Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart. The beginning of 2025 also represents the end of the first quarter of the century. If you think about the first 100 years of the millennium before your school, we're basically in the final weeks of freshman year. To close out today's show, we're going to time travel back 25 years with a look at some of the music of the early 2000s when the boy ban of the '90s gave way to contemporary RnB like Missy Elliott or Usher. The Brit wave of artists like Oasis and Blur continued their heyday as electronic genres like dubstep and grime came into being. It was a decade of hits like Mr. Brightside by the Killers, Chop Suey! by System of a Down, and Complicated by Avril Lavigne. In hip-hop, the decade began with OutKast Ms. Jackson and ended with Empire State of Mind. Call this era the aughts although my next guest for this conversation refuses to. Music writer Rob Harvilla hosts the podcast 60 Songs That Explain the '90s which despite its name, is now taking a look at the music of the 2000s. Hey, Rob.

Rob Harvilla: How are you doing? It's so great to be back. Thank you for having me.

Alison Stewart: So glad to have you. When you think of this era, what aesthetic or artistic impulses would you say define the music of this era?

Rob Harvilla: The pants are very large. That's honestly the first thing that just popped into my head. I am no longer a teenager. I am a young adult. I am working for an alt-weekly in Columbus, Ohio. I am a professional music critic. The first thing that strikes me about the music of the 2000s is I have a different relationship to it now. I'm no longer a teenager in love with the music I'm in love with. Now I am analyzing it as a professional critic. Now I am reckoning with nu metal and Britney Spears and Avril Lavigne and Chop Suey!. It changes completely the way I hear the music almost. I don't know if anything like that ever happened to you, but that was my experience.

Alison Stewart: Oh, yes. [chuckles] I want to point out that in a mini-episode of your podcast where you're going to explore the music from the years 2000 to 2009, you refuse to call it the aughts. Why not?

Rob Harvilla: I do. The phrase just bothers me. It's arbitrary. It's rude to the phrase. I don't like it. It just doesn't sit right in my mouth and that is the reason that the full title of my podcast is now 60 songs that explain the '90s: the 2000s. I prefer to say colon, but you can do what you want. This is the stand that I am taking. This is the hill I am going to die on.

Alison Stewart: Listeners, we want to hear from you. Which artists or bands were you listening to in the early 2000s? What is a song that describes a decade in a nutshell for you? Do you have any stories about music that serve as a good snapshot for-- Hold your ears, for the aughts? Give us a call at 212-433-WNYC. 212-433-9692. You can call in and join us on the air. You can text us at that number or you can hit us up on social media at All Of It NYC. In the premiere episode of the 2000 series, you covered The Killers Mr. Brightside. Let's take a listen.

[MUSIC - The Killers: Mr. Brightside]

Alison Stewart: Okay Rob, why did you choose that song as your entry point to the music of the 2000s?

Rob Harvilla: I can't quite explain it, and I spent 9,000 words trying. That song, Mr. Brightside, I really do think has come to define the aughts. It's got 2 billion plays on Spotify. It is apparently a song where you play it in any environments. At a hockey arena, at a bar mitzvah, at a funeral. Any environment. You put on that song and everyone freaks out. They jump up, they start singing along. It's the Don't Stop Believin' of the 2000s if that means anything to you. That's just the way it is. It's a great song, but I was fascinated by how that song has endured as the anthem of that era. I really do think that's true and I don't quite know why, but I'm not mad at it.

Alison Stewart: I think it's the percussion.

Rob Harvilla: Sure, the percussion that's interesting. I've never heard that. You dig the drums.

Alison Stewart: They're high up and they're placed forward, which I think everybody can find a beat.

Rob Harvilla: That's right. All right. It's good to have a fresh perspective on that because I just talked way too long about the lyrics. The first half-hour of my episode on Mr. Brightside was the crudest half-hour of content I have ever generated. I hope my mother didn't listen to it, but the beat is a way better way of explaining the appeal. Thank you.

Alison Stewart: Your episode covered on Avril Lavigne's Complicated. Let's hear it and we can talk about it on the other side.

