Videodrone #25: Letter from an Occupant

Videodrone is a weekly(ish) feature looking at music videos from the last half century. 

Letter from an Occupant (2000)

What happens when you write a perfect pop song and nobody hears it? Did it actually happen? Well, in the case of "Letter from an Occupant" by the New Pornographers, yes, it did happen and we are all better for it.

Of course, I'm being hyperbolic to say nobody heard it. The song was on the band's debut album, Mass Romantic, which was released on Mint Records in Canada in November 2000. The album got good notices (indeed, the NPs won a Juno for Alternative Album of the Year for it), but it didn't chart and "Letter from Occupant," which was released as a single in April 2002, didn't make much of a splash on radio or MTV. (Although I just discovered it was included on the soundtrack to the movie Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back in 2001.)

But dammit, it sure deserved to. The group was referred to as a Canadian indie rock supergroup, more as a joke than anything else since none of its members had any real success prior to joining. Head songwriter Carl Newman was previously in Zumpano, Dan Bejar was in Destroyer, John Collins was in the Evaporators, Kurt Dahle came from Limblifter and Blaine Thurier later became a filmmaker. Honorary Canuck Neko Case was already an alt-country solo artist, but her career didn't take off until later.

Case sang lead on "Letter from an Occupant," which was an upbeat power pop gem that was very different from Case's usual repertoire. There was a lot going on in the song, Newman told Pitchfork: "I remember 'Letter from an Occupant' was a pretty belabored song. It ended up being almost minimal, but I remember there's so much shit we put on it. There's a psychedelic 12-string guitar solo, a backwards guitar, there's a really cool synth that's in there but buried. At some point, you have to choose. That was the hardest part about mixing the thing: just making that judgment call. I only feel at peace with the record now because people seem to like it."

Newman's lyrics are also excellent. "The time that your enemy gives you/Good times are not the ones you want/I've cried five rivers on the way here/Which one will you skate away on?/The tune you'll be humming forever/All the words are replaced and wrong/With a shower of 'yeahs' and 'whatevers'/You traded me away long gone."

The video was directed by Michael Dowse, who went on to direct feature films including the beloved cult comedy FUBAR, the hockey comedy Goon, and several others. The video features the NPs performing the song in different locations with a screen in the background that jumps to the next scene. It likely got plenty of play on MuchMusic in Canada; if it got any MTV airplay, it was on 120 Minutes. I certainly never saw the video until YouTube came along years later.

I never heard the NPs on the radio, but rather discovered the band the way I learned about a lot of music in the early 2000s, through MP3 blogs. It was around 2003 when the band's second album, Electric Version, came out, that some of the blogs I followed started hyping the New Pornographers. I went back and discovered the greatness of Mass Romantic. 

The early '00s was a great time for Canadian indie rock: The New Pornographers, Broken Social Scene, Metric, Wolf Parade, Stars, Arcade Fire, Death from Above 1979, The Dears, Joel Plaskett Emergency, Hot Hot Heat, Black Mountain, Land of Talk and on and on. 

The NPs just released their 10th album earlier this year. Newman remains the band's leader and Case continues to work with the group, even though her solo career has really blossomed. The rest of the lineup has fluctuated over the years, but the band's output remains strong. Still, Mass Romantic and "Letter from an Occupant" was a hell of a launching-off point.

Stuck In Thee Garage #579: May 9, 2025

Much is made about the insanity of the world right now, and with good reason. It's good to remember that things have always been crazy, although it's ratcheted up now. It was pretty nuts in the year 2000: post-Y2K, pre-9/11, Napster was blowing up and then blown up. This week on Stuck In Thee Garage, I played songs from the year 2000 in hour 2 (after playing new hotness from Model/Actriz, Blondshell and Melvins in hour 1). In 2000, the biggest thing these guys were worrying about was the location of their car.

Dude, here's my playlist:

Hour 1

Artist - Song/Album

Model/Actriz - Vespers/Pirouette

PUP - No Hope/Who Will Look After the Dogs?

Mclusky - People Person/The World is Still Here and So Are We

Viagra Boys - Uno II/Viagr Aboys

Blondshell - T&A/If You Asked for a Picture

Preoccupations - Ill at Ease/Ill at Ease

Friend of a Friend - Beautiful Ppl/Desire!

