15 Pop Culture Artifacts from the 2000s That Will Make You Cringe
Updated: Oct. 21, 2019Were you Team Jacob or Team Edward?
Ever-changing fads
Teen taste is mercurial. Today’s VSCO Girl was yesterday’s Harajuku Girl. Vine videos once occupied their every waking moment instead of TikTok. Sometimes trends get recycled by the high school set—see ’90s mini bags and midi skirts making a comeback in 2019—and sometimes what they just had to have then is something today’s youth wouldn’t be caught dead in. Read on for the things today’s teens wouldn’t be caught dead doing!
Join Team Jacob or Team Edward
Twilight mania was in full swing. The Stephenie Meyer novels (released 2005-2008) about sparkling vampires, fierce werewolves, and the girl who loves both of them in the Pacific Northwest dominated bestseller lists for years after their release. The movies based on them, including New Moon, which hit theatres in 2009, were blockbusters that turned Robert “Edward” Pattinson and Taylor “Jacob” Lautner into warring heartthrobs. The debates (Which actor is hotter? Who should Bella end up with? Would you pick a bloodsucker or a Lycan?) sprang from the screen to real life and divided friends. Pretty sure today’s teens just think they’re old. That is if they even think of them at all.
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Have a Hotmail account
Hotmail, which started in 1996 and was acquired by Microsoft in 1997 for $400 million, was the leading provider of free web-based email services until well past Gmail’s launch in 2004, according to Geek.com. But the software giant released the final version in October 2011, was replaced by Outlook in 2012, and by the summer of 2013, Microsoft had migrated all 350 million hotties to the newer system, according to Fast Company. Now teens are more likely to use Gmail just like more than one billion other folks around the world.
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Own CDs
Introduced in the ’80s, people moved away from cassettes and vinyl (which interestingly is making a comeback) and started buying music on compact discs. But in 2018, Rolling Stone reported that CD sales had fallen 80 per cent over the past decade from roughly 450 million to 89 million and now automakers like Tesla, Toyota, and Ford don’t even bother to equip new models with CD players. Kids had already started to digitize their collections and download new music to their MP3 players by 2009. Now even downloads are on the outs as streaming becomes king. They plummeted 58 per cent since peaking in 2012, making their profits even smaller than physical sales.
On that note, strike these out-of-date words from your lexicon too!
Download music to an iPod Shuffle
This one isn’t limited to teens either. The iPod was the must-have gadget of the aughts. In 2005, Apple released the smaller, cheaper, wearable models called the Nano and the Shuffle. But after the iPhone was invented (2007) and as smartphones became more advanced, people started storing music on those instead. Why carry two pieces of tech when one can do all the jobs? (This same theory was also the downfall of stand-alone cameras.) And as we already established above, people now prefer streaming to downloading. Apple responded by discontinuing both models in 2017.
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Teach you how to Dougie
Teens are too busy doing the Floss, the Dab, the Shiggy, the Milly Rock, and the Shoot to remember the dance move spawned by the Cali Swag District song “Teach Me How To Dougie.” The corresponding video brought the dance and the rappers a few years of fame, according to the Los Angeles Times. Justin Bieber taught Regis, Kelly Ripa, and Ellen Degeneres how to do it. Ryan Seacrest and Jennifer Lopez busted the move on American Idol. There were parodies like “Teach Me How To Panda.” The rappers played teen clubs, car shows, and everything in between, but eventually, their star faded.
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Copying Beyonce’s Single Ladies moves from MTV
Everyone was trying to ace Beyonce’s sexy but complicated “Single Ladies” choreography found in the black and white music video and spoofed on SNL by Justin Timberlake and Andy Samberg. Oh and speaking of music videos, 2019 teens don’t have much use for them either and even when they do want to watch one, it sure as heck isn’t on MTV, the network that pioneered music television.
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Sing along with Glee
On May 19, 2009, the world was introduced to a group of lovable misfits with a song in their hearts from Lima, Ohio, the earnest choir club coach, and the wickedly funny Sue Sylvester on the FOX musical Glee. The high school musical, creator Ryan Murphy, and its cast became household names, it made Journey cool again, and it earned high praise for dealing with coming out, homophobia, teen pregnancy, disabilities, grief, abuse, and other important issues with aplomb and good intentions. There was merch, concert tours, soundtracks, and a few Golden Globes. It aired until March 2015 but had already lost most of its steam after cast changes and the drug overdose of lead Cory Monteith in 2013.
