Another hit-making machine to start her pop era off the heel of the Mickey Mouse Club (holla at Brit-Brit and JT!), Christina Aguilera is the next PYT to takeover MTV and excite teen hormones in 1999. She had already gained some attention with her song “Reflection,” featured in Disney’s Mulan, which highlighted her vocal talents that makes her stand out from the rest pop wannabes.

With her second single, “Genie in a Bottle,” our songbird plays it safe for mainstream audiences and instead showcases a whole lot of stomach and choreographed dance routines in this summertime hit. Though the music video is nothing exciting—her tassled outfits and baggy orange pants are the beginnings of Aguilera’s many fashion faus pas—the song is playing off the same appeal as Britney Spears’ “…Baby One More Time” by being suggestive without seeming overtly sexual. Lyrics such as “I’m a genie in a bottle/You gotta rub me the right way” creates an effective double entendre that teases listeners and leaves the rest to the imagination.

In a time when sport fans celebrated the U.S. women’s soccer team win of the FIFA Women’s World Cup and book nerds rejoiced over the second installation of the Harry Potter series, perhaps Aguilera worked some of her magic as a genie (and someone had indeed rubbed her the right way).

“Wild Wild West” is the fourth installment of what might be the most commercially successful run of five singles any one artist has ever released. In a little under two years, The Fresh Prince gave us the following gems:

1) “Gettin Jiggy Wit It” (January 1998)
2) “Just The Two Of Us” (July 1998)
3) “Miami” (November 1998)
4) “Wild Wild West” (May 1999)
5) “Will 2k” (November 1999)

Okay, so we might be missing Agent J’s anthem. But still, wow! Love him or hate him, there is definitely one thing we can say about Captain Steven Hiller: He made the lives of middle school dance DJ’s really damn easy. Detective Mike Lowrey was a hit machine. We’ll be highlighting a lot of different artists over this series, and all of them (well, maybe not Eminem) were trying to supplant Bagger Vance as pop music’s most reliable artist.

When compared to most of Hancock’s catalogue, “Wild Wild West” is actually a pretty quotidian effort from Dr. Robert Neville. It doesn’t have the cultural impact of “Getting’ Jiggy With It” or “Parents Just Don’t Understand.” Yet it’s not a total trainwreck like “Switch” or a lesson in narcissism like “Freakin’ It.” For a lesser artist, “Wild Wild West” is truly memorable. For Alex Hitchens, it’s just another big, fat, hulking paycheck.

“Wild Wild West” holds out surprisingly well, in that “I’m not ashamed to like it because everyone liked it” kind of way. Admit it, if all I told you was, “You don’t want to see my hand where my hip be at,” you would know precisely what I was talking about. And Sisqo sings the chorus, which was pretty cool at the time.

As for the actual movie Wild Wild West? That does not hold up so well. The thing is unwatchable. Fortunately, moviegoers eager to see some hilariously ridiculous robotic villains are in luck. Transformers II (and all its Michael Bayhem) comes out in two days!

Below are the three steps on how to be in a boy band:

1) After signing with a very suspicious middle-aged man, release two or three albums that simply own the charts, captivating the minds of young audiences, while weathering the vitriol of people who claim to really know music. Tour the world with well-choreographed, high-priced, over-the-top-shows that sell out stadiums.
2) Break up, citing “creative differences.” Launch a briefly successful solo career in an attempt to cash in on fan loyalty.
3) Reunite with your former bandmates for one last world tour, knowing full well that people will pay top dollars for the right to say they went to one of your shows.

In the late 80s to early 90s, New Kids On the Block was definitely in Stage 1. The incredible success of singles like “Be My Girl” and “Hangin Tough” (my personal favorite) is the reason people thought acts like ‘N Sync and The Backstreet Boys could make it. Last summer, the New Kids were in Stage 3. But in 1999, we all got to enjoy Stage 2.

In one year, we saw the release of two former Kids’ solo projects. Jordan Knight put out a self-titled album and Joey McIntyre gave us Stay the Same, with its’ second single, “I Love You Came Too Late.”

Unfortunately, Joey’s solo work did not fare very well. Stay the Same peaked at #49 in the U.S. charts. And “I Love You Came Too Late” shows us why. The songwriting is predictable. The choreography is weak. All the makeup in the world can’t hide the fact that Joey was 27 at the time. Plus, I think they could have gotten a more attractive girl to play the love interest. All in all, it was a poor effort.

The Circle of Boy Bands is an enduring and mysterious phenomenon. Try as they might, all of these baby-faced musicians end up returning to the act that made them famous in the first place. Remember this in 2019, when you are shelling out $400 for front-row tickets to the No Strings Attached Tour.

And much was the same with Nu Metal. Championed by KoRn, the sub-genre exploded in the late 1990s alongside the Latin invasion and a hearty revitalization of bubblegum pop. How these musical styling co-existed is a mystery. An even greater mystery? How 16 million people thought Fred Durst, armed with a DJ and a creepy-eyed guitarist, shouting that he “did it all for the nookie (c’mon) the nookie (c’mon)/so you can take the cookie/and stick it up your (yeah)/stick it up your (yeah)” was worth $12.99 at Tower Records.

“Nookie” epitomizes the paradoxical nature of Nu Metal, a seemingly brilliant idea of combining punk, rock and rap, and is perhaps the sub-genre’s most anthemic tune. Like a bar band on steroids, Durst belts out the lyrics; the song is strangely catchy–you hate to love it it’s so plainly horrific. It represents a great idea gone wrong. But after too many listens, it’s clear that Nu Metal is a bad idea with grave consequences (see: Woodstock ’99). Run DMC and Aerosmith? Great. Rap and rock? Not great. Fred Durst and singing?Almost as bad as a McVeggie.

The Song:  I think this song ushered in a whole new genre of music, which I am going to call “Diss Pop.” T-Boz, Left-Eye and Chili spend a tad over 4 minutes creating the blueprint on how to sell records while humiliating the opposite sex. Before Destiny’s Child complained about their bills, before Justin Timberlake told a certain someone to cry a river and before Katy Perry sacrificed any shot of legitimacy, TLC used the one-two punch of “No Scrubs” and “Unpretty” to sell a whopping 11 million copies of Fanmail (remember people, this was pre-Napster). 

The Hype Williams-directed video is cool in that pseudo-futuristic way. If anything, it definitely proves that Chilli is the most attractive member of the group. Left Eye, of course, looks crazy. But not in that “street cred” way she was probably going for. More like an actual insane person. Her rhyming is not very good and she dates herself terribly with the line “you as clear as DVD on digital TV screens.” All in all, this song passes the Decade Test, because  I still know about 75% of the words.  

The Moment: We all held our breaths for the release of Star Wars: Episode 1–The Phantom Menace. Then, when we exhaled, we used our remaining breath to talk about how truly terrible it was. It’s been 10 years and I still really hate Jar Jar Binks.  At least Natalie Portman got out of that train wreck alive.   

Retrospection: Sadly, “No Scrubs” was one of TLC’s last hits, as Fanmail was the group’s last album of any importance before Left Eye passed away in 2002. It’s hard to say whether “No Scrubs” or “Waterfalls” will go down as the definitive TLC song. That’s a debate for another long-winded blog series. I think all we can say now is that “No Scrubs” is innovative and fun.  Frustrated and jealous pop stars of tomorrow can thank TLC.