2000: The Good Old Days? - January

January 2000 was something I'd been waiting for my whole life it seemed. I was one of many looking forward to the new millennium and had spoken about what I'd be doing to celebrate as early as the mid-90s. Once it was January 2000 the big question I had was what now?

From a music perspective one record that makes me think of the start of the 21st century in a positive way is "(Welcome) To The Dance" by Des Mitchell. To a lesser extent "In Your Arms (Rescue Me)" by Nu Generation also does but that's not as good as I remembered and therefore gets half marks.

The best record for this month is one I was definitely hearing on the Pete Tong show in the summer of 1999 which was "(Just) Me And You" by New Vision. That was possibly my favourite house record of that summer.

Dance music was the music of the moment around the turn of the century and at a stretch you could define around half the new entries as dance records, though there were only 25 new entries in total.

None of the dance records get zero points, most get full marks and some get half marks. Other dance records that deserve a mention include "Rainbow Country" by Bob Marley & Funkstar Deluxe, the lesser know follow up to "Sun Is Shining". There's  also Eddie Amador with his follow up to 1998s "House Music" with "Rise". Then there's "Because Of You" by Scanty Sandwich which is strange but good.

Outside of dance music we have full marks for Nas with "Nastradamus" and Donnell Jones with "U Know What's Up". There's also half marks for Sting & Cheb Mami with "Desert Rose", a rare Sting solo record I remember liking at the time but all these years later it's not as good as I remembered.

The worst record is an R&B record which is "Hot Boyz" by Missy Elliott. To be fair it's not as bad as our usual worst records but there was a small list of zero scoring records to choose from.

Here's a list of the records with the best on top, worst at the bottom and the good ones in green, OK ones in amber and rubbish ones in red (and in no particular order):

Score: 50%

Here's a look at the chart:

Well there we have it, the best month for chart music in the 21st century is January 2000. The story of the 21st century then is that it started well, took a dive in 2002 and then went into gradual decline from 2005 to 2007 with the odd decent month along the way. We're now only a couple of months away from completing the Top 30 reviews of the 90s so what we can do next is see how this ties back to the 90s as a whole.