Curated playlist
2000s fads and trends
- Mobile phoneOn April 3, 1973, Martin Cooper made the first handheld cell phone call from a New York street.
- Nu metalThree nu metal albums came out on August 18, 1998. Billboard later called it the "Biggest Day in Nu-Metal History".
- Rock BandHarmonix reportedly sold for just $50 after Rock Band's market collapsed.
- Gangsta rapGangsta rap first went by a different name: reality rap. Schoolly D and Ice-T said they described a world they knew.
- EmoAt Rites of Spring shows in the mid-1980s, audience members sometimes wept.
- PokémonPokémon Red and Green came in two versions so players would trade. Each version held Pokémon that the other did not.
- Indie rockIndie rock began as a bookkeeping label, not a sound. A Billboard writer coined the phrase in January 1983.
- Tea Party movementWithin roughly ten hours of a trading-floor rant, a Tea Party protest website existed. It was called reTeaParty.com.
- World of WarcraftVice summed up World of Warcraft in 2019 with a single sentence. "Most people," it wrote, "know someone who's said they were 'addicted' to World of Warcraft." The game came from Blizzard Entertainment, which released it for Windows and…
- CrunkCrunk, a hip hop style, began in Memphis strip clubs. It later put songs at the top of the Billboard Hot 100.
- Haruhi SuzumiyaHaruhi Suzumiya is a Japanese light novel series by Nagaru Tanigawa, illustrated by Noizi Ito, and it helped solve a math problem that had stayed open since 1993. In 2011, a crowd on 4chan set out to answer a puzzle inspired by the anime's…
- Guitar HeroGuitar Hero is a series of rhythm games that handed players a plastic, guitar-shaped controller and challenged them to play along with rock songs. The first game appeared in 2005. Over its lifetime the series sold more than 25 million…
- Scene (subculture)Scene fashion's signature haircut reportedly began with a poster of the band Orgy.