Throwback Thursday: Relive the '00s with The Current
February 09, 2022
The aughts were a time when indie music discovered its impact, and the audience that once seemed fringe became viable as stations like The Current emerged and grew. As part of this winter’s member drive, The Current is spending February 10 in “Throwback Thursday” mode, celebrating the music and memories of the ‘00s all day long. (We chose it because it’s the decade that The Current went on the air.)
At the beginning of the ‘00s, garage rockers the Strokes, Hives, and White Stripes saved us from rap-metal. There was an explosion of sounds coming from New York City in the era and aftermath of 9/11 (Yeah Yeah Yeahs, TV on the Radio, Interpol, LCD Soundsytem). These years saw the further emergence of what we would later call The United States of Americana, and the re-issue labels like Light in the Attic and Numero Group uncovering lost gems.
The power of this musical generation carried into other trends – Hybrid and electric cars! Farmer’s Markets! Craft beer! Portlandia! Kale!
So many memories come flooding back thinking about the decade that now recedes further into our collective rearview mirrors. It’s hard to believe the ‘00s ended 13 years ago! Looking forward to hearing all the music and memories of the entire Current staff and listeners on Thursday!
Jim McGuinn: Wow – to summarize my ‘00s… that’s a tough one. I just peeked at pictures in my Facebook page, and it brought back so many memories! So many amazing pictures of my son Jameson, who was born the day The Current turned one, and is now 16 and 6’2”! I got married to the amazing Christine Weeks in 2004, and my thumbnail spiel includes leaving commercial radio and Y100 (WPLY) in Philly, to launching an internet community streaming radio station, teaching Music Biz at Drexel University, joining non-commercial WXPN, helping my friend Superfrank manage James Brown, spending a lot of time in Vermont, my band Cordalene opening for Weezer in front of 10,000 people, and then late in the decade, moving to the Twin Cities to come work for The Current.
I was in Minnesota interviewing for the job when the Philadelphia Phillies were in the World Series – I got back in time to parade down Broad Street in a spontaneous eruption of a city’s joy, then the next week decided to leave that city after 13 years, for a land where I embraced kayaks and started playing hockey! I have a several photos during the decade with Beck – he was def the rock star I seemed to have taken the most pictures with over the years. But looking at that time, I also see those we’ve lost – from artist friends like Gord Downie and Adam Yauch to my pals like Kerry Gray, Ed Ackerson, and Brooks Brown, all gone way too soon.
I remember coming home from a conference around 2004 and telling my wife that someone I saw a speaker who predicted that soon we’d ditch our new groovy iPods and all our music would be stored and played on our mobile phones, which would also be where we’d send emails and check the weather – that they’d be like little computers in our pockets – what?!? I was at Drexel when my students told me about this new thing they were on called Facebook – that it could surpass Myspace, so I joined, and then Twitter soon after. Many of my earliest posts just completed a sentence that started with my name at the top – like “Jim McGuinn Slusarek… is excited that the Cubs lost” – it was the early days of the socials, friends!
Sean McPherson: When the Current got started, I was trying to figure out what the station was gonna do. I wasn't involved with radio professionally, let alone with the station. But I was listening intently. The first time I got the inkling that the station was going to be awesome was hearing the Rhymefest tune "Bullet" in heavy rotation. A rapper I saw win an emcee battle in 2003 in Cincinnati was suddenly being broadcast not just into my apartment in St. Paul, but all the way out at my group home jobs in Anoka and Rosemount. I started to connect with the DJs and with the music I didn't know. The station was filling in gaps with music I missed because I was too young, but my parents were too old. Almost all the cool music I dig that was made between 1975-1985 is thanks toThe Current (and particularly to the shows Kevin Beacham used to run on Saturday nights with Redefinition Radio).
David Safar: A Top 10 moment of the ‘00s for me has to be seeing The Postal Service at the Entry on April 25, 2003. It was an amazing show, and no one really realized just what they were seeing at the time.
Jay Gabler: I joined Facebook in fall 2004, less than a year after it was founded. I was a graduate student at Harvard at the time, and it seemed like I was late to the party — all the undergrads had signed up in the spring, but I held off until a few grad students started joining as well. It was still TheFacebook.com, Mark Zuckerberg's face was still literally visible on every page, there was no news feed (you had to go poking around on your friends' profiles one by one to see if they'd made any changes), and your "wall" was like a whiteboard where anyone could write or erase text in an undifferentiated block. I told my friend I'd joined by sending her an e-mail saying, "I've gone down the rabbit hole." This was my first profile pic!
Also...once The Current launched and I moved back to Minnesota in 2007, I have vivid memories of sitting up late playing cribbage, drinking 3.2 beer (because no Sunday sales), and listening to Mark Wheat play Regina Spektor and Tegan and Sara.
Support The Current during Throwback Thursday right here.
What are your memories of the ‘00s? Leave them in the comments.
