This was supposed to be the year the music world went completely to hell.
Napster was supposed to wipe out everything and everyone. As the record industry explained to us, Napster was going to inspire a decadent spree of digital downloading in 2000. Every music buyer in America was supposed to become an anti-CD heathen who would steal every song he or she wanted. No artist would care about any recordings but singles. Cohesive albums, which the public would no longer be willing to buy, would never be recorded again.
So what happened?
More CDs were sold in 2000 than in any year before. Eminem, Britney Spears and 'NSYNC set remarkable sales records that no pre-2000 release could touch. And the most arresting albums of the year — many of them on major labels, no less — all featured nary a single.
For a year in which CD sales were supposed to shrink, the biggest artists grew even bigger than before. It started with Spears, whose Oops!. . .I Did It Again turned in the biggest opening week in history by a female artist. Most of the album, including the title track and "Stronger," the present single, sounded exactly the same. Only "Lucky," Spears' best song and arguably the best single by anyone this year, strayed at all from the mold. But the soundalikes were undeniably catchy and wildly danceable and the album blew up and seemed destined to be bigger than anything in 2000.
And then Eminem hit.
His Marshall Mathers LP, a long, violent, mysogynistic, homophobic tirade against the world, was gobbled up by every kid in America, from third graders to college seniors. Where Eminem's debut last year was humorous and often cute, Mathers was blistering and angry. To call it the most hateful, dangerous recording ever released would be an understatement.
And yet it was also a disturbingly impressive work of art.
The Mathers LP served as proof that black or white, there's no better rapper than Eminem. Whether it be vocabulary, articulation, creativity or originality, the man has got it all. He's evil and no one should feel good about enjoying his music, and therein lies the problem: Eminem's art, disgusting and deplorable as it is, cannot not be enjoyed. You can hate it, and it can make you cringe, but you can't deny that in the back of your head you're at least digging it a little, and quite possibly a lot. Mathers' opening track, "Kill You," suggests more violence towards women than any rap song in history. Eminem physically, brutally assaults random girls, moves on to his girlfriend and then he assaults his own mother. And it's the most bouncy, fun, catchy song on the whole album. Frighteningly, Eminem has become a modern-day Leni Rief-enstahl, producing a palatable piece of propaganda that makes disgusting, evil acts and attitudes completely OK.
Thankfully, not every impressive hip-hop release made its listeners feel guilty. Old stalwarts like Jay-Z and the Wu-Tang Clan returned with quality full-lengths. And the boom of alternative rap that 1999's Roots and Mos Def albums foreshadowed was fully realized, as acts like Common and Dilated Peoples put out solid pieces of work that deserved the popularity they surprisingly achieved. Outkast exploded with its brilliant Stankonia, which took the intelligent themes presented on 1998's Aquemini and augmented them with maddeningly catchy backing tracks.
In fact, Stankonia's "B.O.B." was the best rap single of 2000.
Even better than Outkast were both Jurassic 5 and Talib Kweli with DJ Hi-Tek, who put out albums that deserved to make any critic's year-end top 10 list.
Radiohead's Kid A was probably destined for everyone's top 10 list the moment everyone heard 1997's OK Computer, but Kid A fans weren't blown away by the album just because it carried Radiohead's name. Kid A deserved all of the praise it received, as it colored vivid, textured collages of sound with mumbled, confounding lyrical themes about transience, desolation, synonymity and commodification. Jazzy, meandering aural spreads and whispered, tempered vocals created a sonic dream state, allowing Kid A's listeners to explore its themes in a fantastical dream world while being completely awake. Not a single song on Kid A could ever be played regularly on radio, and yet every single song is immediately recognizable after one listen and distinguishable from every other track on the album. Each track hits so hard and pulls so violently one particular emotion from its listener, that one listen ensures a lifetime of familiarity with the music. Album of the year, hands down.
But just because Kid A so spectacularly stretched the boundaries of conventional rock should other 2000 releases be ignored. Modest Mouse, indie darlings for years, signed to a major label and released the brooding epic The Moon & Antarctica. It would have scored album of the year nods from everyone almost any other year but unfortunately had to battle Kid A.
With jagged, dir-ty guitars and broken English, Modest Mouse created a white-trash expose on a-lienation and lost love. Just as stellar were efforts by Elliott Smith, Bjork and PJ Harvey. All three artists released solid full-lengths that improved upon their previous models without completely altering their typical sound, although Harvey stopped shouting to sing for the first time and might actually find herself in the top 40 someday if she keeps crooning. Sleater-Kinney's All Hands On the Bad One saw the band return to top form, and the precocious Conor Oberst of Bright Eyes proved a force to be reckoned with after his stellar Fevers and Mirrors. Trans Am's mostly instrumental Red Line sounded like a poor man's Kid A, while Badly Drawn Boy proved to be the U.K.'s answer to Smith.
And as for the industry's threats that music was going to change drastically in 2000? The Billboard charts at the end of the year say at all: the Backstreet Boys are once again entrenched at No. 1. Napster be damned, because boy bands, albums and music in general are never going to die.
