Now That Was Totally On The Radio and Stuff! Vol. 2: Forgotten Singles of the Early 2000s

quarashi is a good call.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A12-KN5UijA

The Crystal Method - The Name of the Game. The "calling all freaks" song with Tom Morello guitar work and the creepy guy with a nose for a head. Heavily MTV2'ed in my memory, and heavily used in soundtracks and search according to Wiki. But it's built out of a bunch of fragmentary hooks, almost waiting to be re-excerpted for little momentary interstitial blurts of sound, leaving it feeling less like a song than, say, "Trip Like I Do."

Not sure if this is quite "forgotten" or just one of those songs that people forget the artist's name:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZkM_nOJ3d4

Also tends to occupy the same space in my mind as BBMak's Back Here, which I do still here from time to time in supermarkets.

Before I even heard the song, or knew who Avril Lavigne was, I remember seeing mentions that there was this new "Complicated" song that was enterring the charts, and I thought they were talking about this song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dl8CVYeV1Fk

aw, that Evan and Jaron song is (and they are) adorable...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3LE6_y8J0s

Soulfly - Back to the Primitive. Much-mocked around my dorm room (similar to Mudvayne's "Dig" and that Slipknot video where a kid has only rusty, dirty water to pour in his Froot Loops). No idea what just knocked it loose from my memory. Horrendous nu-metal injected with exoticizing hippie bullshit and a video rendered virtually unwatchable through amateurish knob-twiddling re: contrast and saturation. Essentially, "What if Disturbed were more brightly lit?"

my pick for rolling worst songs of 2000 btw

hey i'm a huge fan of "dig" and have never knowingly listened to soulfly so here goes

ok yeah that's rough and i think roots is kind of a masterpiece

I now just remembered the existence of Kottonmouth Kings:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ba1H-0nNTT8

[ "I Will Be Waiting" by D-Cru/Craig Smart ] - This is one of those Canadian songs that seems instantly recognizable to me, as if I've heard it a ton of times, but I'm not sure if it's because it got a lot radio play here in Canada, or if it's a shameless knockoff of a more popular song that I just can't quite identify

The D-Cru cut has shades of "Truly Madly Deeply" in the verse and the chorus sounds like, kind of a million things I think. lol at the torso video.

At first I heard it as "Backstreet meets Uncle Kraker"... (um... "Krackstreet"?). It might be one of the most shamelessly derivative songs in history! Too much well-known stuff to list. (The chorus alone is Richard Marx's 'Right Here Waiting' plus maybe a bit of "Like A Prayer"... plus, well, that's enough).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDDh93CSRqE

Matt Darey's Mash Up feat. Marcella Woods – "Beautiful"

Speaking of things that sound like things :-) Around the millennium, a lot of UK radio sounded like this. What I'd tentatively call, um, "trance"? "Summery Euro vibes?" "This [track] cannot be classed as Trance it is more like old skool garage music i would say if you count the beats in the record". Well, whatever it's called, dance music was huge then. It made up 37% of UK singles sales in 2000.

(Probably a lot of generic/uninteresting stuff among it, but maybe some hidden gems too. I'm not qualified to judge, evidently!)

I heard that Evan & Jaron song at Wal Mart the other night.

Also: My local Waffle House had a double-sided "Crazy For This Girl" single in it's jukebox for about as long as they had a singles jukebox (8-9 years).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AsLRPzqdpc

Ozzy Osbourne - Gets Me Through (2001). Lead single from his first album in six years (and his last pre-Osbournes). Lyrically tied up in a not-very-interesting meta-commentary on Ozzy's career and his relationship with his fans, but some okay riffing and stuff.

I remember that video, but not the song.

The follow-up single, Dreamer, I remember quite well.

Black Crowes - Lickin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arU46YyLSP0

Mostly I just remember hating the song because I found it obnoxious and annoying, and thought the video was boring.

I wonder if I know the Ozzy more from commercials for it, featuring clips of the video, than of the whole video? Most of it didn't really seem all that familiar, just mainly the "I'm not the Antichrist or / the Iron Man."

The Crystal Method - The Name of the Game. The "calling all freaks" song with Tom Morello guitar work and the creepy guy with a nose for a head. Heavily MTV2'ed in my memory, and heavily used in soundtracks and search according to Wiki. But it's built out of a bunch of fragmentary hooks, almost waiting to be re-excerpted for little momentary interstitial blurts of sound, leaving it feeling less like a song than, say, "Trip Like I Do."

