top 50 "lost" US hits of the early '00s

while compiling this list i was surprised to find that any westlife song had charted in america at all. i didn't recognize the title and figured it must have been some kind of sales-driven hit, but upon listening to it i do recall hearing radio play it sometimes. indeed a forgettable song!

I am down with “down 4 u”

yeah hah I had to double check the poll title when I saw the Westlife option

Second time this week I've voted for Madonna - Don't Tell Me in a poll

"Sorry 2004" seems tailor-made for this.

"Then The Morning Comes" has become a CVS Jam.

Both these janet songs are sublime

The only songs I know from these are Janet and Madonna and I doubt anything else in here is as good as those.

Is “don’t tell me” a lost US hit though? It seems to me like a song most people from my generation remember.

Fuck voted by mistake for dont tell me… ignore one vote for that and give a write in vote for”someone to call my lover”

probably just the case that they got bumped out of rotation by their more classic songs once they werent New

Btw ages ago I was at a party and the dj played the Giraffage remix of that song and everyone vibed hard to it. It was already late so I was a tad tipsy and having too much fun so maybe it was just me because I love that song and didn’t expect it.

Anyhow highly recommended:

https://soundcloud.com/giraffage/janet-jackson-someone-to-call

Jennifer Lopez ft. Nas - I'm Gonna Be Alright

I liked J-Lo, love Nas still, but HATE hate hate hate this fucking song.

Willa Ford - I Wanna Be Bad

lmao I always liked this . she is more of an actress now

Eamon - F**k It (I Don't Want You Back)

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAA

this was such a transitional period

Dream - "He Loves U Not" is a bop. nice sugary pop

i always dug Craig David's "Fill me In" but I suspect I was the only one in multiple countries

with apologies to Toya, voted "Someone To Call My Lover"

Debating between "Someone to Call My Lover," "With You," and "One Call Away"

on first glance I have to say I don't know what a single one of these songs sounds like. I'm sure I've heard a lot of them.

"someone to call my lover" is one of janet's best

"Down 4 U" may be the only track on this list that isn't completely wretched

XPS The Smash Mouth one basically a downcast rewrite of "Walking On The Sun".

...if that helps.

Smash Mouth never helps

lol I can't forget this "Someone to Call My Lover" thread
Janet Jackson and the Sea and Cake: The Connection?

this was such a transitional period

My favorite pop eras are all transitional.

Idk The stuff I recognize doesn't feel lost to me, special thanks to a subset of millennials who refuse to pump the brakes on glorifying all pop culture between '99-'02. There are probably memes dedicated to at least half of these songs.

XPS The Smash Mouth one basically a downcast rewrite of "Walking On The Sun".

I always thought it sounded like "if Odelay sucked."

Like I can imagine Beck singing "When the Morning Comes" pretty easily.

O-Town song was ubiquitous on pop radio here cos they're from here, just like almost every other boy band.

I didn't dislike it, but it wasn't up to the level of material of their peers. But decent second tier

Someone To Call My Lover

I always thought it sounded like "if Odelay sucked."

Probably why "Walking..." became so successful in the first place was that it was 'Odelay As Bubblegum'.

Which gives me an idea...

'if Odelay sucked...' How Alt-Rock Dealt With Beck In The '90s

the best ones are the ones with r. kelly sadly (which includes ginuwine's "fiesta" and its superior kelly-featuring remix), but i guess those aren't necessarily "forgotten" and more a situation where the radio has rightfully stopped playing r. kelly songs

*sorry, not "fiesta" but "hell yeah," always got those two mixed up

Of ALL the S Club 7 songs to crossover to the US... :(

(It's like how Five's only US hit was When the Lights Go Out but worse).

Fuck It is bad enough but Eamon is the worst singer who has ever breathed. Hideous voice.

Ignition (orig) is lost?

R. Kelly isn't played on many Black stations these days.

I voted 98 Degrees because I remember dancing to that song in clubs.

The R. Kelly songs on this list should all have asterisks because their lack of current radio airplay has a more definitive explanation.

I love that Chingy song.

yea it feels weird to have Ignition on this list

O*Town's "All or Nothing" probably my favorite of these just for the memories, back in my underage drinking days my friends and I would just blast this out at the top of our lungs. also I have a soft spot for imitation boy bands that would take great care to get all the haircuts right and then just fish something out of Max Martin's garbage can.

