Planet Pop 2000 was the soundtrack of my life from November 1999 until probably January or February 2001. I was in middle school at the time and the CD came out probably in the summer of 1999 because the reverse side of the liner notes booklet is a calendar for the 1999/2000 school year, which started in September 1999 for me. I got the CD in November 1999. From 1999 until 2003, my grandmother used to take me out shopping for my birthday and for Christmas so that I could pick out what I wanted rather than provide her with a list and her trying to figure out exactly what it was that I wanted. Usually it was books. Specifically Star Trek or Star Wars books. Back then Chapters, a chain of bookstores, also sold CDs, audio cassette tapes, and VHS tapes in their stores (this stopped in the mid-2000's), and I happened to see this CD on a shelf as we were heading towards the cash to pay for the books I had picked out. I only picked out two books that day. One was the novelization of the pilot episode of Star Trek: Voyager, "Caretaker", and the other was the Voyager novel, Seven of Nine.
The songs on this CD are very 1998/1999/2000 in the way they sound. You couldn't get these songs at any other time in the '90s or the 2000s. That's how much they are of those three years. And they're all popular artists of the time too. You have Britney Spears, the Backstreet Boys, Lyte Funkie Ones (LFO), Brandy, Sky, as well as many others. Most of them you don't hear from anymore. There is one artist on this album who is now more famous for the other thing that she did only six years after this album came out. Track 16 of Planet Pop 2000 is a song called "Girlfriend" and the artist is Billie Piper, who is well known for playing Rose, the Companion to the Ninth Doctor and the Tenth Doctor on Doctor Who. She is just listed as Billie on the track listing on the back cover of the CD as well as inside the booklet, but she was a pop singer in the U.K. before she was cast on Doctor Who. Billie Piper probably wasn't well known outside of the U.K. though as I don't remember hearing "Girlfriend" on the radio, or any of her other songs. Though I'm sure this CD made Canadian kids aware of her because of "Girlfriend".
Like I said, Planet Pop 2000 was the soundtrack to my life for about a year or year and a half after I got the CD. I listened to it with my younger brother and sister all the time and I also listened to it by myself as well. It was also popular with my classmates at school too. I was in grade seven at the time I got the album and this was the music that my classmates were listening to, even though some of them were starting to listen to the more hardcore rap that was becoming popular at the time. I remember there was this one day at school where there was a special event going on. I think it was the last day of school before the Christmas holidays. One of my classmates had brought the CD to school with her and our teacher let her pop it into the CD player and play it while we did whatever it is we were doing. Thinking back on it, it had to have been the last day before the Christmas holidays because I remember we had a classroom Christmas party in the afternoon and that was the only time we got to listen to music outside of music class, unless it was an indoor recess or something like that.
My favourite song on the CD is "Summer Girls" by LFO with "Girlfriend" by Billie Piper being my second favourite. I listened to "Summer Girls" so many times. I think I also taped it onto an audio cassette along with my favourite songs from other CDs we had in the house. Just because I could.
To this day I'll still pop the CD into the player and listen to it all the way through every once in a while or listen to the album on my iPod. Every time I do I think about the turn of the century when this CD was the soundtrack to my life and some of the people I went to school with at the time. And I always smile because these songs made me feel good, even if some of my classmates went out of their way to make my life hell at school, there were still a few that I was glad to see at school five days a week for eight months. Plus as a kid of the '90s and a teenager of the 2000s, these songs are the best musical representation of that period of 1999-2004 when these bands and musicians were at the height of popularity.
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