Not to mention that this was used in SO MANY COMMERCIALS, it was totally unavoidable that year

Love that Bad Ronald was mentioned upthread. I heard the song once on MTV and liked it but never heard of them again. "I've been waitin' all day for that Bad Ronald, man!" - one of the alltime greatest song intros, if you ask me

that crystal method was kinda sneakily unavoidable, didn't actually crossover to become a radio hit but managed to be everywhere in some capacity. the last big beat track to manage that kind of profile iirc.

THE BRAVERY - HONEST MISTAKE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8vzbezVru4

Kinda exploiting a New Order vibe.

yeah i suspect "name of the game" was heard way more than much of the stuff in this thread, but without it leading to people knowing it as a piece of music in its own right, even as a thing with no name or artist (the way "rock n roll pt. 2" is) - just some sounds you heard a lot one particular year.

yeah i'm not sure i ever heard it on the radio (i would imagine it got a little airplay on eg 99x but by that point altrock radio was starting to die out and really diminished in terms of having an impact on the larger culture), it never got a high profile film/tv appearance like fatboy slim or lofi allstars and unlike 'days go by' or 'remind me' it use in ads wasn't so prominent and the tune itself wasn't so distinct or songlike as w/ 'days go by' and 'remind me' that it could create a groundswell of interest, it was just generic doritos music.

it's interesting cuz its mainstream profile was probably slightly higher than 'one more time's at the time ('one more time' managed some video airplay but that was it) but 'one more time' had this immediate afterlife as a jock jam and then daft punk become embraced in this profound way in 97 w/ the tour and kanye and bloghouse in general being tied to them so that by the time their effective followup (in that they let everyone know that hey, they're making an effort this time) they'd be well known enough in the mainstream they could get hyped pre-release on kelly ripa and michael strahan.

ha, "doritos music." yeah. i definitely saw that awful nose guy a lot on MTV2 in the dorms, but that pretty much says it all. ha, i was just going to bring up lo-fidelity all-stars - do people know "battleflag" as a song? i was watching coyote ugly with some friends the other night and somehow that was the most jarring and embarrassing musical cue in the whole thing.

"one more time" was off their 2001 album btw; dunno that they ever were well-known in the mainstream til "get lucky" but they went from something that dance people and avid watchers of mtv's electronica programming knew about to something that radiohead/flaming lips people knew about (and liked), and having both in your pocket is probably very helpful for building hype and connections with your kanyes and your blogs and such. i do remember a girl i had a crush on in high school, who was generally not into outlandish or weird music, talking to me in english class about catching this crazy "around the world" video on TV and being really interested in it. so who knows.

"battleflag" got a good bit of radio airplay and was featured very very prominently in a very very big episode of e.r.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAJR8EX40is

Moony - Acrobats (Looking For Balance)

I'm sure I remember this being played on the radio? it was the follow up to Point Of View and Dove (I'll Be Loving You), both of which were huge hits, but this one only reached #64 in the UK charts. apparently Moony released another album in Japan and Brazil in 2009 but I can't find any information on what she's been up to since then.

is Point of View remembered in the US? wikipedia says that it was a 'U.S. Billboard Hot Dance Music Club Play number-one single', but I don't really understand how the US charts work, is that a big deal? did you see a lot of the video with the cardboard woman?

billboard dance music chart is imo the weirdest and most mysterious chart in terms of methodology and what it signifies

iirc they poll a hundred british twentysomethings at random and more or less go with that, but i am not really a regular attendee at Hot Dance Music Clubs. have never heard, or heard of, "moony" before, anyway.

no that chart decidedly doesn't have an anglophile tilt

never seen any tom petty on it either fwiw

hardy har har

Many XPs..."Battleflag" was a Top 10 Modern Rock hit, and was sufficiently recognizable that my local station had a station id tag based on it's chorus for awile in the early '00s.