I like the 98 Degrees song too. god it's so funny all these hitmaking factories were looking at Ricky and Enrique getting famous plus stuff like Mambo No. 5 and just going "hey guys you uh gotta put some Spanish in it". I wish I could show that music video to the folks who built them pyramids

yeah that o*town song is tempting me as well. i prob haven't listened to the actual song in decades but i do have fond memories of belting that big dumb chorus

i have a false memory of "all or nothing" being one of those pop ballads that they'd also give to john michael montgomery to record a country version

Dream’s “He Loves U Not” is stunning. I genuinely love the production on it

it is true that "Doesn't Really Matter" has totally vanished

tempted to vote for "fuck it," but i just want to make sure that everyone remembers the much much worse answer song!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1K0pUSSFUo

Fuck what I did
Was your fault somehow

"Never Had A Dream Come True" tries hard to match the Spice Girls' balladry.

It makes me want to poll Children in Need singles.

There are some good ones. Maybe. At a stretch. Possibly.

I voted Don't Tell Me because it is actually my favourite but I wouldn't have minded showing love for If You're Not the One. Weird and nervy stuff.

it is true that "Doesn't Really Matter" has totally vanished

its legacy is probably muted due it being the Nutty Professor II song

"Never Had A Dream Come True" tries hard to match the Spice Girls' balladry.

― Malevolent Arugula (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, January 19, 2023 11:36 AM bookmarkflaglink

one of the hostesses at the restaurant I worked at actually heard this on the Muzak at work and said "this is Spice Girls, I love their new direction".

nevermind the twang on the singer

i wouldn't say "don't tell me" (the madonna one -- genuinely don't recall the avril one at all) or "someone to call my lover" are forgotten. most of the songs on here aren't -- i've talked abt them with friends in recent years and it's not like they needed a reminder of what "he loves u not" was when i sang it at karaoke. i am slightly offended to see some of these songs on here, but it is true that american terrestrial radio does not play these songs. by and large most radio formats playing older music have not fully moved into the millennial era of music yet, and if they do i guess some of these songs could come back, but for now most of what gets played from this era consists of the very biggest hits. consequently many artists get reduced to their biggest hit: i've heard "all for you" on the radio plenty in recent years, but never "doesn't really matter" or "someone to call my lover," tho i'd love to hear the latter in particular more

r. kelly is pretty much ignored by all american stations now. i have noticed they will still play songs that he wrote or produced for other artists ("fortunate", "you are not alone", "back & forth" etc.) but generally don't want to directly remind listeners of him with his own voice

Dream’s “He Loves U Not” is stunning. I genuinely love the production on it

agreed, per a deep dive I have learned among other things that this was co-written/produced by David Frank, responsible for all kinds of things, from The System (You are in my System, Don't Disturb this Groove!!!) to synth/sequencer on Chaka Khan's I Feel for You, the world needs more David Frank

otm

I've never heard "He Loves U Not"!

Most of these I don’t miss. But the results of the Janet poll dispute that her two listed here are lost

I had no cd player until like, 2003, and my commute to college was 45 mins each way, so early 00s pop/hip hop radio was all I listened to in the car.

I heard "Butterfly" by Crazy Town the other day and let out a big "hah!" cos I'd hear that one five times a day.

ugh cassidy's "hotel" is absolutely the best thing here. must...not...vote for r kelly

I Wanna Be Bad is the only thing I immediately recognize from the radio those days. Is there a playlist of this somewhere?

1 Someone To Call My Lover
2 Doesn't Really Matter
3 Don't Tell Me
4 He Loves You Not

gotta vote for Eamon since it was the subject of the worst karaoke performance I've ever seen.

by Eamon?

lol i could see him doing this at karaoke nights now and getting told he was only 'aight'

lol, I anticipated this response and respect how quickly it came into being.

lot of love out there for don't tell me; i used it as outro music in a prod of romeo & juliet and the audience was def familiar

it was a choice made early in production and both of my closest friends/collaborators were so clear they found it cringe and bathetic and tonally inappropriate that i kept saying ok ok i'll replace it with something

then one day i was sitting in a hallway waiting for someone to unlock a door and a couple of my dancers were there (the dancers wore beaked plague-doctor masks and tech blacks and invisibly shadowed+manipulated the actors like furies or passions, except when they would break into choreography to yeah yeah yeahs songs) and one of them said hey have you settled on a song for bows yet, and i said it was going to be don't tell me by madonna but it's gonna be something else i just haven't figured it out yet sorry, and she said wait that's perfect why is it going to be something else, and i said "i dunno i've been convinced it's not sad enough" and the other dancer said "who the fuck convinced you of that?"

a beautiful song

oh that's "don't tell me:!

“Then the Morning Comes” is not “lost” at all, wtf.

I haven’t heard “Crash and Burn” in like twenty years, but just scrolling through this list and now I’ve got that annoying goddamn chorus in my head. What a piece of shit song.

