lady gaga is back but i miss my ipod

pop music, iTunes sampling, and the power of 2000s albums

I think my superiority complex started in 2008 when I introduced all the girls in my gym class to “Just Dance.”

When I was thirteen, my main hobby was browsing iTunes. I’d race home from middle school, earbuds jammed in my ears on the bus, iPod turned up as high as I dared, waiting for that blissful moment when I could scramble up the stairs in an empty house and turn on our desktop PC. After the agonizing two minutes it took the computer to wake up, I’d click on the little CD icon and wait another two minutes for my beloved library to greet me. And then, I’d scroll.

Click scroll read click click click scroll read click scroll

Check the new releases, check the top 10, check the editor’s picks, check what people were buying, check the reviews of what people were buying

I spent my hard-earned allowance money on an iPod classic, desperate for more space as I begged my dad to let me import his CD collection. Elton John’s greatest hits, all of Nickelback’s discography, CDs from 3 Doors Down and Evanescence and (a bit optimistic) Iron Maiden. My dad raised me on metal and 80s hair bands, but my mom raised me on broadway. On Barry Manilow and Liza Minelli. (It wasn’t until I was out of college that I discovered that she spent her college experience dancing around to Erasure.) And so my iPod was a bit of a hot mess. The first CD I ever got myself was Accelerate by Jump5. But what really shaped my iTunes library in the early days was my collection of Disney Mania CDs.

These compilation albums - modern pop artists recording their own versions of classic Disney songs - were my introduction to the top 40 artists of the 2000s.

We never listed to pop radio when I was growing up, so I didn’t hear “Oops!…I Did It Again” until I was like ten years old visiting my cousins one summer. I had a cousin who was a few years older than me who listened to all the CDs you’d expect. (I remember one time we visited them and she had the Lizzie McGuire soundtrack and I was so jealous.) Even now, I feel like I was born to the wrong sister because my aunt and I share a lot more commonalities in our music tastes. I didn’t even realize pop music existed until late elementary school.

Even though I was an early 2000s kid living through the pop-heyday of Britney and NSYNC* and Christina and Backstreet Boys, I spent most of my youth feeling like I was just outside of an inside joke. Everyone in elementary school knew all the top 40 radio hits, meanwhile, the first Britney Spears album I ever listened to was Circus in 2008 because Dad only played us Billy Joel or Alice in Chains or Nirvana. Everybody else would sing along to “Bye Bye Bye” or “It’s Gonna Be Me” but the only NSYNC* song I knew was their cover of “When You Wish Upon a Star.” I never understood why so many people liked boy bands.

By the time I got my first iPod for Christmas as an eleven year old, the only popular music I knew was the stuff I listened to on the bus to school. I still remember the first time I actively listened to “Believe” by Cher because I thought it was the coolest song I’d ever heard. I had to spend most of the afternoon repeating the lyrics to myself so that I could go home and Google it to figure out who was singing.

My parents never cared for pop music, or maybe they just were too old by the time 2000s pop had its moment, and so I learned of its existence through my friends’ iPods and Disney Channel and the iTunes top 10. By the time I was allowed to get an iPod - sometimes a genuine Apple iPod, but sometimes when I was between iPods I’d use an old off-brand MP3 player of Dad’s - I had discovered artists like CASCADA and Rihanna and Kelly Clarkson. And when I was finally allowed to buy things off iTunes, I developed an obsession.

I didn’t listen to the radio unless I was riding on the bus - I never had the patience for it, even back then - but I kept up with what was popular through the iTunes Top 10. I started paying attention to what was trending, and for better or worse, I developed my taste around the pop charts of the 2000s and 2010s. When I was left to my own devices, I wanted to listen to hard beats and female vocals. I wanted loud and danceable and fun. But I also wanted to understand my dad. I wanted to sing songs from musicals. I wanted to find new things that nobody had ever heard before.