Line their wrists with Silly Bandz
Speaking of Ohio, Toledo’s Robert Croak and his company, Brainchild Products, created a national fashion craze with the 2006 introduction of Silly Bandz, cheap rubbery bracelets that came in endless shapes and colours including cowboy boots, dinosaurs, musical instruments, and dollar signs that were inspired by a similar product Croak saw at a convention in China. According to an interview with Inc., they were selling more than a million packs a week at the peak in 2008 and storeowners would drive to their headquarters from other states to buy them because they could not get through on the phone to reorder. Several schools banned them for being distracting and causing fights. Although they, along with a few copycats, are still made, sales started to slow in 2010. Nowadays, wrists are reserved for fitness trackers and scrunchies.
Use Facebook
Sorry, Mark Zuckerberg, but today’s teens have no use for your social network. For one, their parents are on it and think it’s cool. Gross. And two, Snapchat, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok are much more their speed. But back in 2009, MySpace was so over and they rushed to establish an online presence on Facebook. They were wild about the like button.
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Send you a FarmVille neighbour request
From August 2009 to December 2010, FarmVille was the top game by daily active users on Facebook. It seemed like everyone was seeing if they had a green thumb for interactive online digital farming. You’d plow, plant, and harvest crops as well as collect chicken eggs and milk cows for hours. All of your friends in the real world had to endure constant requests for help and to become neighbours. (See also Mob Wars and Lil Green Patch.) But now those crops would wither and die unattended as that age group can’t be pulled away from Fortnite.
Wear velour tracksuits
In the late ’90s, tracksuits started to make a major comeback thanks to thumbs ups from music industry titans of the time like Jay-Z and Sporty Spice. By the 2000s, super comfy updated versions of ’70s velour numbers made by companies like Juicy Couture became the de facto uniform of teen queens like Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears, and Paris Hilton for coffee runs, shopping outings, mani-pedi appointments, and casual lunches. By 2010, the suits were a global phenomenon with 100 stand-alone stores in the United States alone. Maybe teens stopped thinking they were cool when their moms started bouncing around town with Juicy emblazoned across their bums. And while the athleisure trend continues today, it has morphed to be more about leggings, bralettes, and Billie Eilish-approved oversized hoodies.
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Quote The Hangover
“Not you, fat Jesus!” The Vegas bachelor party gone wrong film starring Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, and Zach Galifianakis had so many memorable one-liners, everyone was trying to casually work them into conversations. Even teens who either had cool parents, snuck into the rated-R movie, or just faked it until they made it. Today, the movie is not available to stream on Netflix, which means most teens haven’t seen it. They are much more likely to borrow jokes from another Ed Helms’ project that is. According to Nielsen’s research, The Office was the most matched show on Netflix in 2018 with 52 million minutes streamed.
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Leave the house looking like this
They’d probably rather die than leave the house wearing any of these big-in-2009 trends: super long cuffed trouser jeans, bootcut jeans, super low-cut jeans especially the ones with decorative zippers or buttons, kitten heels with boot-cut jeans, fedoras (boys), baker boy hats (girls), really plain ribbed tank tops, cropped shrugs especially with a little military uniform-like flair, super chunky thigh-high moto boots, harem pants, and egg-shaped dresses. As they’d say with an eyeroll, “That’s a lewk.”
Refer to Miley Cyrus as Hannah Montana
And this role amnesia is mostly the actress/singer’s own doing. She’s done everything in her power—divorce a Hemsworth brother, twerk up on Robin Thicke at an awards show, constantly stick out her tongue, date women, wear any of these outfits, appear naked on a wrecking ball and in a latex bondage suit with a studded crotch in music videos, get all these tattoos, talk about her love of marijuana, and so on—to make the world forget that she was once the star of a beloved, wholesome Disney Channel show.
Bump It
Hair bumps, big and small, were all the rage in 2009. To make hair-raising experiences easier to achieve without the help of a salon professional, women and girls turned to as-seen-on-TV plastic inserts called BumpIts. The set came with large versions to get a Kim Kardashian coif and minis to create the small front poofs the teen queens all sported. Made by Big Happie Hair, Time included them on their 50 Worst Inventions list.
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