Songs My Family Downloaded On Napster Between 2000–2001, Ranked

I remember the first time I bought a CD — two together, actually: Barenaked Ladies’ Stunt and Will Smith’s Big Willie Style. I was seven years old and paid for them with my birthday/allowance money. I also remember the first time I downloaded a song, though I don’t know which song it was. It’s easy to recall these memories back to back because they happened only two years apart. As such, CDs and MP3s are eternally linked in my mind as equal access points for music. Try though I might, I can’t shake the feeling that music doesn’t necessarily need to be physical to be loved endlessly. I have records, yeah, and as recently as a few years ago when I had a car, I was still buying CDs and even cassettes. But I use Spotify every single day. I amassed most of the songs that populated my first iPod via LimeWire. Music streams. I listen.

Napster and the entire idea of instantaneous access to music rewired my brain at an early age, and now it doesn’t particularly matter to me how I receive music, whether it’s via a physical, tangible format or whether it leaks out of my laptop speakers like a runny faucet. Thanks to Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker for that, I guess, and thanks to Daniel Ek for keeping it that way.

Below, I’ve taken all the songs I can remember that were downloaded onto our household desktop computer from Napster by me, my older brother, my father, and my mother between 2000 and 2001 — before the legal risks of Napster’s capacity as a P2P file-sharing network made it verboten in my house — and ranked them. If you don’t agree with a certain song’s position in the list, please feel free to tweet at me and call me a dweeb or whatever. That’s what the internet is for. Well, that and streaming music.

25. 40 Below Summer: “Falling Down”
This song is terrible, but my brother downloaded it because his friend alleged his cousin was in the band. He was not.

24. Dave Matthews Band: “I Did It”
Unequivocally the worst DMB single and likely their worst song altogether.

23. Aerosmith: “Jaded”
Not a great song by not a great band. But 10-year-old me liked it enough to download it on our slow-ass cable modem.

22. Godsmack: “Awake”
There are not many good Godsmack songs. This perennial Navy-commercial soundtrack is not one of them. “Voodoo,” however, kinda is. Shame we didn’t have that one.

21. Fuel: “Hemorrhage (In My Hands)”
The melody is here, though it suffers from those faux-Eddie Vedder vocals that sustained a whole subgenre of bad grunge leftovers for far too long. Fuel has some bangers, though.

20. Disturbed: “Stupify”
“The song is about a relationship Disturbed’s vocalist David Draiman was in with a Latina girl,” Wikipedia says. “He said her family didn’t approve of him because of his different ethnicity.” Fascinating, but why the misspelling of the word “stupefy”? (Also, even the best WAHs in this song pale in comparison to this.)

19. Run-DMC: “The Kings”
An early-millennium WWF tie-in, this “King of Rock” re-appropriation is better than “Rollin’” but can’t hold a candle to, say, “Walk This Way” (the only Aerosmith I will tolerate).

18. Sevendust: “Waffle”
Here’s where my personal biases come in: I fucking loved Sevendust. And the affection began right here, when my brother downloaded this head-crunching ode to self-doubt.

17. Limp Bizkit: “Rollin’ (Air Raid Vehicle)”
This song is not “good,” but it’s totally singular. An undeniable groove and Fred Durst’s ridiculous bars make it still endearing for an entire generation of post-post-Nirvana kids. Remember when it was The Undertaker’s entrance music?

16. Aaron Lewis ft. Fred Durst: “Outside” (live from Family Values Tour)
The point at which Staind realized rewriting Alice In Chains’ Jar Of Flies to diminishing returns was way more profitable than being boring sludge-metal wannabes, “Outside” is the reason why Aaron Lewis is a millionaire.“Biloxi! This is the real motherfuckin’ deal, y’all!”

15. Lifehouse: “Hanging By a Moment”
Say, do you think these guys have ever heard “All Apologies” before? Anyway, not a terrible song. It’s almost as good as Matchbox Twenty. Almost!

14. Lenny Kravitz: “Again”
Lenny’s nude for a quick second in the music video for this — talk about foreshadowing. The dude can write a catchy song, too.

13. Bon Jovi: “It’s My Life”
Is this song better than Limp Bizkit’s “Rollin’”? Depends on who you ask, but Max Martin co-wrote it, so yes of course it’s better, even if it’s perhaps even more cringe-worthy, if that’s possible.

12. SR-71: “Right Now” (listed as “Kick Me When I’m High”)
A pop-punk oasis in a desert of annoyingly one-note nü-metal.

11. The Cult: “She Sells Sanctuary”
My dad downloaded this one and I ended up loving it so much, I got into The Cure when I reached the appropriate age to do so. Thanks, Dad.

10. Green Day: “Minority”
I liked this one because Billie Joe says “fuck” in it. Twice! Also, good song.

09. Green Day: “Warning”
They got shit for cribbing from The Kinks, but I’ll be damned if that’s gonna stop me from celebrating the Green Day dead zone between “Good Riddance” and American Idiot. It’s full of treasures!

08. Incubus: “Drive” (listed as “Whatever Tomorrow Brings”)
One of the most inescapable songs of the era, “Drive” is still a stone-cold classic, though I always got kinda bummed when I heard it at their shows instead of, say, “Summer Romance.” Except that time they played the cool re-imagining in 2004 that sounded, once again, like The Cure.

07. Linkin Park: “One Step Closer”
Not the quintessential LP song, but close. The first one I ever heard. The one that started it all, for me anyway.

06. Bob Dylan: “Hurricane”
A political song that gets some details wrong, “Hurricane” is an Important one, yes. But it makes this high spot because of how the jukebox at the best bar in the world, the Hickey Tavern, played it almost constantly.

05. Incubus: “Stellar”
Quite possibly the best Incubus song ever recorded and one that just gets the fizzy, incomparable high of being love absolutely correct.

04. U2: “Beautiful Day”
If you hate U2, and there’s a good chance you do, you probably hate this song. But if you realize (correctly) that they’re the only band on the planet that can do what this song does, then it’s like church. Don’t let it get away.

03. OutKast: “Ms. Jackson”
There was a lot of rap-rock on our Napster. But of the little actual hip-hop we had, I’m now glad it was something from Stankonia.

02. Deftones: “Change (In the House of Flies)”
It doesn’t get much darker than this. I loved the darkness, even then. And now, it’s perhaps even darker. But when you’re craving that vicious sting, absolutely nothing else will do.

01. Rod Stewart: “Every Picture Tells A Story”
I bet you weren’t expecting this shit! My dad downloaded this romantic travelogue and though I hardly ever listened to it then, I came to love its ambling groove and Beat-channeling diaristic entries when I got a little older. I love this song the same way I love Before Sunrise, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, playing guitar at summer dusk, and riding on Amtrak — if it feels transformative, it’s for me. Narratively, musically, emotionally, “Every Picture Tells A Story” sounds just perfect, don’t it?