Ekko Astral - Pomegranate Tree/Pink Balloons: Popped EP

Lunchbox - Gravity/Evolver (2025 Vinyl Edition)

Melvins - King of Rome/Thunderball

Bob Mould - Breathing Room/Here We Go Crazy

Crime Oblivion - And Again/Chime Oblivion

Rude Television - Emphasis/I Want to Believe

Tunde Adebimpe - Pinstack/Thee Black Boltz

Dean Wareham - New World Julie/That's the Price of Loving Me

Mekons - Surrender/Horror

Cameron Keiber - Never Let Me Go/Nurser

Hour 2: 2000

Outkast - B.O.B./Stankonia

The Hives - Main Offender/Veni Vidi Vicious

Rollins Band - Get Some Go Again/Get Some Go Again

PJ Harvey - Kamikaze/Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea

Sleater-Kinney - You're No Rock N' Roll Fun/All Hands on the Bad One

Pedro the Lion - A Mind of Her Own/Winners Never Quit

At the Drive-In - Rolodex Propaganda/Relationship of Command

Hot Snakes - Salton City/Automatic Midnight

Queens of the Stone Age - Leg of Lamb/Rated R

The New Pornographers - Execution Day/Mass Romantic

The Tragically Hip - The Bastard/Music@Work

The Twilight Singers - King Only/Twilight as Played by the Twilight Singers

Radiohead - Everything in Its Right Place/Kid A

Modest Mouse - Tiny Cities Made of Ashes/The Moon and Antarctica

Elliott Smith - Son of Sam/Figure 8

Yo La Tengo - Cherry Chapstick/And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out

Rock in the year 2000 RIGHT HERE!

Day After Day #257: Ms. Jackson

Day After Day is an ambitious attempt to write about a song every day in 2024 (starting on Jan. 4).

Ms. Jackson (2000)

When you're talking about talented duos, Outkast has to be in the conversation. The Atlanta hip hop act has been consistently original and excellent right from the start. They've been on hiatus for a decade, but while they were together, they were at the top of their game.

Outkast was formed in 1992 by Big Boi (Antwan Patton) and Andre 3000 (Andre Benjamin), who met in high school. After three albums that were increasingly more successful, the group released their fourth album, Stankonia, in 2000. The album combined a variety of styles, including funk, rock and gospel. The first single, "B.O.B. (Bombs Over Baghdad)" grabbed my attention, with its over-the-top mix of high-speed rapping, hot guitar solos, and breakbeats. 

But it didn't quite catch on, failing to chart on the Billboard Hot 100. The next single was "Ms. Jackson," which was a totally different kind of song: a mid-tempo funk groove that was reportedly based on Andre 3000's relationship with singer Erykah Badu, with whom he had a child before breaking up. The song finds Andre apologizing to his ex-partner's mother.

"I'm sorry, Ms. Jackson, ooh, I am for real/Never meant to make your daughter cry/I apologize a trillion times/I'm sorry, Ms. Jackson, ooh, I am for real/Never meant to make your daughter cry/I apologize a trillion times."

But Big Boi brings a more antagonistic attitude towards the situation in his verse.

"She never got a chance to hear my side of the story, we was divided/She had fish fries, cookouts for my child's birthday, I wasn't invited."

Andre 3000 is more wistful about things, acknowledging that the couple had the best intentions but it just didn't work out.

"Me and your daughter got a special thang goin' on/You say it's puppy love, we say it's full grown/Hope that we feel this, feel this way forever/You can plan a pretty picnic but you can't predict the weather."

The video was a big hit, although it made no effort to dramatize the scenario in the song. Instead, it showed Big Boi and Andre 3000 working on a house while a bunch of cute animals bop along to the beat. 

"Ten times out of nine, now if I'm lyin', find/The quickest muzzle, throw it on my out and I'll decline/King meets queen, then the puppy love thing/Together dream about the crib with the Goodyear swing/On the oak tree, I hope we feel like this forever/Forever, forever ever? Forever ever?/Forever never seems that long until you're grown."

The song went to #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in February 2001, and it also hit the top spot in Germany, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden. The album went to #2 on the Billboard 200 and was critically acclaimed.

