Feature Year: 2000 (Part 1 – 9a , Part 2 – 9p ET) #2000 @RadioMax

We feature the hits and the music of 2000 Part 1 at 9am and Part 2 at 9pm

January – Canadian post-hardcore band Silverstein formed.
January 1 – In New York City, USA, at precisely midnight the Artist Formerly Known As Prince celebrates the new millennium by playing his anthemic “1999”, in what he vows is the song’s finale. British composer John Tavener is knighted in the New Year’s Honours List.
January 6 – Blink-182 released their single “All The Small Things”, which excelled on U.S. Billboard charts: no.1 on Modern Rock Tracks and no.6 on the Hot 100. The music video was a parody of famous contemporary boybands, pre-eminently Backstreet Boys – it won ‘Best Group Video’ at the 2000 MTV Video Music Awards and was also nominated for ‘Video of the Year’.
January 11 – Gary Glitter is released from jail, two months before his sentence for sexual offences ends. Sharon Osbourne quits as manager of Smashing Pumpkins after only three months. In a brash press release she announces she had to resign “for medical reasons: Billy Corgan was making me sick.” Singer Whitney Houston is caught with 15.2 grams of marijuana in her bag at a Hawaii airport. She boards her flight to San Francisco before police can arrive to arrest her.
January 14 – Rolling Stone reveals that the two children of Melissa Etheridge and her partner, Julie Cypher, were fathered by David Crosby.
January 18 – Spencer Goodman is executed by lethal injection in Huntsville, Texas, for the 1991 kidnap and murder of the wife of ZZ Top manager Bill Ham in 1991. Ham is present at the execution.
February 9 – The Million Dollar Hotel, a film co-written by U2 lead singer Bono, premieres at the 50th Berlinale (Berlin Film Festival).
February 11 – Diana Ross divorces Arne Næss, Jr. her husband of 14 years.
February 16 – The Silver Tassie, an opera by Mark-Anthony Turnage, receives its première at the London Coliseum, performed by the English National Opera.
February 23 – At the 42nd Annual Grammy Awards, Santana wins a record 8 Grammys in one night tying Michael Jackson who won 8 in 1984. Christina Aguilera won Best New Artist.
February 24 – Italian motorcycle manufacturing company Aprilia wins a lawsuit filed against the Spice Girls over a sponsorship deal that fell apart when Geri Halliwell left the group.
February 28 – Songwriter Stan Penridge files a lawsuit against the rock band KISS, the band’s publishing company and Universal Music Group, claiming that he had not received millions of dollars in publishing royalties that he was owed for the song “Beth”.
March 6 – Foxy Brown is injured in a car accident in Brooklyn, New York, in which her car hit a fence. Police discover that Brown was driving with a suspended driver license and order her to appear in court in April. Brown’s license was suspended for failing to appear in court for a parking violation.
March 11 – 311 (band) holds their first 3–11 Day concert at Tower Records in the French Quarter of New Orleans.
March 13 – Blink-182 end their European tour early after guitarist/vocalist Tom DeLonge and drummer Travis Barker succumb to strep throat.
March 24 – After violating a prior probation agreement by getting drunk, Ol’ Dirty Bastard is ordered to undergo a 90 day diagnostic evaluation at the California Institute For Men in Chino, California.
March 27 – *NSYNC sets a new first-week sales record with 2.4 million copies of No Strings Attached sold, smashing the old record of 1.1 million.
March 28 – Jimmy Page wins a lawsuit filed against Ministry magazine, which claimed that Page had contributed to the death of Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham by wearing a Satanic robe and chanting spells while Bonham was dying. The magazine apologizes and offers to pay Page’s legal bills. Page donates the money received from the case to the Action for Brazil’s Children Trust.
April 1 – Ted Nugent angers Hispanic groups in Texas after onstage remarks he makes during a concert at the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion, in which he says that those who did not speak English should get out of America. He is banned from the venue as a result.
