1)Usher feat. Lil Jon & Ludacris, “Yeah!”
SONG: I guess I don’t really hate this, at least the main riff was memorable for something made up of only four notes. I’d rather listen to it than “Believe.” No idea what Usher is up to today, I remember how huge he was towards the end of my college years.
VIDEO: Club. Lasers. Blue filter over everything. Partially ruined by Usher repeatedly seemingly making stink-face all the time. The bit with the violin near the end was funny at least.

2)Usher, “Burn”
SONG: His other huge hit that year is a generic R&B ballad. Figures. I wouldn’t say he was a bad singer, but the line “Man I don’t what I’m gonna do without my boooo” gets a laugh in 2026.
VIDEO: Usher’s girlfriend in a bikini jumps into a pool, which catches very fake CGI fire when she hits water. Whoa bro. The CGI fire pops up a few other times in the video, couldn’t he have afforded better? Dude had the TWO BIGGEST SONGS OF THE YEAR and then some.

3)Alicia Keys, “If I Ain’t Got You”
SONG: Not as obnoxious as her other ones because it’s just a piano ballad with a soft 70s feel. The horns are kind of nice.
VIDEO: Lots of predictable shots of her hands at the piano and even more predictable shots of her doing over the top “longing” facial expressions whenever the camera focuses on her face. Not as obnoxious as in her earlier songs, at least. On the basis of the “scenes” where she’s arguing with her boyfriend, I think we’re figuring out why she didn’t move on to an acting career.

4)Maroon 5, “This Love”
SONG: Well, here’s a “rock band” song, and…yeah, I have heard this one a lot over the years without even knowing who it was. Not something I’d go out of my way to listen to but I can’t really say I hate it. It doesn’t wear out its welcome at least. Geez, do I know any of their other songs?
VIDEO: Adam Levine rolling around in bed with his scantily clad model girlfriend. Oooo steamy. Three band members have Thurston Moore’s bangs and all look like the same guy.

5)OutKast feat. Sleepy Brown, “The Way You Move”
SONG: This was actually a bigger hit than “Hey Ya,” but I don’t remember it to save my life, let alone hearing it as much or more than “Hey Ya.” It’s Latin flavored and very repetitive. Someone here said that Speakerboxxx/The Love Below was a once-huge album that has since fell out of the conversation a la The Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill but I cannot remember who it was here who said that.
VIDEO: Set in an auto-repair place with Big Boi wearing a dumb 70s leisure suit, this shifts to bad CGI graphics, with loads of bikini clad girls wandering around an African savannah and a dojo with bad lightsaber fights and a dance hall. Wasted opportunity. I know that Outkast was split between Andre Benjamin and Big Boi but I don’t think I even saw Andre in this video at all.

6)Hoobastank, “The Reason”
SONG: Same as the Maroon 5 song, I’ve heard this mediocre power ballad a zillion times without knowing the name of the band doing it. Except that the name of the band was laughed off the face of the Earth for being such a stupid band name even back then. As for the song all I can say is that it’s not as awful as Nickelback or Creed or Train. It’s still symptomatic of mainstream rock being completely out of ideas by this time.
VIDEO: The lead singer, who looks like Zack Morris if he were a sleepy half-Asian guy, hits a chick with his car. Then a bunch of other stuff happens involving someone cutting wires and getting a ruby out of a safety deposit box and the girl lives.

7)Mario Winans, “I Don’t Wanna Know”
SONG: Dull repetitive R&B ballad with an annoying extra-thumpy bass-drum “thunkthunkthunkthunk” beat. Don’t remember the song or him.
VIDEO: “Co-starring DIDDY” - Well, that gets a laugh nowadays, doesn’t it? Dude on his bed looking at old photographs. ZZZZ. Then Diddy shows up and makes the song all about Diddy. You know how it goes.

8)OutKast, “Hey Ya”
SONG: I liked this well enough back in the day. Hadn’t heard it in awhile (again, I’ve been told the album “fell out of the conversation.”)” I’m guessing the far-more-famous Mr. Benjamin was the more talented of the duo? Easily the song I liked the best out of this particular Top 10.
VIDEO: Good for a laugh with Andre Benjamin grinning through his silly green costumes and playing all the band members. Didn’t realize that was Ryan Phillippe doing a bad British accent as the guy who introduces him (them).

9)Ciara feat. Petey Pablo, “Goodies”
SONG: Completely generic hip hop/R&B hit of the period. I don’t remember it. It’s based around a dumbed-down Moog-synth “whistle” hook that places it about 10 years behind the times…right? I don’t know enough about this kind of music to make that claim but isn’t that just Snoop Dogg’s “Gin & Juice” with the artistic interest removed?
VIDEO: Completely generic hip hop/R&B video of the period. She had a nice body, I guess.

10)Terror Squad feat. Fat Joe & Remy Ma, “Lean Back”
SONG: The string-section sample that forms about half of this song’s backing music is barely audible. Big loud beats and vocals at the forefront. To me that’s a lack of creativity, but again, this isn’t my genre. Big Pun foreva, Joe Montana foreva huh!!! Uhn! Yeah! Uhhh! Remember when they did a scientific study of modern music that concluded that it was all gradually getting dumber and Michael Danehy commented that pretty soon music would just be Lil Wayne grunting? This song made me think of that.
VIDEO: Typical hip hop stuff again, with Lil Jon showing up halfway through to do his usual schtick (he’s in about three other videos on this list, too.) When did the crunk genre die off? I know it was around four or five years before this at least, when I started college in 2001 my roommate blasted “Bia Bia” nonstop. I actually like that song!

OTHER SONGS IN THE TOP 100 THAT I’M GLAD TO NOT HAVE TO LISTEN TO BECAUSE THEY’RE NOT IN THE TOP 10:

No Doubt - “It’s My Life” - Love Talk Talk, don’t love No Doubt, never liked this cover, though it’s sort of cool if it got anyone to go back and look at Talk Talk, which in turn means people listening to post-rock.
Kelis - “Milkshake” - Barf.
Ashlee Simpson - “Pieces Of Me” - Was this the song she was singing when she had her infamous SNL disaster? Or not singing?
Jet - “Are You Gonna Be My Girl” - Terrible band that inspired one funny comment from A Smith about these guys stealing old ladies’ medicine and selling it to people because they were just that stupid, or something. It’s in the quotebook, if anyone wants to go look it up. This song sucked.
Toby Keith - “American Solider” - Gag.
Gretchen Wilson - “Redneck Woman” - Die, die.
Nelly & Tim McGraw - “Over And Over” - More country, this time with hip hop mixed in. Still die. I can think of about five country songs I like and about ten hip hop songs I like but NO crossover between the two was ever anything but godawful.

COMMENTS: Pretty weak year as usual. I don’t remember the rest of it, especially not any of the “rock” songs. And it’s not that I wasn’t paying attention - in my dorm cafeteria they had that crummy “College Television Network”/”MTV U” channel playing all the time. Britney Spears’ “Toxic” is in there, which is the only song she ever did that I feel even remotely positive about, and thus one of about four songs in the entire top 100 that I find bearable let alone good.