The group went on to its biggest success with the 2004 double album Speakerboxx/The Love Below, which was basically two solo albums combined into one Outkast album. Andre's song "Hey Ya!" was a monster hit, spending nine weeks at #1 and Big Boi's "The Way You Move" also went to #1. Outkast released a movie and album called Idlewild in 2006; the album sold well but not as well as previous releases. 

That was the last Outkast recording. In the years since, Big Boi has released three solo albums; Andre did some guest spots on other albums and acted (including playing Jimi Hendrix in a movie) until releasing a 2023 instrumental album of flute music. Because of course he did.

The duo reunited in 2014 to play a tour of festivals and other large venues, but that's the last time the two have performed together as Outkast.

 

Day After Day #239: One Armed Scissor

Day After Day is an ambitious attempt to write about a song every day in 2024 (starting on Jan. 4).

One Armed Scissor (2000)

Is it possible for a band to have too much energy? Probably not, but if you ever saw an At the Drive-In performance, you might wonder. I've only seen footage of them on YouTube, but man, they went all out all the time on stage. Just off the charts insanity and awesomeness.

In 2000, the music scene was pretty strange. Napster was blowing up, the recording industry was filing lawsuits to stop file-sharing sites like Napster, nu metal acts like Limp Bizkit were all the rage and pop and hip hop were also thriving. 

By this point, post-hardcore act At the Drive-In had been together for six years, formed in El Paso by guitarist Jim Ward and singer Cedric Bixler-Zavala, with Omar Rodriguez-Lopez joining in 1995 as bassist. The band released their debut album, Acrobatic Tenement, on Flipside in 1996. Shortly after recording that album, ATDI added Tony Hajjar on drums and Paul Hinojos on bass, with Rodriguez-Lopez switching to guitar. After switching labels to Fearless Records, the band released In/Casino/Out in August 1998. 

Buzz had been building about ATDI's incendiary live performances and eventually the group signed with G.A.S. Entertainment, a label founded by record company exec Gary Gersh and artist manager John Silva. But while the band was recording its third album, Relationship of Command with producer Ross Robinson, G.A.S.'s parent company, Digital Entertainment Network, dissolved and Gersh and Silva merged their label with Grand Royal (founded by the Beastie Boys in conjunction with Capitol Records). 

Any fears that ATDI would water down their sound after signing to a major were unfounded. Relationship of Command came out in September 2000 and was a ripper of an album, cementing the band as the premier "screamo" act of the moment. I was working for Webnoize and we attended South by Southwest in March 2000, where ATDI played a hot set; unfortunately, I was unaware of it and missed it. But thanks to our office "research" on Napster, I was able to hear some of the new stuff early and picked up the CD when it came out. "Pattern Against User," "Arcarsenal" and "Rolodex Propaganda" (featuring Iggy Pop) are all standouts. The energy is palpable, with Bixler-Zavala screaming while Ward and Rodriguez-Lopez riff furiously and the rhythm section thunders along. 

"One Armed Scissor" was an early favorite, although I have to admit I didn't know what the hell they were singing about most of the time. According to the Wikipedia page for the song, the band said in an interview that a one-armed scissor is a mixture of Red Bull and vodka, and that the song is about their tours told from the point of view of "an omniscient character named the one-armed scissor who sees their hardships they deal with while on tour." Okay, that still doesn't make much sense. But neither do these lyrics, which center on something bad happening on a spaceship (I think).

"Yes, this is the campaign/Slithered entrails in the cargo bay/Neutered is the vastness/They hibernate, but have they kissed the ground?/Pucker up and kiss the asphalt now/Tease this amputation/Splintered larynx, it has access now/Cut away, cut away/Send transmission to the one-armed scissor/Cut away, cut away/Send transmission from the one-armed scissor/Cut away, cut away/Send transmission to the one-armed scissor/Cut away, cut away."

The song began getting play on college radio stations like WMBR, which we were listening to in our Cambridge office at the time, but also on more mainstream rock stations. And the band was going on talk shows like the Late Show with David Letterman and Late Night with Conan O'Brien and just exploding on the stage, with Bixler-Zavala throwing himself into instruments and even Conan's guest couch (according to a YouTube viewer who was in the audience) while the band thrashed away. 