[MUSIC - Avril Lavigne: Complicated]

Alison Stewart: Oh, Rob. It's all so complicated. What's complicated?

Rob Harvilla: You know what's complicated about this is I remember this song being ubiquitous in real time on the radio, but I forgot the way that Avril Lavigne was specifically framed as the anti-Britney Spears. That era you had Avril Lavigne, you had Michelle Branch who had Everywhere. You had Vanessa Carlton A Thousand Miles, the piano. These artists were specifically marketed as not teen pop. They play their own instruments, they write their own songs, and they're the anti-Britney.

I'm really interested in the media narratives at that time and the way teen pop like boy bands and Britney Spears were so dominant coming out of the '90s and into the 2000s. This was the backlash. At least the media generated backlash. I don't think Avril cared for the term at all but just this idea that we had this new wave of female singer-songwriters who were real and more authentic and not fabricated. All of that generality. I really dig just going back and seeing how these people were framed and sold to us and how that marketing holds up now.

Alison Stewart: It's interesting. On a serious note, you're talking about authenticity and you have to really think that a lot of culture, for time being, was defined by the terror attacks of 9/11.

Rob Harvilla: Of course.

Alison Stewart: How did it change the music world?

Rob Harvilla: That's the filter through which I hear all this music and I try and go light on that on the show. Even a song like Complicated, even a song like Jimmy Eat World's The Middle. These joyful, happy, poppy radio songs, I hear them through the prism of 9/11 absolutely. I did an episode you mentioned on Chop Suey! by the metal band System of a Down. What I remember most vividly about the terror attacks on 9/11 afterward, Clear Channel, which owned all these radio stations, hundreds if not thousands of radio stations at the time, they had this leaked memo of songs that you shouldn't play on the radio right now because it just wasn't the right environment.

It's such a bizarre mix of really heavy metal songs that are a little too intense. Any songs that mention planes in any context like Fly Away by Lenny Kravitz and then stuff like Imagined or What a Wonderful World. Songs that are too pretty or too utopian, they scan as ironic suddenly in this context. Of course, the Dixie Chicks, now the Chicks. The backlash to the statements they made about the Iraq war. The country music boom of really jingoistic let's go get them radio songs. Toby Keith's Courtesy Of The Red, White And Blue, for example.

Even music that isn't explicitly about that moment and a reaction to that moment and the culture and the time and the mood, I still all hear it through the prism of 9/11. I really wish I couldn't. Some things like U2's All That You Can't Leave Behind, Bruce Springsteen's The Rising. These albums that I think really helped people process and heal and come together. There was a utopian feel to some of the rock and pop of that time, that it really was trying to unify us and heal us in some abstract sense. I hear all the music like this. I wish I didn't, but I do. I don't know about you.

Alison Stewart: Yes, for sure. This is from X. Time for Heroes by the Libertines summarizes a feeling of being part of a new wave of music that was happening in the moment. It had lots of brash and cool attitude with a textbook definition of classic rock and roll ego bravado. Listening from Mexico. Thanks for calling in. Let's talk to Mike in Huntington. Hi, Mike, thanks for calling All Of It. What do you got to say?

Mike: I think the first thing is-- I'm going from memory here, so I'm not [unintelligible 00:11:06] what I was actually listening to in 2000 but I know that I was then and still am listening to Wilco. They have an album, '99 Summer Teeth, which I think is often overlooked as a real pop gem in their catalog.

Rob Harvilla: That's my favorite.

Mike: I think 2000 I was probably also listening to a lot of Ben Lee, [inaudible 00:11:33] Dwayne. Oh, crappy human being, but big musician at the time, Ryan Adams, he had that album post 9/11 with the American flag on the cover with the song New York. There you go.

Alison Stewart: Thanks for calling, Mike. We really appreciate it. We are talking about the music of the 2000s with music journalist and podcast host Rob Harvilla. We'll have more after the break. You can call in and join us. 212-433-9692. Your favorite song of the early 2000s after a break. You are listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest is Rob Harvilla. He's host of the podcast 60 Songs That Explain the '90s: The 2000s. We are talking about the music of the 2000s. I want to play a little bit of M.I.A's Paper Planes. Let's take a listen.