OMG I totally forgot There You’ll Be” the fucking Pearl Harbor song. “In my dreams I’ll always see you soar above the sky”. Was this the worst era for pop music ever?

They still made videos like this, eh

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cB9JJIoAdYM

xp

Yes.

Nah I don't think so. Shit pop music was about equally abundant from the late 70s to around this point. Late 2000s was the worst.

I couldn't remember which JJ song "Someone to Call My Lover" was and it's the one I loved the most back in my no-cd player all pop listening days.

such a great use of sample of America's "Ventura Highway".

I was all about the All for You singles.

oh and "Doesn't Really Matter" has an amazing chorus.

"I Turn to You" was kind of the waning hour of Christina's squeaky clean era, eh?

lol I just youtubed the Angie Martinez song. god, I hated a lot of the pop rap in the early 2000s, same BPMs, same cornball concepts. this one isn't as bad as Fat Joe's "What's Luv" but it's fairly annoying.

not on the list but anybody remember this one

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFUmz39p-uY

2002-2004 were amazing years for hip-hop pop crossover

it's kinda funny how much more melismatic and Mariah Carey-esque Jessica Simpson was when she first came out. I mean she didn't have quite THAT capability, but it seemed like what her and her label were going for.

Second time this week I've voted for Madonna - Don't Tell Me in a poll

― enochroot, Wednesday, January 18, 2023 6:48 PM (three days ago) bookmarkflaglink

what video is that, Neanderthal? it doesn’t show

Samantha Mumba - "Baby Come on Over"

ah okay - only know “Gotta Tell You”, which I liked

i remember "baby come on over" playing on the radio briefly, i didn't rly like it but it sounds pretty good now

it's kinda funny how much more melismatic and Mariah Carey-esque Jessica Simpson was when she first came out. I mean she didn't have quite THAT capability, but it seemed like what her and her label were going for.

her live/promo performances of that song on tv sounded pretty rough and it's rather surprising she didn't wreck her voice permanently singing like that. but honestly on the recording she sounds glorious. i found the song pointless and boring at first (esp the title line, like girl you don't need anyone's permission to love someone for any length of time) but i came to love it. it actually struggled a bit to get airplay and its chart performance was mostly powered by its platinum sales. aiming to split the difference between teen pop and adult contemporary was pretty normal through the late 90s but by the turn of the millennium this tactic rarely worked at radio anymore except for the boybands, and even they couldn't rely on that. her next single, the duet with nick lachey, tried the same style again but fared much worse, and then with "i think i'm in love with you" she finally settled into a more center-lane style.

based on what i have heard about how christina aguilera felt that "genie in a bottle" did not sufficiently show off her voice, i suspect she would have preferred leading off with a song similar to "i wanna love you forever" but honestly it's probably a good thing that it didn't work out that way. it would be many more years before the mainstream turned up its collective nose at this style of melismatic belting, but i guess around now were the first signs that it may have been on its way out. i suspect american idol killed it off for good, not only for demonstrating several of its absolute worst examples but also b/c the judges would fairly regularly dole out the 'over-singing' criticism, sometimes (imo) for contestants who didn't rly deserve it

2. Ricky Martin & Christina Aguilera - Nobody Wants To Be Lonely

this may have been my first napster download? lol. it's okay

5. S Club 7 - Never Had A Dream Come True

i liked this actually. their show would air on one of the channels here and i found it and them bizarre. it does make sense that this fairly bland ballad that could have been sung by anyone was their only record to make it in america, otherwise it'd be like wondering why steps never had any hits over here

6. Faith Hill - There You'll Be

i was aware of this song but luckily it was easy to avoid if you didn't listen to adult contemporary stations, where it was #1 for months. the pearl harbor movie seemed like heinous dogshit even then and i remember distinctly hoping that faith hill would NOT have her "i heart will go on" moment with this. dj speedo feat. angelica >>>

7. Britney Spears - From The Bottom Of My Broken Heart

spears's first single to bomb at radio, unsurprisingly a ballad. it charted decently regardless because, unlike her previous two singles, it was released to retail and accordingly scanned platinum. anyway i didn't mind it then but in retrospect it's obviously shit

23. Evan And Jaron - Crazy For This Girl

it is 100% unsurprising that this was a dawson's creek song but it is actually rly good anyway. the dramatic, echoing bridge! the instrumental break leading back into the last chorus! so cute and wholesome. despite this song being a hit, the album underperformed and they got dropped, and in 2009 jaron came back with one (1) hit country single before being expelled from the major label system once again