"Dissect a trillion sighs away/Will you get this letter? Jagged pulp sliced in my veins/I write to remember/'Cause I'm a million miles away/Will you get this letter?/Jagged pulp sliced in my veins/I write to remember/I write to remember/I write to remember."

So maybe the space station is a metaphor for life on the road, perhaps. That life was taking a toll on the band, for sure. In November 2000, ATDI's touring van skidded on ice and flipped onto its roof; the band escaped with only minor injuries to Hajjar and Bixler-Zavala. In January 2001, the band was playing the Big Day Out festival in Australia when the band grew upset at the crowd's moshing and left the stage after playing three songs. Two months later, about to begin a U.S. tour and at the peak of their popularity, ATDI split up. While exhaustion was given as a reason, both Bixler-Zavala and Rodriguez-Lopez were dealing with drug habits and the band members had different ideas about musical direction. 

Bixler-Zavala and Rodriguez-Lopez wanted to move into a prog-rock vein and formed the Mars Volta, while Ward, Hinojos and Hajjar formed the ATDI-adjacent Sparta. Both acts released albums that performed well. Hinojos left Sparta and joined the Mars Volta from 2005-2009. ATDI reunited in 2011 and played some festival shows the following year. The Mars Volta split up in 2013 and Bixler-Zavala and Rodriguez-Lopez stopped talking for a while before resolving their issues the following year.

ATDI reformed to make a new album in 2016, although Ward left after a few rehearsals and was replaced by former Sparta guitarist Keeley Davis. The album, in*ter*a*li*a, came out in 2017 and was pretty good. The band toured behind the album, but in November 2018 announced another hiatus. 

I still love watching those old videos of At the Drive-In, which remind me of similarly kickass acts like Fugazi, Drive Like Jehu, Hot Snakes and the Nation of Ulysses, all of which ATDI has cited as influences. Whether they're singing about spaceships, booze or scissors, ATDI was the real deal, man.

Day After Day #71: Idioteque

Day After Day is an ambitious attempt to write about a song every day in 2024 (starting on Jan. 4).

Idioteque (2000)

After the successes of their albums The Bends and OK Computer, Radiohead had become one of the biggest bands in rock. OK Computer had redefined their sound and they were being hailed as the natural inheritors of the mantle that U2 and R.E.M. once held as a Very Important Band. Critics and fans alike were anticipating the band's next album to see how they would once again transform guitar-based rock.

But there was just one problem: Radiohead had no interest in doing that. The band was burned out and felt like other bands were copying their sound. Singer/songwriter Thom Yorke suffered from writer's block and became disillusioned with rock music in general, choosing instead to listen to electronic artists like Aphex Twin and Autechre. 

The rest of the band wasn't buying it at first, especially when Yorke was bringing in fragments of songs with no guitars or drums. There was a lot of time spent in the studio experimenting with electronic instruments like synthesizers and sequencers, as well as with using effects on their guitars to create synth-like sounds. It took a while but finally the songs began to take shape by early 2000, and in April of that year, Radiohead had completed 20 songs. Eventually, they decided to release them on two albums, starting with Kid A in October 2000.

This was at the height of the popularity of Napster, the file-sharing service that allowed users to share/steal MP3s. Radiohead decided not to release any singles or videos and did very little press for the album. But the album leaked on Napster months before its official release. I was working at Webnoize, where we were writing about the impact technology like Napster was having on the music industry, and we were using it for "research purposes." I heard some of the Kid A stuff before its official release and it was wild.

The band incorporated a wide variety of electronic and other instruments, as well as vocoders, strings and horn sections. In addition to electronic acts, influences on the new sound included Krautrock acts like Can, jazz artists including Miles Davis and Charles Mingus, Talking Heads circa Remain in Light, and Bjork. For someone expecting OK Computer 2.0, it was probably a major disappointment. 

The song "Idioteque" grew from an improvised sound collage that guitarist Jonny Greenwood put together using '70s-era synths, found sounds and samples; Yorke took a short section and wrote lyrics based on that. Yorke's lyric-writing process was much different than on previous albums. Inspired by David Byrne's haphazard lyrics on Remain in Light, Yorke would take phrases and then pick them from a hat to put them together. Amazingly, it works.

"Who's in a bunker? Who's in a bunker?/Women and children first/And the children first and the children/I'll laugh until my head comes off/I'll swallow til I burst/Until I burst."