[MUSIC - M.I.A: Paper Planes]

Alison Stewart: All right. That's great to dance to, but it's also a critique of the international drug trade. How did the music world approach political and socially poignant music?

Rob Harvilla: It's interesting because your caller mentioned Wilco. The Wilco album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot became another one of these albums that helped people process the 9/11 attacks and the American mood, despite being released and recorded, of course, before the attacks. That was projected onto it. That mood and that analysis of the record was projected onto the record. Whereas I think M.I.A, I think easily one of, the most popular and also most political incendiary political artists of our time.

Paper Planes, to my mind, has always been a song about immigrants. Just the public perception of immigrants is people coming to our country to take our money. She's personifying that, and she's blowing it up to this cartoon-like gangster appeal. She's sampling a Clash song, of course, Straight to Hell that had a similar theme. M.I.A to me was somebody who was hugely, critically popular. Big on critics polls, things of that nature. Paper Planes was her huge crossover song. It was in the trailer for that movie, Pineapple Express. The stoner comedy with Seth Rogen and James Franco and suddenly she's a pop artist. Suddenly she's on stage at the Grammys with Jay Z and Lil Wayne and Kanye West.

She's keeping this ferocity, this edge, this provocation. The M.I.A saga is just so fascinating. Just her press coverage if the words truffle fries mean anything to you in context with M.I.A. If you don't know what I'm talking about, stay out of it. M.I.A just the political statement she would make. She flipped the bird at the Super Bowl with Madonna a couple years later. Nowadays, she's tilted a little bit into conspiracy thinking. She's selling tinfoil hats for $100 on her website if I'm not mistaken. I'm not really endorsing that, but I'm just letting you know it's available. M.I.A has one of the most fascinating, most frustrating arcs of any pop musician of this century so far, I think.

Alison Stewart: Got a text. I was in high school in New York City in the 2000s. Two albums that defined that period for me were Operation: Doomsday by MF DOOM and Let's Get Free by Dead Prez. Also remember listening to a lot of Dashboard Confessional when I was feeling emo. This one says--

Rob Harvilla: What a scope.

Alison Stewart: I know. Love it. In high school, my best friend and I traveled to Philly to see one of our favorite bands, Incubus For my 40th birthday this year, we traveled to Austin to see them play again. We sang along with Brendan and had such a great time. I remember a very dance-based hip hop like Nelly's Country Grammar, Midwest rap. That [unintelligible 00:16:09] Midwest rap. What do you make of that?

Rob Harvilla: There wasn't a lot of it. Nelly was from St. Louis. Nelly was representing for St. Louis, which is nice. Imo's Pizza and the like. Hot in Here is an emblematic 2000s song for me for sure, produced by the Neptunes. Of course, they produced songs by the Clips and Snoop Dogg. I'm trying to think if there were other huge Midwestern artists at the time. I'm going to blank on somebody obvious. Nelly was an outlier there in Houston and I love him for it. St. Louis, sorry.

Alison Stewart: Let's listen to MGMT management. Let's listen to Kids.

[MUSIC - MGMT: Kids]

Alison Stewart: Rob, what do you remember about the music scene that accompanied this rise of indie pop-rock sound?

Rob Harvilla: Very broadly speaking, the arc, in the '80s it was college rock, and in the '90s that became alternative rock, and in the 2000s it became indie rock. It's just such a broad term as to be meaningless. By this time, mid-2000s, I'm living in New York City. I'm living in Brooklyn, and I'm as cool as I'm ever going to be in my entire life. MGMT are suddenly huge along with all these other Brooklyn bands, TV On The Radio, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. If you brought it out a little bit like Grizzly Bear, like Animal Collective, these are the cool new rock bands. Arcade Fire, of course.