I’ll be honest, a lot of my music taste back then was shaped by Neopets. That was my biggest secret in middle school. All my friends were making their AIM accounts and MySpace profiles, and I would go home after school and create HTML font signatures and code pages for Guilds. And the people like me who were secretly addicted to Neopets had the same obsession as everyone else at that time: what music would autoplay when you clicked on your page. Neopets was where I first heard CASCADA. It’s where I discovered one of my earliest pop-earworms, “Endless Summer.” It took me years to track down a buyable version of the song, so for a while I would pull up the same Neopets page over and over again to listen to it. I’d spend hours searching people’s pages and guilds for music recs, and then when I forced myself to grow up and get off Neopets a few years later, I started spending more time browsing iTunes.

It was like a game. A treasure hunt. A gambling den.

I didn’t have a job because I was, you know, thirteen, but my parents were trying to teach us about money so they gave me and my brother a pretty healthy allowance. I’d spend hours plotting out how to spend it on music. If I was lucky, I’d get iTunes gift cards as presents, but if I wasn’t, I’d have to ration my $7 carefully until the next week or the next holiday. And since YouTube was just beginning, since we didn’t have streaming and I didn’t even know record stores existed, I spent most of my time listening to the 30 second samples on the iTunes store. If I listened to 30 seconds of the middle of a pop song enough times, would I know how the rest of the song sounded? Would I be able to roll the dice, spend $.99 and add this mysterious song my parents had never heard of to my library? Not only that, but could I justify to my dad that I needed this pop song by Metro Station when he came to put in the password to our Apple account to pay for it?

Thinking back on it now, it feels like another world. How I’d religiously update my Apple wishlist, listening intently to samples over and over and over again until I convinced myself to spend the $4 I had on these songs I thought I would enjoy. How I’d spend weeks agonizing over completing an album when I liked a few of its singles. How I used to print out lyrics to convince my parents I needed to purchase an explicit song to fully appreciate it. (True story. “The Best Damn Thing” by Avril Lavigne. Still a banger.)

But all this intentionality, all the limits that were placed on my music library back in the day made me appreciate the music more. My playlists felt more real. The artists I discovered felt like mine. The real magic was discovering a song that was just yours…until it wasn’t.

When I first saw the cover for Lady GaGa’s debut single, I was interested. It looked exactly like every other pop act in the late 2000s, the first inkling of the 2010s, but GaGa became the blueprint for so much of our culture around that time. She’s now a staple in the entertainment industry, and over the years she’s mellowed out and gotten weirder and mellowed out again, but at the start of her career, she was a freak. Like some kind of strange mixture between Bowie and Madonna. When I first showed her to my friends, they side-eyed me so hard. (Not as hard as they side-eyed me when I showed them Ke$ha a few years later, but still.) I had to convince people to give her a chance because she was a little…weird.

Do the kids these days know about her meat dress? Do they remember the fall when we were all singing about disco sticks? Does anyone who was born after the year 2010 know about her iconic 2009 VMAs performance of “Paparazzi?”

I found “Just Dance” while I was going down my usual iTunes rabbit holes. Clicking through artists I knew until I found artists I’d never heard of, until every sample I clicked on was reduced to a pop beat and a female vocal. And after a while they kind of all sound the same…but not this one. I don’t think I took long to deliberate buying this song. There was an immediate pull, like This is going to change your life. So I told my dad I wanted to buy it and we went through the same song and dance - me praying he wouldn’t stare too long at the lyrics, him carefully typing out the password to our Apple account - and when it was finally downloaded to my iPod, I would not shut up about it.

I played this song on repeat on the bus, forced my friends to play it at their birthday parties until we all were obsessed with it, choreographed a dance to it in gym class.

“Who’s it by?”
“Lady Gaga.”
“Who?”

By the time The Fame released later that year, I had converted my entire friend-group into Little Monsters. We played that album so much that it’s burned into my brain. It sounds like layered camis and Rocketdogs and under-eye liner and low-rise jeans and low-res digital cameras and Picnik photo edits and Facebook Flair and infinite pieces of gum. It’s so intertwined with my eighth grade experience - along with It’s Not Me, It’s You by Lily Allen (yes, I had the clean version) - that listening to it now feels like a time machine.