The song sounds like it's from the year 3000, not 2000. For the second verse, the synths drop out and Yorke sings over the electronic percussion, seemingly about climate change.

"Ice Age coming, Ice Age coming/Let me hear both sides/Let me hear both sides, let me hear both/Ice Age coming, Ice Age coming/Throw it in the fire, throw it in the fire, throw it on the/We're not scaremongering/This is really happening, happening."

The band rearranged the Kid A songs to play them live. They ended up doing just a few North American shows in small venues, and also played on Saturday Night Live, where they did "Idioteque" and "The National Anthem" in two of the best performances that show has ever seen. 

The critics were split on the album, some loving it and others trashing it, but by the end of the decade, it made most best-of lists. Kid A topped the U.S. Billboard 200 and the UK Album chart and was top 10 throughout the world. The rest of the songs recorded during the Kid A sessions were released on the album Amnesiac in May 2001; it included more of what one would consider traditional Radiohead songs along with experimental sounds.

I saw them on the Amnesiac tour at Suffolk Downs of all places and then a few years later in Mansfield (the venue formerly known as Great Woods and many other names) on the Hail to the Thief tour. Radiohead is a terrific live band.

Radiohead released one more album for EMI before self-releasing their seventh album, In Rainbows, as a "pay what you want" download. This naturally freaked the industry out; the band later released the album as a CD through the traditional retail route and it went to #1 in the U.S. and UK. The band has only released two albums since, the last one coming out in 2016, but the group's members have been busy, releasing solo projects and working with other musicians. Yorke and Jonny Greenwood formed The Smile with drummer Tom Skinner and have released two excellent albums that feature a decent amount of guitar, don't ya know.

 

Day After Day #52: Hate to Say I Told You So

Day After Day is an ambitious attempt to write about a song every day in 2024 (starting on Jan. 4). 

Hate to Say I Told You So (2000)

There have been many cases over the years where a band releases a killer song and nothing happens. Radio doesn't play it, people don't hear it and those that do hear it don't react to it. 

This happened to the Swedish band the Hives when they released their second album Veni Vidi Vicious on Burning Heart and Epitaph in April 2000. There wasn't much of a reaction to it until Alan McGee, a music executive and founder of Creation Records, saw the video for "Hate to Say I Told You So" on German TV and signed the band to his Poptones label, which released a compilation of the band's first two albums. The album went to #7 on the UK album chart and led to Veni Vidi Vicious being re-released in the U.S. in April 2002.

This time around, people listened. "Hate to Say I Told You So" was suddenly getting played on rock radio (this was back when there were still stations playing new songs) and MTV started playing the video. The timing was better for the song to hit in early '02: it got lumped into the whole garage rock revival that was happening with the Strokes, the White Stripes, the Vines, etc.

On top of all that, the song just kicks all of the requisite ass. The Hives know how to deliver the goods, playing propulsive garage punk with a sense of humor. They wear matching suits, they've got goofy stage names like frontman Howlin' Pelle Almqvist and they've got boundless energy. On "Hate to Say I Told You So," the Hives ride a catchy riff and just pummel the listener into submission with awesomeness, slow the din down to a lone bass line and then rev it up again. This is one of those songs that will get you ready to run through a wall.

"Do what I please, gonna spread the disease/Because I wanna/Gonna call all the shots for the no's and the nots/Because I wanna/Yeahhhhhhhh."

In the U.S., the re-released song went to #6 on the Billboard Alternative Airplay chart, #35 on the Mainstream Rock chart and #86 on the Hot 100 chart. The album went to #63 on the Billboard 200, but more importantly, it allowed the Hives to establish themselves as a premier live band. I saw them in the summer of '02 at the Roxy (now the Royale) and they blew the roof off the place. Almqvist is a master performer and loves to work the crowd with stage banter and the band is constantly in motion. 

Over the 20+ years since, the Hives have released four more albums, although there was an 11-year gap between Lex Hives and last year's The Death of Randy Fitzsimmons, which was an excellent return to form. They still do what they do best: rock the hell out and have a ton of fun doing it (see their performance last year on the Howard Stern Show below).

Completely Conspicuous 613: Stuck In a Moment

Part 2 of my conversation with guest Phil Stacey about the music of 2000. Listen to the episode below or download directly (right click and "save as").

