The song that represents the END of the 90s

http://991.com/newGallery/Artful-Dodger-Re-Rewind-The-Cro-176354.jpg

I remember in the late 90s that whole 80s retro craze starting that typified this decade... Les Rhythmes Digitales, DMX Krew, all that shit.

The Strokes I think are a good general symbol of the End of the 90s ... 1) people started wearing jeans again, skinny ones! and 2) people started listening to rock again... the second half of the 90s was basically pop, electronic, and various trip, jazz, flip, and hip hops.

there was a time when ppl didn't listen to rock and didn't wear jeans? i must've been out of the country

oh, yeah ... this is the New York City area I'm talking about. Indie crap was like what, Soul Coughing, and mainstream stuff was hip hop or pop. I remember only the dorks in school listened to what remained of rock in the 90s.

fucking a

I remember in the late 90s that whole 80s retro craze starting that typified this decade... Les Rhythmes Digitales, DMX Krew, all that shit.

The Strokes I think are a good general symbol of the End of the 90s ... 1) people started wearing jeans again, skinny ones! and 2) people started listening to rock again... the second half of the 90s was basically pop, electronic, and various trip, jazz, flip, and hip hops.

-- burt_stanton, Monday, 18 February 2008 23:18

I don't but all this "Rock is Back" bollocks that surfaced around 2001, every decade since the 60s has had huge, successful rock bands, including the 90s. Rolling Stone just wanted something else to write about other than Celine Dion and Creed. I remember everyone wearing jeans in the 90s... just a bit baggier.

eh i think burt is kinda on to something - and im speaking in the most general of terms here but for a while around the turn of the century in new york rock was not that cool - mostly people were all in to some various other shit whether it was whatever individually named electronica microgenre or playing rare-groove records or whatnot - and then one day everyone was all lol im in a rock band again

i know this sounds really dubious - but thats at least what it felt like at ground level to this guy (i dont really remember anything abt jeans tho)

i live in the midwest where people never stop rocking or wearing jeans

the sunscreen song, duh

although the $$$ denim craze did get rolling around then and khakis got a lot less popular so maybe...

there's a bit of a divish here between 'last track of the 90s' (and 'windowlicker fits that pretty well kinda) and 'first track of the 00s'.

i thought the strokes were fucking lame, maybe it was different in new york, but i can't see how any one of their songs could mark the start of a whole decade.

lol unless the new decade started the day after the release of MARQUEE MOON amirite!?!?!11!?/

as for limp stuffing one up kurt's ass -- who gave a fuck about kurt cobain in 1999? (don't answer that, i guess.)

i live in the midwest where people never stop rocking or wearing jeans

-- M@tt He1ges0n, Monday, February 18, 2008 11:44 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

^^^ this, only east anglia instead of midwest

i live in the midwest uk, where people never stop rocking or wearing jeans

lol xpost

The 'rock is back' bullshit was some of the bullshittiest bullshit to ever be bullshitted. And anyone unthinkingly perpetuating it are even worse bullshitters.

Jann Wenner, 2000: "Oh god, why the FUCK can't people listen to their Mick Jagger solo records like I tell them too. Minion! Find some miserable band and claim rock is back!"

Minion: "It never left, sir."

Wenner: "FUCK YOU!"

What I'm thinking is, the fashionable rock was was jazzy trip flip hop microgroove, or it was spacey ambient post-rock, or groovy LES jazz rock. I remember after the Strokes people were all about straight ahead rock, and it wasn't Rolling Stones, it's what people were saying on the ground... nobody under 50 reads that thing.

well a lot of people in nyc thought the strokes were lame too but that just furthered their ridiculous ubiquitousness. so while their music might not be particularly innovative it was just around a lot then and was said by some to be a signal of some shift. but whatever it was unavoidable in bars (and at my house). also worth mentioning that it came out right after (and before if you count the uk version which a lot of people had) 9/11.

ned is right - rock never came back - its been ded lol

"it's my life
It's now or never
I ain't gonna live forever
I just want to live while I'm alive"

"Windowlicker" sounded like something new to me, along with a lot of 2step and proto-grime "garage rap". I thought that's what pop music in the 00s was gonna be like, hahahaha...

Indie really looked on the ropes in 99-00 as well. Melody Maker went under, only ultra-MOR stuff like Coldplay and Travis selling. Remember loads of people whining about manufactured pop, but didn't give a shit 'cause there was loads of good hip hop/r'n'b/electronic/electro/techno/garage/2step/whatevs.

windowlicker looked backward and forward, or so it seemed, maybe.

The song that represents the END of the 90s is the last song you heard before you did your first WWW search for something music-related.

waht was 1st napster song lol

What in 1996? On the school computers looking for "hardcore" and not exactly getting DJ Slipmat.

How about when those French house people started using 4/4 beats with more empasis on the snares again? Sure, this began already in 1996-97, but it sounded pretty different by then while in the oughties it has been pretty much the rule outside R&B/hip-hop at least.

