Pop Culture

Best Pop Culture Moments From 2000, 20 Years Later

When I hear certain songs from the year 2000, I am right back in my pre-teen bedroom lying on the floor looking up at my sky-blue walls (12-year-old me did not know this, but cerulean blue was the Pantone colour of the year in 2000, so your girl was on trend). I’d roll over only to press skip on my CD player to get to Aaliyah’s “Try Again” on the Romeo Must Die soundtrack.
That was the most 2000 sentence, ever.
As soon as Timbaland’s soothing voice kicks in with, “without a dope beat to step to, step to, step to,” I am 12 again, singing along while flipping through the pages of my soon-to-be favourite book (Zadie Smith’s White Teeth) and wearing my knockoff Juicy Couture velour tracksuit (from Stitches, of course). OK, that was the most 2000 sentence ever.
The year 2000 wasn’t just instrumental in skyrocketing my boy-band obsession, strengthening my affinity for celebrity gossip through the pages of CosmoGirl (or Seventeen, or Bop, or Teen People, RIP teen mags of my youth), and defining my future music tastes. It was a transformative year in entertainment — we got the first illegal music streaming service in Napster, the origin story of Netflix and Google Images. The year 2000 shifted us into a digital future all those ’80s movies predicted — minus the flying cars. The computers around the world didn’t crash as the clock struck midnight on December 31, 1999, but change did come.