Show notes:

• Jay's non-top 5 picks: Hot Snakes, Rollins Band, Fu Manchu, Pearl Jam
• Phil's and Jay's #5: Diverse offering from the Tragically Hip
• Phil's and Jay's #4: More accessible effort about living in NYC by PJ Harvey
• Phil's #3: Bluesy debut album from North Mississippi All-Stars
• Jay's #3: Electrifying major-label debut from At the Drive-In
• Featured in Dan Ozzi's book Sellout about indie acts who sign with majors
• Phil's #2: Phish blends some different styles into their jam band formula
• Jay's #2: Queens of the Stone Age's second album takes a big leap onto the rock scene
• Phil's #1: U2 bounces back with a back-to-basics release
• Phil: Feeling down about what was once his favorite band
• How bands age 
• The last really good U2 album
• Jay's #1: Radiohead totally reinvents their sound, embracing electronics
• Phil's not feeling it
• Favorite songs: "Optimistic" (Jay), "Stuck In a Moment You Can't Get Out Of" (Phil) 

 

Completely Conspicuous is available through Apple Podcasts. Subscribe and write a review!

The opening and closing theme of Completely Conspicuous is "Theme to Big F'in Pants" by Jay Breitling. Voiceover work is courtesy of James Gralian.

Completely Conspicuous 612: In the Year 2000

Part 1 of my conversation with guest Phil Stacey about the music of 2000. Listen to the episode below or download directly (right click and "save as").

Show notes:

• In 2000, Jay got married
• Jay turned 33, Phil turned 31
• Jay: Went to SXSW, saw Modest Mouse, Fu Manchu, Bevis Frond
• Pivotal year for the dot-com boom
  
• Albums were leaking on Napster before they came out
• A better year than '99 in terms of stuff we liked
• Top 100 songs were predominantly pop
• Phil's non-top 5s: Ween, Sleater-Kinney, Outkast, White Stripes, Rage Against the Machine, Ryan Adams, New Pornographers, Doves, Neil Young, Steely Dan, the Hives 
• Phil's out on runs scaring old ladies 
• To be continued

Completely Conspicuous is available through Apple Podcasts. Subscribe and write a review!

The opening and closing theme of Completely Conspicuous is "Theme to Big F'in Pants" by Jay Breitling. Voiceover work is courtesy of James Gralian.

Stuck In Thee Garage #324: June 5, 2020

Let's face it, things in the world aren't great right now. Hopefully they're going to get better. This week on Stuck In Thee Garage, I played songs from another year that seemed kinda crappy: 2000. Although I guess the following year was even worse, so...anyhoo, hope you enjoy the new and the old stuff.

Also: Something something more cowbell.

This playlist has the fever:

Hour 1
Artist - Song/Album
Run the Jewels - Walking in the Snow/RTJ4
Bob Mould - American Crisis/Blue Hearts
Coriky - Too Many Husbands/Coriky
Gateway Drugs - Invitation/PSA
The Lawrence Arms - PTA/Skeleton Coast
Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever - The Second of the First/Sideways to New Italy
Japandroids - Heart Sweats/Massey Fucking Hall
Chicano Batman - I Know It/Invisible People
The Dears - Instant Nightmare!/Lovers Rock
Car Seat Headrest - Martin/Making a Door Less Open
Jeff Rosenstock - Old Crap/NO DREAM
X - Strange Life/Alphabetland
Sleaford Mods - Tarantula Deadly Cargo/All That Glue
Lightning Bug - The Onely Ones/Single
Diet Cig - Night Terrors/Do You Wonder About Me?
Mark Lanegan - At Zero Below/Straight Songs of Sorrow

Hour 2: 2000
Outkast - Ms. Jackson/Stankonia
The Hives - Hate to Say I Told You So/Veni Vidi Vicious
Sleater-Kinney - All Hands on the Bad One/All Hands on the Bad One
Radiohead - Idioteque/Kid A
PJ Harvey (with Thom Yorke) - The Mess We're In/Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea
Modest Mouse - Gravity Rides Everything/The Moon and Antarctica
At the Drive-In - One-Armed Scissor/Relationship of Command
Rollins Band - Are You Ready?/Get Some Go Again
Queens of the Stone Age - Monsters in the Parasol/Rated R
The New Pornographers - Mass Romantic/Mass Romantic
Yo La Tengo - From Black to Blue/And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out
The Twilight Singers - The Twilite Kid/Twilight As Played by The Twilight Singers
The Tragically Hip - Lake Fever/Music@Work
The White Stripes - I'm Bound to Pack It Up/De Stijl

Ye Olde Hit Parade: Optimistic

Editor's note: Ye Olde Hit Parade takes a look back at my favorite songs year by year (starting in 1978, when I really started paying attention to music).

