By Saloni Gajjar, Jacob Oller, Monica Castillo, William Hughes, Drew Gillis, Matt Schimkowitz, Danette Chavez, Erik Adams (Images, clockwise from top left: Grey's Anatomy; The Devil Wears Prada, The Black Parade, Wii Sports)
As 2006 Week comes to an end, we ask: What pop culture defined the year for you? Tell us about the art that shaped the start of the back half of the aughts for you in the comments below—and if you have a pop culture question you’d like us and fellow readers to answer, please email it to [email protected].
“Chasing Cars” and “How To Save A Life,” thanks to Grey’s Anatomy
When Snow Patrol and The Fray released “Chasing Cars” and “How To Save A Life” in 2006, respectively, neither could’ve comprehended how intertwined their work would become with Grey’s Anatomy. Once the show used them in the back half of season two, they were tied to the show’s traumatic events. Ask any fervent fan their significance, and chances are that, like me, it’ll be a trigger point. (My skin crawls if I ever hear it on the radio in the car or while working out of a coffee shop.) Since the show defined a lot of my teenage years—and adulthood, too, if I’m being honest—these needle drops will always remind me of sitting on my couch and getting lost in the world of Seattle Grace’s compelling drama. While The O.C. and One Tree Hill introduced me to a lot of cool artists at the time, ABC’s medical series cemented in my mind just how evocatively music can affect storytelling. Perhaps that’s why “Chasing Cars,” in particular, immediately reminds me of weeping over Denny Duquette’s (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) death and its aftermath in the season two finale. (And yes, the show periodically uses these two songs even now when it wants to dial up the theatrics). So in the year that gave us chart-toppers like “Hips Don’t Lie,” “Unwritten,” and “Buttons,” my biggest association will remain these two tracks that will forever be nostalgic tearjerkers. [Saloni Gajjar]
Wii Sports
An included launch title for a new game console, especially one marketed as being for everyone—not just hardcore gamers—bears a heavy burden. It’s got to show you how cool this new piece of tech is, all the things it can do, and how much fun it is to do them. Judging by that rubric, Wii Sports might be the launch title. Not since Tetris got everyone addicted to their Game Boys did a single game welcome so many folks to the world of yelling at pixels. And, like Tetris, Wii Sports was a game for everyone. I can count the number of video games my parents played with me on one hand, and with the other hand I could keep getting my ass kicked by my dad’s bobbleheaded Mii in tennis. With fun, intuitive motion controls (along with wrist straps to keep you from launching your controller through the TV), familiar sports like bowling and baseball, and immediate ways to put the Wii’s custom avatars to work, Wii Sports was a perfectly designed juggernaut. You could hardly walk into a friend’s living room without hearing the sunny melody of Kazumi Totaka’s earworm menu theme, and the crazy thing was, it’s so good that you didn’t mind. [Jacob Oller]
High School Musical
In 2006, Disney Channel was still a year away from its highest-rated year ever, but two major seeds were planted that year. 2006 was the year that Hannah Montana premiered on the channel, launching the career of Miley Cyrus, who got staggeringly famous staggeringly quickly to people of all ages. But before that was High School Musical, the first Disney Channel Original Movie that felt like a major cultural event. It’s not just that it felt that way to the nine-year-old me; the facts bear this out. Its soundtrack was the best-selling album of 2006 and it was big enough to be parodied in decidedly adult-oriented comedies like Disaster Movie and South Park. Zac Efron in particular launched a long career off of it. Though Disney Channel had obviously been big before that with movies like The Cheetah Girls and series like Even Stevens and That’s So Raven, 2006 felt like an inflection point, even at the time. The embrace that year of music-based entertainment on the channel that year feels somewhat responsible for the eventual ascendance of other teens stars like Selena Gomez and Demi Lovato, and it’s not hard to imagine that the success of HSM—and the level of obsessed with it kids my age were—was not a factor when Fox and Nickelodeon greenlit Glee and Victorious. [Drew Gillis]
The Black Parade, My Chemical Romance
While Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge will always be my favorite My Chemical Romance album, their 2006 follow-up, The Black Parade, was an equally impressive mix of propulsive emo punk songs and music I had never heard any of the other bands in MCR’s section of the record store ever attempt. It was a major shift from what the band had done before, a conceptual rock opera that was decidedly less danceable pop and more bold and experimental. They switched out of their prep school jackets for costume-grade military pageantry, and their first track, “Welcome To The Black Parade,” became something of a last gasp anthem for the generation of emo mall punks who roamed the food courts, book stores, and movie theaters after they were bored browsing in Hot Topic and Spencer’s. Within a few years, the emo wave would recede once again, and the catharsis of scream-singing along to bands frustrated by the state of the world would be relegated to karaoke rooms and car trips. But if your friends or strangers hear and recognize the opening lines, you might expect them to join in for a sing-along “Welcome To The Black Parade” like a sleeper agent awakened by the right code words. [Monica Castillo]
“Shoes,” Kelly
There isn’t a single piece of pop-culture ephemera I associate more closely with 2006 than “Shoes” by Kelly, a.k.a. Liam Kyle Sullivan. The early YouTube hit, a deadpan parody of electroclash feminism, struck the right mocking tone of mid-aughts consumer empowerment. But as a 19-year-old college student, it was also the first YouTube video that my friends and I obsessed over. “Shoes” became the song of the summer—along with 2005’s “Since You’ve Been Gone”—a must-listen before any night out. The video’s blown-out, high-contrast, early digital photography and Kids In The Hall cross-dressing made Kelly’s parent-defying shopping spree and disaffected pursuit of determining which shoes “suck” and which ones “rule,” a must-watch before any night out. Sharing space alongside genuine pop sensations, like a mashup of Madonna’s “Hung Up” and M.I.A.’s “U.R.A.Q.T,” “Shoes” was the song of the summer in 2006. Unsurprisingly, I give it the same review today: These “Shoes” rule. [Matt Schimkowitz]
Borat! Cultural Learnings Of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation Of Kazakhstan
I knew, vaguely, who Sacha Baron Cohen was in 2006, having caught a few minutes of Da Ali G show here and there over the years. But none of that early exposure truly prepared me for the November invasion of Borat! into theaters, or how successfully Cohen would be able to mash his love of prank show antics, gross-out humor, and genuine social commentary together for his first big film. In a year that saw two different Hollywood heavyweights attempt to exorcise America’s collective mid-2000s PTSD with overt movies about 9/11, Cohen took his scalpel to the soul of the Bush Jr. era in far more precise and nuanced fashion—while also filming one of the best “two out of shape naked men get into a running fist fight with each other” sequences of all time. As a wise man once put it: Very nice. [William Hughes]
The Devil Wears Prada
I was deeply in my “obnoxious atheism” phase in 2006, and if I’d never grown out of that—and Richard Dawkins hadn’t turned out to be, well, this—I might cite The God Delusion here. But the work that’s much more representative of my state of mind in 2006 (and just holds up better) is The Devil Wears Prada. Back then, I was in awe of glossy magazines, more optimistic in general, and convinced that bangs could turn my life around. Before the David Frankel film would be memed to hell, I was distinguishing between cerulean and turquoise, wondering what satchels Marc (Jacobs, I assume) was doing in the pony in regular conversation, and murmuring “why is no one re-e-ady” while my sisters took forever to get ready. I doubt the legacyquel will stay with me in the same manner, but I’ll always have this depiction of Paris Fashion Week. [Danette Chavez]
Arrested Development season 3 on DVD
For me, the home video release of Arrested Development’s final Fox season couldn’t have arrived at a better time: My last year of college was barely underway and I’d just moved into an off-campus house with three friends, which meant we had a lot of time on our hands and a new living room in which to crack open 13 episodes of the premier primetime satire of the George W. Bush years. I’d been itching to see how everything turned out for the Bluths since the previous winter when, through circumstances of dating and box set availability, I made up for all the times I told people, “Yeah, that sounds funny, I’ll check it out” by blitzing first through season two, and then season one. (This could be why I had a higher tolerance than most for the jumbled timeline of season four.) Shoutout to my friend and eventual fellow local-music blogger (now we’re really getting 2006) Annie for making that happen, and cheers to my former roommates Ross, Josh, and Steve, with whom I marked the end of that first week of classes/our first week with the season three DVDs by singing the Mock Trial With J. Reinhold theme as we walked to the co-op party where I met my wife. 2006 was much kinder to me than it was to Arrested Development. [Erik Adams]
Keep scrolling for more great stories.