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Welcome to the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, I’m your host, Christopher Verdesi. Every week on Chartcrush, we do a deep dive into a year in Pop music and culture, and count down the top 10 songs according to our exclusive recap of the weekly Pop charts published at the time in Billboard, the music industry’s leading trade mag.

This week on Chartcrush, we’re turning the clock back to 2001, technically the first year of the 21st century, since there was no year zero, which actually seems more fitting given events, especially 9/11/2001 when Al Qaeda terrorists hijacked four domestic flights and flew them into the North and South towers of the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon in DC, and a fourth crashed in rural Pennsylvania after passengers thwarted the hijackers.

The consensus is that 9/11 marked the end of the “cultural ’90s” and the start of the ’00s, but boundaries between cultural decades are never black and white, and many of the ’00s defining features were already in play. The Battle of the Boy Bands heating up in ’98; then Britney Spears at the end of that year. Total Request Live on MTV. And HBO’s Sex in the City premiering that Summer. One blogger pinpoints that as “the precise moment the ’90s were summarily impaled on a fur-covered Manolo Blahnik stiletto.”

Extreme political partisanship, another feature of the ’00s coming out of the impeachment of Bill Clinton, also in ’98, and heading in to ’01, the aftermath of the 2000 election when the Supreme Court had to stop recount officials with magnifying glasses in Democrat counties looking for enough dimpled or hanging or pregnant punch card chads to swing razor-thin Florida and the election from George W. Bush to Al Gore.

’01, also the year a court pulled the plug on Napster, the original filesharing app, and its 60 million users downloading mp3 songs ripped by other users from their CDs and shared on the platform. At one school, students in dorms were using 61% of the university’s internet bandwidth downloading free music on their 56K dialup modems, as much the hard drives on their Dell and Gateway Power PCs could hold. And all of that, completely under Billboard‘s radar.

In his Year in Charts feature at the end of the year, Billboard‘s resident chart guru at the time, Fred Bronson noticed that what was being played on Pop and R&B radio and in Dance Clubs had never been more out of sync with the singles people were buying. Airplay and Club Play Top tens, many of them, barely registering on Sales charts if at all.

At the end of ’98 that same issue had forced Billboard to dump its 41-year-old Hot100 rule that disqualified Airplay-only hits not out as singles. But in ’01 single sales were down 40% in just one year, and less than a quarter what they were in 1997. And labels were releasing fewer and fewer of them to get fans to spring for full albums, but that only made legally-dubious filesharing more attractive to fans.

The industry’s Secure Digital Music Initiative went down in flames in May of ’01 after a team of hackers cracked their proposed watermark in a high-profile tech challenge. But it was already pretty clear that labels were never gonna be able to compensate gadget-makers and internet providers enough for what they stood to lose hitting the brakes on the free music gravy train. Napster’s demise, it turned out, just a bump in the road, as other peer-to-peer sharing platforms kept cropping up like whack-a-moles throughout the ’00s.

In October of ’01, Apple debuted the iPod. Tagline: “1,000 songs in your pocket.” All free, of course; the iTunes Store with its 99 cent legal mp3 downloads didn’t debut ’til 2003, and didn’t impact the charts ’til 2005. Apple sold 125,000 first gen iPods during the ’01 holiday season, MSRP $399.

Now, again, since downloads didn’t register on Billboard’s charts, we’ll never know how the ten songs in our Countdown line up with what was on music fans’ Winamp playlists and Diamond Rio mp3 players. Airplay, by far the biggest factor on the Hot100 in ’01. But with that caveat, let’s dive in.

#10 Joe feat. Mystikal – Stutter

At #10 we have the R&B Singer who scored the #7 song of 2000 with his slow-burning “I Wanna Know” from the coming-of-age flick The Wood. He brought in New Jack Swing producer Teddy Riley to produce the standout slow-burner on his third album, but it was this remix of that song, also for a movie (the buddy action flick Double Take) that became his first #1, for four weeks in late Winter. Featuring growly New Orleans Rapper Mystikal, it’s Joe with “Stutter.”

Joe featuring Mystikal, the remix version of “Stutter,” #10 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of 2001’s biggest hits. Billboard ranked it #14 on the year, possibly because the weeks it was #1 in February and March were below average for sales and/or radio listenership. Just a guess; we don’t have access to the underlying data, so we can only go by chart positions.

Anyway, Joe cooled off on the Hot100 after ’01, his only top20 entry after “Stutter,” his feature singing the hook on G-Unit’s #15 hit in ’03, “Wanna Get to Know You.” Mystikal returned to the top ten in ’02 though, Rapping on Ludacris’ #15 hit “Move,” but in ’03 he pled guilty to sexually assaulting and extorting his hairstylist and got six years. That’s interesting because Mystikal was bald!