This is the vanguard now as far as guitar rock and beyond. It seemed very cool. I was too large a human to shop in American Apparel, but I was aware of the fact that everyone around me was. I was going to free pool parties at McCarren Pool in Brooklyn. I was just trying to fit in and probably not doing a very good job but there was this sense that this was the cool stuff.

MGMT and that song maybe particularly Kids, is another one like Mr. Brightside that has endured. I feel that keeps picking up a new generations of listeners and now stands as if you're picking the 3 to 5, broadly speaking, rock songs, pop songs, indie rock songs of that era. You got to have MGMT in there. I wouldn't have guessed that at the time, but they've really really held up.

Alison Stewart: This text says Green Day, American Idiot.

Rob Harvilla: [laughs] Absolutely. I think a lot about the bands that were popular in the '90s, Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Nine Inch Nails, et cetera, and how few of them maintained that popularity into the 2000s. Sometimes there are very good reasons for that, personal reasons. Green Day is one of the few who I'd say made an album emblematic of the '90s Dookie, of course, but then American Idiot was absolutely huge. It's probably the highest profile if you want to say political, anti-war statements made by a major rock band.

It's not that nobody did it, but there wasn't a huge wave of protest music necessarily like people thought or hoped, coming out of 9/11 and the Iraq war, et cetera. American Idiot stands out as a huge exception. For young people now, I think American Idiot is every bit as emblematic of Green Day as Dookie, as what came before. It's really impressive the way that you can have a second act like that. It's pretty rare.

Alison Stewart: This one says, "How are you going to not mention Back to Black?" Like I said, we're on it. Let's listen.

[MUSIC - Amy Winehouse: Back to Black]

Alison Stewart: Rob, as you look back on the decade, how do you think about Amy Winehouse's impact and what her story tells us about the musical impulses of the early 2000s?

Rob Harvilla: Amy Winehouse was my second episode after Mr. Brightside. I had to do her immediately, but I really worried about it because I didn't want her to be merely a tragic story. It's one of the biggest musical tragedies of the decade, and partly, you got to lay that at the feet of the tabloid culture of the time. Just how horribly she was written about. This cycle we go through with Britney Spears where we make a bunch of documentaries apologizing to her for her treatment back then.

It's a similar thing but Amy Winehouse had one of the most distinctive, most vivid, most majestic voices of the early 2000s. What I really tried to do with my episode on Back to Black is not just make it about how it ended, and what she went through, and just the tragic hero. 27 Club of it all. I really wanted to celebrate what made her so unique, where she came from. The jazz phrasing that she was able to update, to mix with hip hop, but not in a way that seemed cloying or unnatural. Just she was her own person and you could tell where she came from and you could tell the artists that she loved.

She belonged in that pantheon with those artists, the Tony Bennett's, the Ella Fitzgeralds. For just two albums, it's just such an incredible body of work. What I'm always trying to do with the show, when I have to talk about somebody who died tragically, I don't want it to be a very special episode of the podcast. I want to keep the tone not light, but just I want it to be celebratory. I want to celebrate the music that she made more than I want to wallow in how her story ended.

Alison Stewart: Let's get this really quick. Natalie in California, go for it.

Natalie: Hi, Alison. I just wanted to mention I grew up in the MySpace era, graduated to Tumblr era. For me, it was really a funny mix. In middle school, we would be dancing to Lean Wit It, Rock Wit It by DEM Franchize Boyz, and then all of a sudden we'd be singing Oxford Comma by Vampire Weekend. Shout out to them. Just saw them last year on their tour and it was amazing. Got to to relive some old memories from the 2000s.

Alison Stewart: Love hearing that. Thank you so much and thank you to Rob Harvilla. The podcast is 60 songs that explain the '90s: the 2000s. Thanks for joining us, Rob.

Rob Harvilla: Thanks for having me.

Alison Stewart: Let's go out on The Middle by Jimmy Eat World.

[MUSIC - Jimmy Eat World: The Middle]

Alison Stewart: That is All Of It for today. I appreciate you listening. I appreciate you. I'm Alison Stewart. I'll meet you back here next time.

[MUSIC - Jimmy Eat World: The Middle]