I think we take that era for granted now that GaGa is such a household name, but she built her empire from the ground up, and I was there from the beginning. I still remember going to Target to buy my CD, back when they used to put inserts into the jewel cases with gimmicks and phone numbers and website codes that nobody paid attention to. I remember listening to “Paper Gangsta” and “Space Cowboy” on repeat over and over again through my shitty off-brand earbuds. I remember when The Fame got nominated for Album of the Year (funny, it lost to Fearless) and I remember being so proud of my freaky popstar. I felt vindicated, like I had single-handedly won this woman her fame by canvasing her to all my friends. (Ah, the pretentiousness of teenagers.)

The reason I’ve always liked Lady Gaga is not because of her lyrics - although she’s written some gut-wrenching poetry over the course of her career - but because she made MUSIC. She knew how to use beats and melodies to create an entire atmosphere. I was thirteen, I’d never been to a club or drank alcohol or longed for a sexual relationship with a man, but I knew how to dance around my room in my underwear. The Fame was one of the first true albums I ever loved because I did genuinely love the entire thing. It wasn’t just a single or two I sampled on iTunes, it wasn’t just the top 40 hits that I found from the radio on the bus, it was a full album, a CD that I found and bought myself.

I think it’s a little sad to think back to that time now because 2008 (and the 2000s in general) produced a lot of hit albums that were big successes. Not just because the album sold a lot (though they did), but because the albums from 2008 were megahits. They’d have five or six radio singles at the top of the charts. You’d hear the same artist over and over again because they had so many singles running at the same time. Rihanna was “Umbrella” but she was also “Don’t Stop the Music” and “Shut Up and Drive” and “Disturbia.” Beyoncé was “Single Ladies” but she was also “If I Were a Boy” and “Halo.” Artists were making albums, and we were eating it up. Fearless, I Am… Sasha Fierce, The E.N.D., Good Girl Gone Bad, The Fame, all of these classic albums produced hit after hit. You’d buy a whole CD because you already knew half the songs anyway, so you might as well listen to the whole thing.

And now, you’re lucky if you can get two big singles from your album. Even though these same stars - Gaga, Taylor, Beyoncé - are commercially successful in 2025, they still don’t have the same effect on the charts. The biggest fans listen to an entire album, but TikTok doesn’t care about more than one or two songs from any given record, and if they do, those songs hardly chart for long. Not unless it’s short and snappy. Not unless it’s quirky or memorable or theatrical. Even if you look at the albums nominated for Album of the Year at the Grammys these days, you can hardly name one or two songs from each of them. We had Brat Girl Summer a while back, but can you tell me the tracklist? Sabrina Carpenter won for Pop Vocal album, but what other songs are on Short N Sweet besides “Espresso” and “Please Please Please?”

Nobody writes songs or albums the way they used to. Or maybe, nobody listens to albums the way they used to. I know I still try to listen to albums, whether it’s from artists I know and love or new up-and-coming artists, but even I have a hard time finding full albums I would want to buy on CD.

There’s nothing wrong with albums that aren’t full of hit singles. In fact, it’s probably for the best that music has shifted, that we can find our niche and love our smaller artists for their non-mainstream artistry. It feels more personal, more special. But there’s something unifying about a particularly popular album of music. People these days are unified by the songs that go viral on TikTok, the 20 seconds of music that become a trending audio, songs that have choreographed dances or a common video theme or an easy to remember hook. But even if I can’t name more than two songs on Brat, there was something magical about the world rallying behind one album last summer. We all knew about that shade of green. We all wanted to lose ourselves in pop beats and the same set of fifteen songs. It felt like we were a community, like a real actual community rather than a group of people all trying to be seen doing the same stupid dance over and over again. (Yeah, I know “Apple” has a stupid dance. Let’s just ignore it. I don’t even like Brat as an album. I didn’t even listen to it last summer. Sit with the vision.)