25. Mariah Carey ft. Joe & 98 Degrees - Thank God I Found You

forgotten, fake #1 hit that ascended to that position largely because huge quantities of the single were being given as 'free goods' to retailers who'd then be compelled to sell through the glut of stock as quickly as possible by any means necessary. same story as "loverboy" basically, except that one failed to go #1. years later mariah still tries to spin "loverboy" as a success because it sold more copies than any other american single the year it came out (i.e. when the retail singles market in america was in its death throes) even tho it only sold half of what they were hoping to (what got shipped) and they were all sold at rock-bottom/loss-leader prices

28. Toya - I Do!!

the production on this one is really great, and the song's pretty good too. djs on the station i listened to would often talk over its long intro, which i decided i loved before i even realized it was an actual song -- at first i assumed it was just some random instrumental they were using for station promos/announcements. the song took a long time to break because it got pushed to r&b radio and bet first, but they didn't bite. so it just steadily sold as one of the few strong singles at retail for months and months before top 40 stations finally found that it would work well for them and they picked it up instead. nonetheless, like evan and jaron her album didn't take off and she was quickly dropped. the industry is brutal!

35. Daniel Bedingfield - If You're Not The One

i remember one evening this came on during a commercial break on some teen-oriented channel i was watching by myself one night. it might have been during a degrassi marathon on 'the n' or something. a good friend and i -- one who would normally be watching degrassi marathons with me -- had recently grown apart, in part because she was facing pressure to stop hanging out mostly with guys, and she had recently told me in no uncertain terms that the increased distance was intentional on her part. i didn't have a crush on her -- i turned out to be gay and she actually turned out to be a lesbian -- but it hurt. anyway, this song played, i had no idea who it was and didn't know if i even liked it, but the lyrics about struggling to come to grips with the fact that a relationship simply won't go the way you envision it hit me like a ton of bricks and i CRIED on the floor. i came back to it years later and now love it

36. Savage Garden - Crash And Burn

i love this song actually. i feel like half the songs i liked during this era were sappy or earnest/corny + aimed at the middle-aged

38. Smash Mouth - Then The Morning Comes

i have to bet that the reason this isn't played anymore is b/c "walking on the sun" exists. in fact when this song came out you would still sometimes hear "walking on the sun" in recurrent rotation so i actually didn't realize they were distinct songs at first

41. Craig David - Fill Me In

this is my vote. i liked it then, but not as much as i would come to years later

42. P!nk - There You Go

i have to wonder if "most girls" is faring any better -- i would guess not by much. by and large radio doesn't seem to want to remind listeners that she initially broke through by cosplaying as biracial. tbh i prefer "most girls" to basically anything she's released since but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

46. O-Town - All Or Nothing

yes i liked this one too. it makes sense that it was written by westlife songwriters. their first single, the shameless/bad "liquid dreams" charted well but mostly on sales, and it seemed to be an mtv-only phenom as radio largely shunned it. so i remember being surprised when this song actually went all the way as far as mainstream success goes. of course that wasn't going to last because they were a pretty bad group, but oh well, it was all right while it lasted

Only vaguely remember 'I Do!!` but it's sounding surprisingly fresh to me

2002-2004 were amazing years for hip-hop pop crossover

I always wished this one would've been a bigger hit:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYWNlrGzh20

"There You Go" even though I don't remember anything except the title line and a flying motorcycle in the video.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

"There You Go" just over "Hell Yeah."

I didn't like "There You Go" when it was new but on listening to it in another thread recently, it's a fuckin' jam.

really wish we'd gotten more of this era of Pink, not that there was anything wrong with the direction she eventually went.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

LOL, very appropriate three-way tie

Fuck voted by mistake for dont tell me… ignore one vote for that and give a write in vote for”someone to call my lover”

― ✖✖✖ (Moka), Wednesday, January 18, 2023 6:27 PM (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

so i guess "someone to call my lover" wins with "doesn't really matter" runner-up :D

Here's another: Nivea's "Don't Mess With My Man"

I grew to get really sick of that Asher Roth song but it still brings back some good memories. We'd always change the lyrics to make them way more G-rated...I love studyin'...and I love passin'.... A plus! A plus! A plus!

I really hate the Eamon single but the Frankee song is a thing of beauty. It captures all the petty, bitter, nonsensical rage of wounded pride after a break-up, and "I had to do your friend" as a lyric will never not make me laugh.

"He Loves U Not" is an incredible song, the sound of teenagers fighting in a daytime soap opera, laser-focussed performance and that incredible kick-drum pattern.

so glad to see that one getting love itt.

I missed He Loves U Not somehow. What a bizarre but brilliant sound. Genie in a Bottle-inspired?

in the sense that its writers and producers were the same as "genie's"

well there we are