2000: Radiohead - Optimistic

First things first, we survived Y2K intact. Nothing happened, the computers kept working and on we went. It was another presidential election year in the U.S. and this one was particularly crazy, with George W. Bush edging out Al Gore after a controversial monthlong recount in Florida. The dotcom bubble began to burst, leading into a lot of companies going under.


That last piece of news wasn't particularly great for the dotcom I was working at, although we weren't as reliant on big money as some of the more infamous companies were. We were busy in 2000, moving our office from Stoneham to Central Square in Cambridge, which was fun. We had a pretty cool space and I was working closely with a good group of folks covering all these dotcom investments. One big story we followed was when Metallica decided to sue Napster, followed soon afterward by the major labels filing suit. We went to South By Southwest in March, where we had a booth and spent a lot of time covering the event; we also spent a lot of time eating BBQ and going to see bands including Modest Mouse, Fu Manchu and the Bevis Frond. In November, we were back in Los Angeles for our annual conference. But as we tracked how a lot of these internet-based companies were unable to take advantage of the funding they had received, we also were facing a similar dilemma as we headed in 2001.

Meanwhile in Beverly, Deb and I spent the first part of the year getting ready for our wedding in July. About a month before the big day, a huge tree branch fell on and totaled my car. Since I was taking the train to work anyway, we decided to just go with one car for the time being. The wedding itself was great and we went to St. Lucia for our honeymoon. Then in the fall, we ended up buying a two-family house across town with Deb's mom. By total coincidence, it just so happened to be the same house I rented an apartment in eight years earlier.

We had shitty dial-up internet at home so using Napster was out of the question. I tried it, but it was so slow. But in the office, we had a nice, fast T1 line, so we used it "for research purposes" (which was actually true, because we had a research department that was publishing reports on the service). New music was getting leaked early on Napster, including Madonna's latest single. This was the pre-iPod era, but we had gotten different MP3 players sent to us, including my personal favorite, the Diamond Rio. The player only had 64 MB of memory, which could play about an hour's worth of music (depending on the bitrate or size of the files; we used to get stuff at 96 or 128 kbps, which is pretty low-quality, but it worked). But you could add a memory card and double the memory. So I was getting advance copies of new albums and listening to them on my commute. These included the new releases from Radiohead (more on that in a bit), At the Drive-In, The Tragically Hip, U2 and others. I was also still buying CDs and ripping them into MP3s to listen to on my MP3 player; these included albums from Queens of the Stone Age, PJ Harvey, Sleater-Kinney and Outkast.

Once we moved to the Cambridge the office, we started listening to WMBR, the MIT campus station, which introduced to a lot of newer acts like the White Stripes, Peaches, Modest Mouse and others. We also had this weird Sun ray computer system (you used a smart card to log in, so you could go to any terminal and get your settings and stuff) with a shared music drive full of stuff we had downloaded from Napster. You couldn't download it to a personal player, but it was cool when you were working in the office. For concerts, I saw Supergrass, the Tragically Hip and Guster, in addition to those shows I saw in Austin. But certainly a lot fewer shows than in previous years, probably due to a longer work day (I was up at 5 to go to the gym and then catch the 7:20 train to Boston and then didn't get home until 7:30 p.m.) and the fact we only had one car now.



Coming off the success of 1997's OK Computer, Radiohead had established themselves as a band to watch and the anticipation for their follow-up was immense. Fans and critics were expecting a continuation of the guitar-heavy sound the band had used on their first three albums, but 2000's Kid A ended up going in a totally opposite direction, embracing electronics in an almost shocking way. I'm a guitar fan so when I first heard songs from Kid A via Napster, I was disappointed, but the more I listened, the more I liked them. That was where the intimate experience of listening to those songs on my Rio 500 player really paid off. I dug into those songs while on that long-ass commute, which included walking to the train station, 35-40 minutes on the train, another 10-minute walk to the subway and yet another 10-minute walk to my office. That made Kid A really imprint itself onto my brain, and there was so much to like about it. I especially liked "Optimistic," which sort of melded the band's old and new approaches.