People always ask why the radio is still doing “80s, 90s, 2000s, and now” when it’s been now since 2010s, and I read somewhere that it’s because collective consciousness died around 2003. That due to the constraints of technology and the way the world used to work, the western world was all listening to or watching the same things until the internet started to change things. You could find indie records sure, you didn’t have to listen to pop music on the radio obviously, but studios controlled the music industry and you only had certain ways to access music, so we were all listening to the same stuff. Most people know Madonna or Elton John or Prince because hey, that’s all we had to listen to.

With the internet, we changed how music is made, how it’s marketed, how accessible it is, and suddenly with more choices, you could develop your own taste. You could download things to your iPod that your friends and family had never heard, all without leaving your house. This isn’t a bad thing, but it killed the community aspect of music that once permeated our world. My favorite albums of the 2020s might be the same as yours, maybe we all listened to COWBOY CARTER last year, or maybe not. Maybe you’ve never heard of Miya Folick and I’ve never listened to the entirety of Short N Sweet. Maybe this is good because we each get to have music tailored to our tastes. But it can get a little lonely.

Recently Lady GaGa put out her newest album, MAYHEM, and I’ve been avoiding it. I listened to most of it during release week while I did laundry, optimistically believing it would compare to The Fame or Born This Way or maybe even Chromatica. Maybe my expectations were too high or maybe I’m just annoyed that everyone’s been posting about it. Maybe I miss when I was the only person I knew who’d heard of this Lady GaGa woman. But with each song that played, I felt like there was magic missing. It’s unfair of me, I know, because GaGa is talented. She can’t make a bad album. I know in six months I’ll be kicking myself when MAYHEM becomes one of my top played albums of the year. But it’s just not the same as the old days. I miss when it was my friends and I blasting this CD in the basement for a birthday party. I miss when you couldn’t escape “Poker Face” or “LoveGame” on the radio. Maybe I actually just miss being a teenager.

But most of all I miss when we didn’t run songs into the ground with short-form viral video content. It cheapens it. It reduces a pop song like “Abracadabra” to something smaller than it should be. It turns an album into a commodity rather than something to be treasured. Sure it’s cool that people can do the insane choreography from Tate McRae’s “Revolving door” but if everyone is attempting to recreate it, how can we fully respect Tate’s womanly power for achieving that piece IN FUCKING HEELS? Maybe it’s not the best song ever made, maybe I don’t even like her much as an artist, but turning that intense, challenging choreography into something as tacky as a viral dance piece is absurd. Maybe pop music has always relied on dance and choreography to hit the top of the charts, but that makes it all the more impressive. That a woman can hit some insane high notes while dancing her ass off in heels. It didn’t start with Tate, and hell, it didn’t even start with GaGa, but “Revolving door” wouldn’t exist without “Bad Romance.” And “Bad Romance” would be nothing without the success of The Fame as an album.

We appreciate music differently now. The internet has turned the industry into a commercial hell, preying on artists and forcing them to contort themselves into two minute viral hits. Maybe all the best songs have already been written, maybe we have to write new lyrics over all the old samples we once loved (Anxietyyyyyy…). Is it the artists’ fault? Should we blame them for what’s inspiring them, what’s driving them? Or is it the listeners’ fault? Have we lost our attention span? Did we lose our patience for long songs and cohesive albums and creative concepts? Or is it the fault of our overlords? Is music being coerced by numbers and algorithms and computers and rich men? Did they destroy the radio so that we’d stop listening to music and put our nose to the grindstone?

Maybe this new generation’s taste is just different than mine. Maybe I’m becoming…old. Or maybe white people just need to give it a rest for a bit and let Doechii and Kendrick and Beyoncé and SZA work their magic.

Even though this is objectively nothing like his work, a lot of this piece was inspired by reading Hanif Abdurraqib’s They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us.