#9 matchbox twenty – If You’re Gone

At #9 is another repeat top 10 entry from the Rock band that scored 2000’s #9 hit, “Bent,” the lead single from their Y2K album Mad Season. But their biggest coup in 2000 was Frontman Rob Thomas singing the year’s #1 hit as the featured Singer on Rock god Santana’s “Smooth,” one of the biggest chart hits of all time, #1 for 12 straight weeks, which catapulted the band to the top of the Post-Grunge heap heading into the ’00s. At #9, the second straight hit off Mad Season, it’s matchbox twenty with “If You’re Gone.”

Unlike “Bent,” matchbox twenty’s “If You’re Gone” never got to #1; it topped out at #5 in late January. But again, chart longevity, often the factor that gets songs ranking high on yearly rankings, and “If You’re Gone” was on the chart 42 weeks.

There were a lot of those in ’01: five of the songs in our Chartcrush 2001 countdown never hit #1. The next two singles from matchbox twenty’s quadruple Platinum Mad Season album failed to crack the top40, and the lead from their next set, More Than You Think You Are only got to #29. Uh oh. But the second, “Unwell” got them back into the top 10 in the Summer of ’03.

#8 Eve feat. Gwen Stefani – Let Me Blow Ya Mind

Next at #8, a Philly MC who was Dr. Dre’s top prospect on his Aftermath label until he decided to focus his attention on Eminem instead. She landed on her feet though as the sole Female in original growly Rapper DMX’s Hip-Hop collective The Ruff Ryders. In ’99 she became only the third Female Rapper to score a #1 album, after Lauryn Hill and Foxy Brown, and then this was her Hot100 breakthrough in ’01, produced by Dr. Dre. No hard feelings there!

She had to fight her fellow Ruff Ryders for it, but she got her way inviting No Doubt Frontwoman Gwen Stefani in to sing the chorus: only her second chart appearance as a solo act. And the record peaked at #2 the week Alicia Keys’ “Fallin'” hit #1. It’s Eve with Gwen Stefani, “Let Me Blow Ya Mind.”

Eve’s “Let Me Blow Ya Mind” at #8 on our 2001 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. In ’02 she brought in the Singer who’d kept that song from getting to #1, Alicia Keys, for the advance lead single from her next album, Eve-Olution, and that one, “Gangsta Lovin’,” also got to #2, kept from #1 by Nelly and Kelly Rowland’s “Dilemma.”

Well, she returned Gwen Stefani’s favor in ’04 with the Rap verse on “Rich Girl,” and then, wouldn’t ya know it, she shows up on Kelly Rowland’s #7 R&B hit “Like This” in ’07: Eve’s final top10 on any chart. But she was already ubiquitous on screens: the Barbershop movie, reality show guest spots, hosting documentaries, recurring roles on scripted shows, you name it. And starting in the mid-’10s, daytime talk: The Real on Fox, and then The Talk on CBS.

#7 StainD – It’s Been Awhile

Now there were a lot of Rock bands scoring big Hot100 hits from ’99 to ’01: Creed, Limp Bizkit, Foo Fighters, Rage Against the Machine, Kid Rock, 3 Doors Down, Nine Days, Papa Roach, Crazy Town, Linkin Park, Incubus. And those are just the ones from the Heavier side of things.

And then these guys at #7 out of Springfield, Massachusetts whose Frontman made the Hot100 as a solo act before his band did. Just a couple months before, but still. Aaron Lewis and Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst’s “Outside” made the chart in January ’01; then Lewis’s “Country Boy” with Country legends George Jones & Charlie Daniels hit in March, and then this song by the band. They’re the only act in the countdown whose album was also among Billboard‘s top 10 albums of the year, Break the Cycle. At #7, StainD, “It’s Been Awhile.”

Aaron Lewis and StainD connected with an audience craving a new level of vulnerability and emotional transparency in Pop lyrics, and with “It’s Been a While” it’s easy to see why. But in the Summer of ’02, that got its own genre as Jimmy Eat World and Avril Lavigne scored their first hits, Weezer ditched their Grungy sound on their ’01 Green Album, and the confessional Pop-Punk called Emo outlasted Lewis and StainD’s Post-Grunge by several years.

Now “It’s Been a While” only notches in at #14 on Billboard‘s year-end Hot100 for ’01. That’s because their cutoff date for the ’01 chart year to give themselves time make their press deadline for the year-end issue was the last week in November, and “It’s Been a While” stayed on the chart 14 weeks after that. But adding those weeks back in and counting its full chart run as we do for every song on Chartcrush, it comes out #7.

