Dolly Mag Sep, 2002
I've been collecting clothes to dress like this lately. It's 2000s indie sleaze and this style was still pretty hip up to late 2007, thanks to shows like Veronica Mars and The O.C.
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Today's compilation:
Totally Hits 3
2000
Alternative Rock / Pop-Rock / Pop / R&B / Adult Contemporary / Teen Pop
Time for yet another fun turn-of-the-millennium trip down memory lane, folks! Yesterday we got into a dispatch from America's bestselling contemporary hits series, Now That's What I Call Music!, but today we've got something from what was once their greatest competitor instead: Totally Hits.
And the biggest difference between these two series was ultimately the partnerships between the labels that put them out: the US version of Now was the result of a link-up between Capitol, EMI, Universal, Virgin, and their many subsidiaries, and Totally Hits represented Sony, BMG, Warner, Elektra, Atlantic, and their many subsidiaries. Now always wound up having the upper hand with the more popular collective catalog, but Totally Hits wasn't any slouch, either, even if they were Now's perpetual kid sister.
So, here we have a pretty solid collection of late 90s and early 2000s commercial fare that should provide for a nice nostalgia rush, but the most glaring omission on this third Totally Hits installment is that there aren't any boy bands at all. And that's because, by the time this album had come out, NSYNC—who had made an appearance on the prior volume—had successfully left their label, RCA, citing the glaring and overt exploitative practices of their manager, Lou Pearlman. And as a result, at the height of the teen pop explosion, the massive conglomerate that made up Totally Hits only had acts like Christina Aguilera and Vitamin C to show for it, whereas Now, with Jive Records appearing to fall under their umbrella, had not only NSYNC, but also the Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears as well. And as a result, Totally Hits suffered because of it.
But TH wasn't to be totally ignored, because their releases still had plenty of good pop music on them, and although they may have faltered in the teen pop arena, where they seemed to make up for it was in alternative pop-rock and R&B, with late 90s-early 00s entities like Matchbox Twenty, Barenaked Ladies, and Third Eye Blind holding down the rock side of things, while dominant forces like Whitney Houston and Toni Braxton were able to supply some of the quality R&B.
And another dimension that Totally Hits had that Now really didn't was country. I might dislike the pair of tunes that TH selected here for this album, between Faith Hill's super poppy "The Way You Love Me,“ and John Michael Montgomery's eyeroll-inducing and deeply Christian-overtoned "The Little Girl," but including a very popular genre that Now wasn't paying much of any mind to at all definitely helped Totally Hits to differentiate themselves.
So, I'd expect a lot of people to be familiar with most of these songs, but two that I'd like to point out especially are Dido's "Here With Me" and Next's "Wifey." Both of these acts each had a hit that was far more popular than the one that ended up on this album—Dido's "Thank You," which was also liberally sampled for Eminem's "Stan," and Next's "Too Close," a #1 hit song about trying to suppress an erection while grinding on someone 😂. But "Here With Me," which was actually Dido's debut single, is a beautiful piece of tender female singer-songwriter pop, and "Wifey," the lead single off of Next's sophomore album, is a terrific slice of dreamy and softly funky male group R&B.
So if you're ever trying to piece together an eclectic representation of a turn-of-the-millennium American commercial pop music landscape, Now is, of course, essential, but it'd be foolish to sleep on what Totally Hits had to offer, because while Now was definitely better, they weren't monopolistic, and TH was there to capitalize on that circumstance.
Highlights:
Pink - "Some Girls"
Matchbox Twenty - "Bent"
Vertical Horizon - "Everything You Want"
Third Eye Blind - "Deep Inside of You"
Barenaked Ladies - "Pinch Me"
Dido - "Here With Me"
Toni Braxton - "He Wasn't Man Enough"
Christina Aguilera - "What a Girl Wants"
Next - "Wifey"
Vitamin C - "Graduation"
The Corrs - "Breathless"
Whitney Houston - "Fine"
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