April 4 – Mick Jagger attends the opening of an arts center named after him at Dartford Grammar School in southeast England.
April 6 – Shawn Colvin, James Taylor, Cyndi Lauper, Richard Thompson, Sweet Honey, Elton John, Cassandra Wilson, Wynonna Judd, k.d. lang, Bryan Adams, and Mary Chapin Carpenter perform in New York as part of a tribute to Joni Mitchell.
April 12 – Metallica files a lawsuit against the peer-to-peer service Napster, as well as Yale University, University of Southern California and Indiana University for copyright infringement. Yale and Indiana are later dropped from the suit when they block access to Napster on campus computers.
May 1 – A $1.8 million civil fraud lawsuit is filed against Neil Young in Los Angeles Superior Court by a former Village Voice writer. The lawsuit charges that Young broke an agreement to have a biography written about him when he blocked the book’s publication.
May 4 – Letters To Cleo play their last concert in Boston; they disband the following month.
May 5 – Rod Stewart undergoes an hour-long throat operation at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles to remove a growth on his thyroid, which turns out to be benign.
May 6 – John Mellencamp receives an honorary Doctor of Music degree as the commencement speaker for Indiana University’s Class of 2000.
May 13 – The 45th Eurovision Song Contest final, held in Stockholm’s Globe Arena, is won by Denmark’s Olsen Brothers and the song “Fly on the Wings of Love”. Dickey Betts is Kicked out of The Allman Brothers Band and replaced with Warren Haynes.
May 16 – Britney Spears’s second LP, Oops!… I Did It Again sells 1.3 million copies in its debut week and 500,000 on the first day of its release, giving it the highest first-week sales by any solo artist in US history, until Eminem’s “The Marshall Mathers LP” a few weeks later. The album sold over 20 million copies becoming the best-selling album by female artist of the decade.
Prince announces that he has changed his name back to Prince now that his publishing contract with Warner/Chappell has expired. He had been known as an unpronounceable symbol, since 1993.
May 24 – 50 Cent is shot nine times in Queens. After spending time in hospital he returns to recording and performing.
May 25 – Eddie Van Halen begins treatment for prevention of tongue cancer at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas.
May 29 – Michael Jackson and Mariah Carey are named the Best Selling Male and Female artist of the millennium at the World Music Awards in Monaco.
May 30 – Eminem’s second LP, The Marshall Mathers LP sells 1.76 million copies on its debut week, becoming the fastest selling rap album ever according to the Guinness Book of World Records. Produced by Dr. Dre, the album breaks the previous record of 803,000 copies set by Snoop Dogg’s Doggystyle, also produced by Dr. Dre.
June 8 – Sinéad O’Connor comes out as a lesbian in an interview with Curve magazine.
June 20 – Billy Gilman’s debut album One Voice was released under Epic Records. The album was certified 2x platinum, making Gilman the youngest artist in music history to perform the feat. Britney Spears begins her Oops!… I Did It Again World Tour, her first world tour, visiting North America, Europe and Brazil in support her sophomore album, Oops!… I Did It Again. The tour was a commercial success and became the second highest-grossing tour by a solo artist on 2000, only behind Tina Turner’s Twenty Four Seven retirement tour.
June 23 to 25 – The Experience Music Project, now the EMP Museum, opens in Seattle.
June 30 – Nine people are crushed to death during Pearl Jam’s set at the Roskilde Festival, in Roskilde, Denmark.
July 21 and July 22 – Oasis plays at Wembley Stadium. The first of this night is featured on the double CD and the DVD Familiar to Millions.
July 26 – A U.S. district judge orders the Napster to halt the trading of copyrighted music among its users, essentially ordering it shut down. A stay on the injunction is granted two days later, allowing the site to continue operating for the time being.
