Quick note: monthly rankings are based on weekly positions on the Billboard charts collected and scored. Rankings are in [brackets] and will correspond to the position on the playlist provided above. Some months not all songs are available to stream and cannot be made available for a playlist, so sometimes we pretend they didn’t exist, sorry.
Topping the charts for March is a song that grew on me over the months since I’ve begun this project. I don’t think I remember listening to “Stutter”[1] when it came out. I was familiar with some other tracks by Joe and they really didn’t do much for me, so when I kept seeing “Stutter” make a climb to the top I tried to give myself the time to understand the popularity. But, my dear my dear my dear, I really took a liking to it.
Perhaps it’s the sample of the instrumental and vocal stylings of The Pharcyde’s “Passin’ Me By” that warmed me to the song(which in fact sampled Quincy Jones’ “Summer In The City” which was itself a cover of the song from the Lovin’ Spoonful, holy rabbit hole!) . Maybe it was Mystical in his prime delivering a verse that sealed the deal for me, but it works. One of the perks of this retrospective project is to discover some great gems and “Stutter” will be hard to forget from this point on.
While “Stutter” climbed to the top of the mountain briefly, we’re beginning to see songs collect at the top and stay there for months to come. Shaggy’s two monster hits “It Wasn’t Me”[7] and “Angel”[2] will still hover near the top half of the charts for many posts to come. Same goes with Lenny Kravitz’s “Again”[4]. While never topping the charts for the month, the song was a mainstay for the first half of 2001.
It’s easy to forget, or maybe perhaps it’s that we want to forget, the grip Crazy Town’s “Butterfly”[3] had on radio and MTV during this time. It even topped the charts for one week. I admit, I loved this band and song at the time. It could have been it was because I met the band after they opened for the Insane Clown Posse and P.O.D. and thought they were the coolest, but it could have also been that I was barely eighteen and was bathing in AXE body spray and blue tinted hair gel and didn’t know better. Anyways, “Butterfly” was a sneaky pop tune that wormed its way into your head and its glossy music video was equal parts sexy and glistening. We glistened a lot in 2001. Perhaps a bit too much in hindsight.
Two songs made their debuts in the top 50 and they were two tracks that helped define the year. Nelly’s “Ride Wit Me”[33] was an undeniable hit for the St. Louis rapper and by this point Nelly was establishing himself as a big time player not only in the hip hop genre, but popular music as a whole. “Ride Wit Me” brings upon itself a vibe that felt summery and timeless and is still a wonderful tune to come back to all these years later.
The other song that was everywhere that spring of 2001 and was “Hanging On By A Moment”[29] by Lifehouse. Combing all the elements of contemporary adult rock radio with a twinge of post grunginess gave this song a moment that commanded a lot of airplay throughout the year. Lifehouse never really soared to the heights that seemed promising after the release of “Hanging On By A Moment”, but the band found success with singles “You and Me” and “Whatever It Takes”
A few albums were released this month that grabbed my attention in many different ways.
Musician Jim Johnston released the latest batch of theme songs for WWE (fka WWF): The Music Volume 5. This collection did indeed include some well known entrance themes such as Kurt Angle’s. You know the one, it’s the one where musically it encourages the fans in attendance to chant “You Suck!’ at the Olympian turned Pro Wrestler. Such disrespect for a man who won a gold medal with a broken freakin’ neck. Motorhead’s Lemmy lent his voice for Triple H’s signature theme and became a mainstay for the rest of the wrestler’s career. The physical album features Chris Benoit’s theme and did not make it onto the later digital releases FOR OBVIOUS REASONS. However, this was a fairly disappointing release at the time as WWF Volume 4 flew too close to the sun by including the memorable and meme-able song “Assman”, the theme associated with Billy Gunn. Volume 5 tried and used Gunn’s newest theme under his new and lame “The One” gimmick which failed to win the crowd over and was downright shameful. Love live “Assman”!
I was starting to go the shows at this time, and it feels like I’m a old man yelling at the clouds but there would be people handing out all sorts of stuff as the crowd was let out and it was great. Stickers, flyers for upcoming shows or albums coming out, even CD singles. One such single was for a band called Skrape and it has haunted me to this day. On this month 25 years ago, the nu-metal band would release their album New Killer America and would feature the same artwork that adorned that same CD single months prior. The image is of an infected fingernail and is unsettling to say the least. Inside the album contained other gory images. The art director for this album, Tracy Boychuk, also worked on the art direction for The Strokes’ Is This It?, which is far less scary to look at (and listen to). Album art aside, New Killer America was a fairly good album in the genre and did not nearly get the attention it should have received.
Lastly, Katy Hudson released her self-titled debut album this month. The Christian pop record incorporated elements of alternative pop to little fanfare and lukewarm reviews. Later on in the decade, Hudson would later rebrand as Katy Perry and would release “I Kissed A Girl” in 2008 which somehow led to headlining the Super Bowl Halftime Show with dancing sharks, fly in space as a part of Jeff Bezos’ vanity project, and later date the former Prime Minister of Canada. Some hell of a domino effect for Ms. Perry, but at what cost to us, dear listener?
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