#6 Janet – All for You

At #6, a chart veteran: her 23rd top ten hit since 1986, and her tenth #1. Critics in the ’90s had been comparing her singing unfavorably to the likes of Whitney, Mariah, Celine and others who’d raised the bar for Pop vocal chops, even though that’d never really been her thing. But since her previous album in ’97, soaring Pop Power Ballads had been sidelined by Teen Pop, Celine Dion on hiatus, and Whitney and Mariah taking things down a notch and chasing Hip-Hop street cred with a more urban sound.

So now in her mid-30s with the Pop ecosystem looking better for her than it had in years, she was poised to surge again, and surge she did, with the longest-running #1 of the year: seven weeks in the Spring. At #6 it’s Janet Jackson (officially going just by “Janet” since ’97), “All for You.”

Janet, “All for You,” #6 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 2001. Miss Jackson was newly single and ready to mingle in ’01. The split from hubby, Mexican Dancer, Songwriter and Video Director Rene Elizondo, Jr. after nine years of marriage had come as quite a shock to fans; but not because they were breaking up, but because no one had known they were even married until he filed for divorce in 2000; it was a secret! But ’01 was party time, and it comes across on “All for You.”

If you heard Chic’s “Good Times” listening to that, good ear, and reviewers at the time heard it too. But not quite! The sample courtesy of Janet’s longtime Producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis is from a Dance hit from 1980 that rips off Chic’s “Good Times:” “Glow of Love” by anonymous Italian Disco producers Change. Janet had never heard of it, but Jam and Lewis had the right idea.

Janet followed up with the “Ventura Highway“-sampling “Someone to Call My Lover,” which got to #3 in late Summer. And never made the top10 again! Just before her next album Damita Jo dropped in ’04, her Superbowl halftime “Nipplegate” wardrobe fiasco with Justin Timberlake, and CBS Chairman Les Moonves banned her from Viacom-owned MTV, VH1, a ton of radio stations and even the Grammy Awards which were on CBS a week later. That oddly obsessive vendetta continued until Moonves himself was ousted from CBS, peak #metoo, in 2018.

#5 Train – Drops of Jupiter

Now I mentioned at the top of the show Billboard‘s Fred Bronson noticing at the end of ’01 how the Airplay and Sales charts were diverging. Well another thing he noticed: the opposite was happening with the Mainstream and Modern Rock charts: more and more artists and songs in common between the two.

Translation? Alternative now was Mainstream. Our #5 song had almost identical placements on those two year-end charts, but it had its best showing on the Hot100 which also factored Pop radio and Sales. It took its sweet time climbing to its peak at #5 for two weeks at the end of June, but once there it stayed in the top 10 for 14 weeks, and came up just one week shy of having the longest chart run of the year. Their top 20 chart debut “Meet Virginia” in ’98 had gotten their name out there, but this made them superstars; it’s Bay Area Rockers Train with “Drops of Jupiter.”

Train’s big breakthrough hit “Drops of Jupiter,” #5 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 2001, mistaken by some at the time for a long-lost Elton John song, and that was no accident! Elton’s Arranger since his first hits in 1970, Paul Buckmaster, did the strings. And how about that piano!

Train Frontman Tom Monahan wrote the song about his mom’s long losing battle with lung cancer, and it won Best Rock Song at the Grammys. Train mostly retreated to the Adult Pop Airplay charts through the rest of the ’00s, but surprised everyone in 2010, peak Electro-Dance, when their rootsy ukulele jam “Hey, Soul Sister” got all the way to #3.

#4 Jennifer Lopez feat. Ja Rule – I’m Real

At #4 we have the first of two back-to-back #1s by the same artist that got Billboard to change its rules about what qualifies as a “remix” on the Hot100. As head of Def Jam Records in the ’90s Sean “Puffy” Combs (later P. Diddy) had pioneered the strategy of releasing Hip-Hop remixes of R&B songs. With both versions out there, a song could get played on Mainstream Pop and R&B radio and edgier stations in urban markets, but Billboard would treat it as the same song, so the airplay for all the versions combined into a single entry on the Hot100.

OK, that makes sense. But what if you released two completely different songs with the same title and just called one of them a “remix?” Would Billboard still combine them on the Hot100? Well as it turns out, yes. And as it also turns out, the same artist, label and remix collaborators can get away with that twice, and both times score #1 hits, before Billboard finally says (as their reviewer did say, in print, about the second of those back-to-back #1s): “you gotta be kidding me,”

At #4, ’01’s “it” New York rapper Ja Rule with his “Murder remix” (in fact a completely different song from the Dance Pop number on the album) of Jennifer Lopez’s “I’m Real.”

