2002 - in general - was not a good year for chart music, but some positives can be drawn.
The esteemable Nickelback topped the yearly billboard 100 singles and albums. There are a million rap/nelly/usher/ collabs that, whilst I genuinely don't remember them, are surely worth tracking down. And the poetry of artist/release naming reached new heights all round, thanks to the evocative 'Puddle Of Mudd', 'P Diddy', and 'Chocolate Starfish And The Hotdog Flavoured Water'.
Meanwhile, a robot called Avril Lavigne charmingly told us to, like, stop thinking so hard about shit, and stuff, cos, life's like this, and if anyone knows what life's like, it's a emotionally vacant 18 year old ROBOT PUPPET CARVED OUT OF LAB-GROWN FLESH (or, if you are more generous, a tragic FLESH ROBOT victim of the music biz), meticulously crafted in the image of the immortal catchphrase 'WAT----EVARRR!!!!1111oneone'.
I liked Girlfriend the best. It really captured the zeitgest.
"Hey!!(hey!) You!!(you!) I can be my girlfriend! Hey!!(hey!) You!!(you!) I think you need WOT--EVARR!!!1oneone"
Ahh, it's all coming back now....I remember a very touching and totally relatable song about scooter riding boizzz who get dumped by female FLESH ROBOT popstars only to go on and become even bigga MEgAsTarZz.
This is the first recorded instance of a song written entirely in txtspk, k. This unceasing commitment to musical innovation, which runs through all of Avril's FLESH ROBOT SONIC MIMICRY can be traced back to a LIZARDMAN happy to scuttle about in the shadows silently pulling Avril's CONTROL WIRES. Fondly remembered by his test subjects as a creepy, old-but-slim-and-painfully-on-trend-but-ew-wrinkly puppet producer / A&R* rep / LIZARD BODYSNATCHER, to this day we don't know his/it's name, species - or even what the letters A&R really stand for. Asininity and Redonkule-ousness? Archaos and "Refreshments?" Airships and Rigging? Advances and Rudeness?
Whatever the truth, this SKELETAL LIZARD BODYSNATCHER not only captured the zeitgeist, he took it back to his own dimension - but not without sucking the vigors from as many soft, innocently pale necks as anyone in the musak biz: past, present or NON-LINEAR PANDIMENSIONAL LIZARD UNIVERSE TIME CONSTANT / (x, y) => (z, root[-1]) >/= 0.
Yeah fuck I'm manic again.