August 8 – A coalition of 28 U.S. states file a lawsuit against the major record labels, accusing them of keeping the prices of CDs fixed at artificially high prices since 1995.
August 11 – Madonna gives birth to her second child, son Rocco. Film director Guy Ritchie is the father.
August 14 – Outside the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, Rage Against the Machine performs a free concert protesting the two-party system. In a chaotic scene after the performance, police forcibly disperse the crowd and several arrests are made.
August 16 – Rapper Eminem files for divorce from wife Kim Mathers.
August 20 – Skinny Puppy reunite for a concert at the Doomsday Festival in Dresden, Germany.
September 7 – Rage Against the Machine’s Tim Commerford is arrested for climbing on the set at MTV’s Video Music Awards after his band lost the award for Best Rock Video to Limp Bizkit. The director of Rage’s “Sleep Now in the Fire” video, Michael Moore, suggests Commerford was probably “just bored” by the show. Britney Spears performed her hit single “Oops!…I Did It Again”, becoming one of the VMA’s most iconic and controversial performances due to her skin-coloured outfit.
September 13 – The first Latin Grammy Awards are held.
September 19 – Madonna releases “Music”.
September 23 – Isaac Stern celebrates his 80th birthday together with his 40th anniversary as President of Carnegie Hall.
September 26 – Pearl Jam releases twenty-five live albums, each taken from a different show on their European tour, as the initial part of the Pearl Jam Official Bootlegs series.
October 1 – Midnight Oil perform their single Beds are Burning at the closing of the 2000 Summer Olympics dressed in outfits clearly displaying the word “Sorry” in reference to Prime Minister John Howard’s refusal to apologise to the Stolen Generation.
October 5 – The Beatles release a hardcover book version of The Beatles Anthology, containing newly published photos and interviews with band members. The book went straight to the top of the New York Times bestsellers list. EMI and Warner Music withdraw their application to the European Commission for a proposed $20 billion merger due to regulators’ concerns. The merger would have concentrated 80% of the European music business into the hands of just four major labels.
October 17 – Limp Bizkit release Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water selling over a million copies in it first week of release, a new record for a rock album.
October 18 – Zack de la Rocha leaves Rage Against the Machine saying that the band’s decision making process has completely failed.
October 24 – Linkin Park’s debut album, Hybrid Theory, is released and debuts at number 16 on the Billboard 200, with 47,000 copies sold in its first week. It would later become the best selling album of 2001, and later become certified Diamond by the RIAA in 2005.
October 31 – Napster and BMG Music announce a partnership that would change the website into a subscription-based service offering legal downloads.
November 5 – The fourth Terrastock festival is held in Seattle.
November 7 – The Mark, Tom and Travis Show (The Enema Strikes Back!) is released by Blink-182. It is the first and only live album by the American pop-punk band. It also features the single “Man Overboard” which does relatively well in the charts.
November 18 – A new musical adaptation of Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck by Robert Wilson and Tom Waits opens in Copenhagen.
December – Tripp Eisen formerly of Dope replaces Koichi Fukuda in Static-X.
December 2 – The Backstreet Boys debuts with 1.6 million with Black & Blue and becomes the first artists in history to achieve back-to-back million-plus first week sales. It also sells 5 million worldwide and sets a record for the best International Sales Week in History. The Smashing Pumpkins played what was to be their final concert at the Metro Club in Chicago. The band would reunite in 2005.
December 22 – Madonna marries film director Guy Ritchie, at Skibo Castle in Dornoch, Sutherland, Scotland with Gwyneth Paltrow, Stella McCartney, Sting, George Clooney, Jon Bon Jovi, Celine Dion, Bryan Adams, Rupert Everett and others in attendance. The Joel and Ethan Coen film, O Brother, Where Art Thou? is released, with a T-Bone Burnett-produced soundtrack that revives the popularity of traditional American folk music and bluegrass.
December 31 – Chris Robinson of The Black Crowes marries actress Kate Hudson.