For me, "Optimistic" represented a lot of different things, not the least of which was a positive outlook as I moved into the "grown-up phase" of my life. It ended up coming in handy the following, which presented a lot of grown-up challenges, both good and bad.


Honorable mentions: Radiohead - "Everything In Its Right Place"; Radiohead - "Idioteque"; PJ Harvey - "Good Fortune"; PJ Harvey - "This Mess We're In"; Queens of the Stone Age - "In the Fade"; Queens of the Stone Age - "Feel Good Hit of the Summer"; The Tragically Hip - "My Music at Work"; The Tragically Hip - "Lake Fever"; Pearl Jam - "Nothing As It Seems"; Rollins Band - "Get Some Go Again"; Yo La Tengo - "Cherry Chapstick"; Steely Dan - "Cousin Dupree"; Elliott Smith - "Son of Sam"; Sleater-Kinney - "You're No Rock 'N Roll Fun"; Modest Mouse - "Tiny Cities Made of Ashes"; The White Stripes - "Hello Operator"; The White Stripes - "You're Pretty Good Looking (for a Girl)"; U2 - "Elevation"; U2 - "Walk On"; Outkast - "Ms. Jackson"; Outkast - "So Fresh, So Clean"; Dr. Dre - "Forgot About Dre"'; Fu Manchu - "Boogie Van"; Fu Manchu - "King of the Road"; Geddy Lee - "My Favorite Headache"; At the Drive-In - "One-Armed Scissor"; At the Drive-In - "Rolodex Propaganda"   

Stuck In Thee Garage #99: October 9, 2015

The year 2000 was notable for a lot of things, not the least of which was being the first year of the 21st century. Somehow everything didn't end on January 1 despite rampant Y2K fears. And the music industry was undergoing a major shift. This week on Stuck In Thee Garage, I played music from 2000 in hour 2 and it was exceedingly good.

The accurately predicted playlist:

Hour 1
Artist - Song/Album
Sally Crewe - Satellite/Later Than You Think
Wild Ones - Dim the Lights/Heatwave
Elizabeth Colour Wheel - Wish/Wish
Potty Mouth - Creeper Weed/Potty Mouth
Childbirth - Nasty Grrls/Women's Rights
Blacklisters - Seas Make Ships/Adult
Donovan Wolfington - Mosquito/How to Treat the Ones You Love
Split Single - Fragmented World/Fragmented World
Bob Mould - Star Machine/Silver Age
Sugar - Your Favorite Thing/File Under: Easy Listening
The Besnard Lakes - Devastation/The Besnard Lakes are the Dark Horse
Ride - Seagull/Nowhere
Red Red Meat - Idiot Son/Bunny Gets Paid
Wilco - Cold Slope/Star Wars
Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks - Baltimore/Real Emotional Trash

Hour 2: 2000
Radiohead - Optimistic/Kid A
Elliott Smith - Son of Sam/Figure 8
The Twilight Singers - King Only/Twilight as Played by The Twilight Singers
The Hives - Main Offender/Veni Vidi Vicious
The Hellacopters - Sometimes I Don't Know/High Visibility
Rollins Band - Get Some Go Again/Get Some Go Again
Fu Manchu - Boogie Van/King of the Road
The New Pornographers - The Slow Descent Into Alcoholism/Mass Romantic
Sleater-Kinney - You're No Rock n' Roll Fun/All Hands on the Bad One
PJ Harvey - Good Fortune/Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea
The Tragically Hip - My Music at Work/Music @ Work
The White Stripes - Why Can't You Be Nicer to Me?/De Stijl
Yo La Tengo - Cherry Chapstick/And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out
Queens of the Stone Age - The Lost Art of Keeping a Secret/Rated R
At the Drive-In - Rolodex Propaganda/Relationship of Command
Modest Mouse - Dark Center of the Universe/The Moon and Antarctica 

Stuck In Thee Garage #99 by Koomdogg on Mixcloud