I think it may have varied a bit regionally? I remember my buddy in Auburn railing against it, like it was this major sensation that they were playing every hour, and me being like "huh, I don't even know what that is." I'd heard it but it wasn't as big of a deal.

it's def '99. from same spring as "praise you" and "let forever be."

oh yeah, wasn't submitting it as "forgotten" here, just following up balls on it being a point of comparison

in retrospect spring 99 peak big beat in america, "rockafeller skank" also peaked here then thx to she's all that - http://youtu.be/r4mQmoD72tc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7iY2pE0mpo

Scent - "Up & Down"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6m7Ga1uRjQ

Bubba Sparxxx - "Lovely" (2001). Probably not so forgotten on websites that host Timbaland track polls (it didn't place). The followup and, I guess, conceptual twin, to "Ugly," but not burdened by trying to offer up a theme song intro number to this new countrified rapper. (The video in particular sheds all the pig-ridin', road-house folks stuff from its predecessor.) The hook is decent and there are some memorable rhymes in there though I can certainly see why it didn't take off. Suspect for most folks his discography has effectively contracted to "Ms. New Booty" and, for the hep cats, "Deliverance."

I liked Deliverance at the time. Were any of the singles from that album on the radio n stuff?

I think I heard/saw "Deliverance" at least a little, but I might be mixing it up with it getting really good reviews and me checking it out? In my mind this was a Pitchfork-hyped album but now I can't find anything about it there. Anyway it made #9 on the US Rap chart so it must have gotten at least a decent amount of airplay for a minute. "Jimmy Mathis" and "Back in the Mud" otoh went absolutely nowhere.

Another pick:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKEWdRPRf3I

Fatboy Slim - Bird of Prey. This was big in the UK, but in the US it was a career-suicide single that I remember getting played on MTV2 for maybe a week or so. It sounds better to me now than it did then, when I was mostly just baffled - this trippy, dreamy little meditation on Jim Morrison (and, apparently, atomic-war pilots on acid) is how he's going to follow up the wacky good times party jams of his smash album? Oookay....!

'lovely' was so dope, to me better than 'ugly'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgBYdsKqCsM

Scapegoat Wax - Aisle 10 (Hello Allison)

Had this brought to my attention tonight. Don't remember it whatsoever but several other people seemed to know it well. Kinda in the interzone between Elwood and "Shaniqua."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMOZRk74QrY

Jin (with some Wyclef interjections) - Learn Chinese

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7F3vWGQsVI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FR4WrdUyf7Y

The Breeders - "Huffer" and "Son Of Three." Neither is probably much forgotten by ILX alt-rock types but they're both great songs which were kinda out of time in the radio rock landscape of 2002 (the year of Linkin Park, POD and Chad Kroeger - though "You Know You're Right" did very very well).

The latter's single version is a completely different recording from the album - faster, generally more energetic. Gets stuck in my head all the time. If I find the door... I am the son of Go.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sB2_MmtMoIc

DMX - Who We Be. Top ten US Rap and had a good stretch of video airplay for a minute but this kind of relentless BA-DUM! BA-DUM! BA-DUM! BA-DUM! had a pretty limited shelf life I think. At the time we reacted to it with easy take-offs, since at first blush he seems to just be listing things and we couldn't make out a lot of the words, so: point at random objects in the room and blurt out their names to the rhythm of the song. Actually reading the lyrics it seems much more pointed and, potentially, powerful than I'd thought. Still can't really get past the sound, personally.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILCNAln_7Z4

Trick Daddy - I'm A Thug. #16 on US Rap, following the lower-charting but, I think, much bigger "Take It To Da House." The production on both audio and video could really not be from any moment other than the 99-01 pop interzone.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTlKFbZBynE

The Offspring - Original Prankster. Also very much of that period (I think the video, which I can't find, would bear that out) and easily one of the shittiest songs of its entire genre. I've definitely bitched about it on ILX before - a garbage rewrite of the already godawful "Pretty Fly For A White Guy," with a pointless guest turn by Redman, and painstakingly-enunciated first-draft lyrics that bend and contort to try and fit the rhythm without making any real sense. It hit #2 on U.S. Alternative, but if you asked somebody to name a dozen Offspring hits I doubt they'd get to this one.

"Who We Be" is a great song!

Feel like there's a pretty deep well of sunny, club-oriented NOW! pop from this period that's sort of, not forgotten, but probably at a low ebb. Like, JoJo's "Leave (Get Out)" was 2 big a hit 2 be 4gotten... but is there any venue/outlet where it would be heard today? Maybe CVS I guess?

The SiriusXM station Pop2K is all about these.

As for FM, some Top 40 stations have lately been throwing in occasional Pop2K hits from lower in their respective "Hot 100 of the year" lists.

wow, willa ford "i wanna be bad" is a pretty naked rewrite of "sock it 2 me," huh

also at the risk of offending ilx's new wave contingent, adding New Order's "Crystal" to the playlist