local H – Whatever Happened To PJ Soles?
17. Refused – Songs To Fan The Flames Of Discontent
https://youtu.be/2npKIDGqYEY?si=mvpnpuy5_Sr_kZy6