Defined a decade.

I mean, that fact 140-150 bpm beat with thumping 909 bass drums and hardly any difference between the 1-3 and 2-4 is one of the most obvious trademarks of the 90s, found almost nowhere else, other than on late 80s Technotronic and Inner City hits and a few Aqua influenced early 00s kid-dance tracks, plus in trance in general.
The straight 120 bpm 4/4 disco beat, however, was almost nonexistant for most of the 80s, until the French started picking it up again towards the end of the decade.

Almost nonexistant for most of the 90s, I mean

idioteque

j0rdan speaks the truth re. "like i love you": if any song represents the transition from capital-p pop to everything going 'urban' (for a while: partially reversed in hot 100 terms by itunes era) that obviously does. over here, it's actually the song that made justin (actually the other singles off 'justified' did that even more): he was known for the britney connection, and n'sync were popular enough i guess, but never anything like as big as bsb. 'no strings attached' peaked at something like number 15 here.

in uk chart terms, i'd go for some number-nine-and-quickly-out eurohit that nobody really remembers. "just the way you are" by milky (aug 02) possibly. the lingering death throes of the late 90s, clinging on even in the weeks leading up to the downing street memo. after that, the new divisions (which killed blair's entire geopolitical idea of britain, though he never realised the fact) were well and truly with us, and before too long they'd fundamentally altered the fabric of the charts from what it was at the turn of the century. most of 2000 (not the final weeks obviously) are still 90s to me. i mean, the very fact of "moi ... lolita" getting into the uk top 10, though it is five months after the twin towers fell, belongs far more to the late 90s than to anything that followed.

for me, 99/00 was the uk singles chart's peak in my experience, precisely because corporate-indie had yet to recover from the collapse of britpop, and it seemed like it might have permanently failed. fuck the haters.

defining the sound of these two decades is half of what I was getting at

Eminem's "My Name Is"

"Get Low" = first song of 2000s

^this might be otm but i'm too lazy to think of other candidates right now

(im sure some ppl would argue "b.o.b" or another outkast song)

maybe "i just wanna luv you" if you wanna talk about neptunes reign or "h to the izzo" ushering in kanye

also some ludacris songs

"get low" is a really good one though

early 00's= dubious "garage" revival...endless bands with "the" preceding their names...plus lotsa hype about electroclash

yeah the right answer is probably "fell in love with a girl" esp. when paired with video

I heard "Mockingbirds" on the radio the other day, and it made me think of life in the 90's

Grant Lee Buffalo - Mockingbirds
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6nBQ7sYBpU

Although that wasn't the question, I guess. Then I'll go with Le Tigre's "Deceptacon."

I'll go with New Radicals, "Mother We Just Can't Get Enough."

Blur's "Tender" seems to me to be the end of the 90's, particularly when it got stopped from being number one by Britney's "Baby one more time" which was the start of the 00's

In one sense - "I Have A Dream/Seasons In The Sun" by Westlife.
In another sense - "Steal My Sunshine" by Len.
Mental block following my bus accident means I cannot remember much about this period without looking it up.

Yeah really we're looking at 'event' singles, big hits that felt like they couldn't really have happened any earlier given fashions, musical climate etc. The Artful Dodger felt like a break between what came before and the start of what felt like the first 'new' music of the 00s. Rollin' wasn't the first nu-metal single by any means but felt eblematic of its arrival in the UK.

The Strokes were the first big 'haircut indie' band and seemed to signify a big sea-change from Britpop hangover to something else. Britney keeping Blur off #1 seems to fit as well for a different reason.

I can't quite place an equivalent moment in rnb or hip-hop, mostly because 1997-2003 feels like a mini-decade in itself.

artful dodger is a sound choice.* like limp bizkit, though, it feels like part of a mini-epoch of its own, that ended about 2002. there isn't really a big decade-defining sound in any decade.

*i wonder if it couldn't have happened earlier though. 'rip groove' happened.

I remember trying to count how old I’d be
When the clock struck twelve in the year two G
is possibly my favourite lyric ever

I think Artful Dodger's good, and 2001 had 'Do You Really Like It?', '21 Seconds' and 'Can't Get You Out of My Head', none of which could've been nineties records. I don't think any Spice Girl has been to number one since, which is also a pretty good marker.

goddamn it 'rip groove' bangs.

OTM. But its something of a different beast nonetheless.

wieny 10000% OTM. fred durst at woodstock.

Then I'll go with Le Tigre's "Deceptacon."

DFA Remix = first track of the 00's

"get low" a good call too

Umm, the spiceys still had top ten hits solo after 2000, but for number ones, here:

1 Emma Bunton What Took You So Long Apr 2001

1 Geri Halliwell It's Raining Men May 2001

that's it.

"What Took You So Long?" is a lovely record. First number one of the noughties I really liked.