Not too many pop culture personalities in ’01 bigger than Jennifer Lopez. In ’97 she’d scored as an Actress starring in the biopic Selena, and then rode the 1999 Latin Invasion wave to Pop stardom with her debut album and its #1 hit “If You Had My Love.” Her green Versace dress at the 2000 Grammys was Google’s top search and the reason they created Google Images.

Then at the beginning of ’01 she became the first woman to have both the #1 movie and the #1 album at the same time when The Wedding Planner co-starring Matt McConaughey hit theaters the same week her second album dropped.

The album debuted at #1 but reviews were mixed, its lead single failed to hit #1, the second barely cracked the top 20, and the album was dropping like a rock. What to do? Hip-hop remix! So they brought in New York’s hottest new Rapper. But instead of remixing anything, Ja Rule and his label, Irv and Chris Gotti’s Murder, Inc. Records, wrote and produced two completely new tracks, with J. Lo contributing vocals.

But check it out: then J. Lo’s label, Sony/Epic, released them, one after the other, with the same titles as two of the songs on the album, just tacking on “Murder Remix.” “I’m Real,” which we just heard at #4, was first; then “Ain’t It Funny,” which was the #9 song of 2002. After that Billboard changed its rule to only allow remixes with the same melody to combine for chart positions.

By the way the “I’m Real” Murder Remix was the #1 song the week of 9/11, and when they reissued J. Lo’s album with the Murder remixes included, it shot back into the top ten after bottoming out at #107. Crazy!

#3 Alicia Keys – Fallin’

Now as I said talking about Janet Jackson, Pop and R&B Divas like Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey were incorporating more of Hip-Hop’s attitude and sound into their work in the late ’90s. But labels also wanted new blank slates who could embody that hot new hybrid, and the one at #3 was a perfect candidate: experienced Writer/Producer, classically-trained Pianist, great voice, sexy look, and a born-and-raised New Yorker, so she’d lived and breathed Hip-Hop since she her toddler years.

Of course Clive Davis snapped her up, the A&R legend who discovered Whitney in the ’80s. And since she wasn’t yet a star, Clive was able to sneak her out the door with him after his longtime company Arista Records threw him overboard in 2000 to bring in L.A. Reid as CEO. That despite Davis spending a bunch of Arista’s cash in ’98 to buy her out of her previous contract with Columbia, including all the songs she was working on there.

This was one of them, and in his new start-up label, J, Davis uncharacteristically gave her full freedom to develop her songs and make her records as she saw fit, unlike Columbia, who wanted her doing Teen Dance Pop. At #3 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 2001, Alicia Keys’ debut, “Fallin’.”

Not only was Alicia Keys’ debut single “Fallin'” #1 on the Hot100 for six weeks; it won the Record and Song of the Year Grammys, and Alicia was Best New Artist. Her follow-up single “A Woman’s Worth” got to #7, then her feature I mentioned earlier on Eve’s “Gangsta Lovin’,” a #2 later in 2002. But her sophomore album released in late ’03, Diary of Alicia Keys, made her one of the ’00s top stars with its three top ten hits in ’03 and ’04, and also in ’04, her #1 duet with Usher on his Confessions album, “My Boo.”

#2 Lifehouse – Hanging by a Moment

Now recall that Train’s “Drops of Jupiter” only got to #5, but it still makes our Top Ten Countdown thanks to its 53 weeks on the chart. Well our #2 song didn’t get to #1 either, but it had 54 weeks and peaked at #2, kept out of the top spot for three weeks by Christina Aguilera, Lil’ Kim, Mýa, and P!nk’s update of “Lady Marmalade” for the Baz Luhrmann big screen Jukebox Musical phenomenon Moulin Rouge, that starred Nicole Kidman and Ewen McGregor.

That 54 week chart run made it Billboard‘s #1 song of ’01, but one song beats it on our Chartcrush ranking, and I’ll explain in a minute, but first, at #2 it’s Lifehouse’s “Hanging by a Moment.”

Lifehouse from L.A., their Hot100 debut “Hanging by a Moment,” the #2 song here on our 2001 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. That melodic Post-Grunge sound, certainly not limited to Lifehouse and StainD, whose “It’s Been a While” we heard at #7. It was ubiquitous on Rock radio in the early ’00s and it drew a lot of fire from fans and critics alike for its sameiness across artists and songs.

