The most intense year of my life was 2002. The experience of my out-of-body-experience-ish crush on Megan Irvin (sp??; can't seem to find her Facebook profile or anything else to prove she actually exist(ed)...), being the next great screenwriter of the world, and having a liberatingly loose school schedule was enough to make it highly memorable to say the least.
That summer I got cable TV, and had access to MTV2 before the difference between it and MTV became much like the difference between the different HBO channels. MTV2 was basically conceived to keep people who were heartbroken over the fact that MTV no longer played music videos 24/7 from going into the Viacom headquarters with a machine gun and taking hostages. But over the years, it became clear to the Big Guyz that the concept of 24/7 music videos just didn't appeal to all that many people. So, if it exists still, it's for little to no reason. Idk, maybe it's gone back to its original glory, but as of early 2003, the shift was already apparent.
But anyway...
2002 was a great time for dark romantics like me to have access to MTV2; music of all types - R&B/hip-hop, teen-beats, and of course rock, were all brimming/oozing with strong emotions, i.e.: melancholly. It was most notably the era of emo rock as MTV saw it (emo had actually been around for over a decade by the time Taking Back Sunday dropped their landmark debut, but nobody knew that...). The albums that spawned the various songs of my sr. high school year were varying degrees of disappointment, for the most part. Craig David's "Walking Away" was a great melo-drama song, but the sample clips on the 'net of the other songs on the album didn't impress me. Pink's "Just Like A Pill" and "Don't Let Me Get Me" were greats of the day, but "Get The Party Started" was possibly the most annoying song of 2001/2002. Staind's breakout album BREAK THE CYCLE was OK, I wasn't as into the nu-metal sound as most people were. Thursday had some great classics, but most of their music was just too noisy and chaotic to offer any noticeable insights unless I were to ignore the musical element and try to decipher the lyrics and their meaning. The sample clips of The Strokes' IS THIS IT were also unimpressive, so I figured "Hard To Explain" and "Someday" were the only songs there to hear and I thus never bought the album.
I did thoroughly enjoy Avril Lavign's LET GO and although it took some getting used to, I did enjoy Taking Back Sunday's TELL ALL YOUR FRIENDS and Dashboard Confessional's THE PLACES YOU HAVE COME TO FEAR THE MOST. Saves The Day's STAY WHAT YOU ARE was also thoroughly enjoyed by me. For some reason I didn't buy The Starting Line's SAY IT LIKE YOU MEAN IT until a few years later, but I did listen to it at Hot Topic, so I knew it was worth buying. To this day, I still haven't bought Hoobastank's self titled CD, not sure why. I LOVE the music video for "Running Away", almost bought the CD single so I could have it, but it's only playable on computer, which i have, but just barely (video playback through disc is very choppy). I heard Pete Yorn's "Undercover" at my local entertainment superstore (Hastings), and was thus compelled to buy the SPIDER-MAN soundtrack, and thus was looking forward to the movie, even though most of the soundtrack was junk, but nontheless, I was sorely disappointed in the movie. The villan and his backstory were not satisfactorily explained and the feelings that Spidy felt for Mary Jane were not explored well either. You just get these little hints that Mr. Parker has a crush on her, and then you see him get the girl (almost), but there's no skill used in any of the crew's resources - camera angling, editing, music, etc.++++ - to let the viewer feel what Parker feels, except the assumption that the audience will imagine that feeling on its' own based on the "duh" factor. And the action sequences were pedestrian. I guess the film was trying to appeal to too many people by not getting too heavy into any particular aspect of the film. On that front, it wildly succeeded, much like TITANIC did in 1997/1998. As for being anyone's favorite movie, much like TITANIC, SPIDER-MAN failed; they're good movies to bring your friends along to or to see with your significant other, because most folks will stave off boredom via those films, but for anyone in said group to seriously be moved to any memorable extent by either film requires your cinematic taste buds to be non-existent. That's why TITANIC grossed almost a billion USD in 1998, and Gregg Araki's nowhere (1997) didn't gross much more than a million USD in its day.
Anyway...emo pretty much became a 4letter word by 2005, and by then pop-punk morphed into something almost unrecognizable called Fall Out Boy/Panic At The Disco, while bands like Cute Is What We Aim For and Paramore succeeded at social acceptance. Then synth-pop made a comeback around 2008, and now the boybands & their solo projects are Back!(!!!!!!-insertAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH-!!!!!!). Backstreet Boys aren't cool anymore though b/c their reaching middle age. And who wants to listen to their parents' music anyway?
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