Lifehouse opened for red hot matchbox twenty on a 14-date tour in March, and by the end of that, “Hanging by a Moment” was in the top 20. Their follow-up singles went nowhere but in the Fall the WB network used Lifehouse’s song “Everything” in the pilot of their new Teen-targeted Superman prequel series Smallville, which went on to be a huge hit on TV, and by the fourth season after repeated uses, Lifehouse appeared as themselves playing their song “You and Me” in a poignant prom night scene, which helped keep it on the charts even longer than “Hanging by a Moment” and make it the #8 song of 2005.

#1 Mary J. Blige – Family Affair

And that gets us down to our #1 song on our Chartcrush ranking for 2001. Again, Billboard had “Hanging by a Moment” atop its year-end Hot100, but as happens way more often than you’d think, huge hits get buried in their rankings, and only because of when during the year they were hits.

Our #1 song debuted at the end of July, hit #1 in November and was still #1 on November 24, which was the last week Billboard counted in its 2001 ranking. And it stayed #1 for two more weeks in December and on the chart ’til May of ’02. All that, factored into Billboard‘s 2002 chart year, so they have the song at #31 for ’01 and #17 for ’02.

At Chartcrush though, again, with the luxury of hindsight, not having to get a magazine issue printed and mailed before New Years, we count every song’s full chart run, and rank it in whichever of the calendar years it had the majority of its chart action, and doing that reveals this to have been the biggest hit of 2001. At #1, Mary J. Blige’s “Family Affair.”

“Family Affair,” Mary J. Blige’s first #1 and first top ten since “Not Gon’ Cry” in early ’96, produced by Dr. Dre, his first #1 as a Producer after getting so close just months earlier with Eve and Gwen Stefani’s “Let Me Blow Ya Mind,” which we heard back at #8.

Mary was coming off two more mainstream-targeted albums in the late ’90s as the Pop Diva tide was yielding to more Hip-Hop influenced R&B sounds. They sold well, those albums, but didn’t produce any big hits, and like Janet Jackson, Blige in 2001 was newly single, having just ended her abusive six year relationship with Jodeci’s K-Ci Hailey. The title of her ’01 album said it all: No More Drama, and “Family Affair” was its lead single, a brighter, more upbeat sound than the tortured confessionals that’d made her famous in the early ’90s.

Bonus

Well there you have ’em: our Chartcrush top ten songs of 2001 factoring every song’s full run. But the year-straddling hits “Family Affair” and StainD’s “It’s Been a While” coming in to our top ten along with Joe and Mystikal’s “Stutter” displaces three songs from Billboard‘s year-end top ten. Of those, Destiny’s Child’s “Independent Women, Part 1,” their #10 song, was a 2000 to ’01 year-straddler that comes out 2000’s #2 song doing things the Chartcrush way, so it’s in our 2000 episode. But the other two were legit 2001 hits bumped from our top ten, so to be thorough, let’s run through those.

#12 Lenny Kravitz – Again

Billboard‘s #9 song comes out #12 on our ranking: yet another Rocker that didn’t get to #1. It peaked at #4, for six straight weeks. But it hung out in the top 10 for 14 weeks. Lenny Kravitz’s “Again.”

Lenny Kravitz’s first top 10 on the Hot100 since “It Ain’t Over til It’s Over” in ’91, but he scored four on the Mainstream Rock chart in that time, and his Greatest Hits set released in 2000 sold boatloads. “Again” was the new song on that.

#14 Dido – Thank You

So after the Chumbawamba and Spice Girls in ’97, Brits got pretty scarce on the U.S. charts: only eight top tens by British acts between then and when James Blunt’s “You’re Beautiful” hit #1 and broke the logjam in ’06. But Billboard‘s #8 song of 2001 was an exception thanks to Eminem sampling its first verse in his critically acclaimed late 2000 hit “Stan.” We have the song at #14 on the year, Dido’s “Thank You.”

Dido, one of the bestselling artists of all time in her native U.K., and one of the few British acts to impact the Hot100 in the early ’00. “Thank You” peaked at #3 for three weeks in the Spring while Janet’s “All for You” was #1. It did top the Adult Contemporary chart though, for four weeks, and she was back in ’04 with another top 20 hit, “White Flag.”

Well that’s a wrap for our 2001 edition of the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show. I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi. Thanks for listening and hey, if you like what you heard, you’re gonna want to check out our website, chartcrush.com, for a written transcript and link to the podcast version of the show, plus our full Top 100 chart, interactive chart run line graph and other kickin’ extras. We do that for every year we count down, ’40s up to now, and it’s all on the website, again, chartcrush.com. It’s a different year every week, so be sure and tune in again next week, same station, same time, for another edition of Chartcrush.

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