One thing that was so unique about myspace is the music. If only every time we opened our Facebook page it played the song that we love at the time. It gave you your own identity, (or at least you thought you had your own). Although it would be cool, it would be so loud all the time if the Internet just played music whenever we opened it. It would be louder than a Fayetteville NC emergency towing vehicle screaming down the highway towards an accident. I still remember some of the 2007 hits I put on my page. Ron Pope- A drop in the Ocean was the main one for some reason. As if we were all heart broken at 12.
So we called this era the Xanga Stage. This is where every teenager stopped being a little kid and thought they were going to be popular by getting the most likes on their mirror picture. As apart of this era, the look was similar to what we would call Punk Rock or in simpler terms ‘emo’. Some popular artists that were a must have on the Myspace page that resembled this Punk Rock look included Fallout Boy, All American Rejects, Panic at the Disco, Nevershoutnever, Thirty Seconds to Mars, and of course Blink 182.
The music always had to match your background. If you’re layout had glitter and a cover photo that said something like “Choose to Shine” or something laughable like that, then your song that week was probably something like “One in a Million” by Miley Cyrus. If your had a darker background then there was probably no glitter and it had a picture of the lead singer from All American Rejects. If that was the case then your song was 100% Dirty Little Secret, and there’s no way it wasn’t. We are all guilty of having the biggest crushes on some of these artists.
Since all of these Punk Rock boy band artists had long hair that looked like it was straightened half of the time, that is how the era of long flipped out hair came about. You were not cool if you didn’t have long hair that you were flipping out of your eyes every two seconds. In fact that’s how Justin Beiber became famous, and he obviously had the signature hair too. I will never forget the viral cover he made of “With You” by Chris Brown that he posted through MySpace. All of my friends were posting it on my bulletin board and we have all been hooked ever since.
Back in this decade, this is how artists got popular. The popular older teens would put on a song on their layout page and the younger teens would learn every word of that song because it was influential and they wanted to be just like them. Maybe that was just me who did that. The age of Paranoia and Nostalgia was definitely one for the books and you are lying to yourself if you say you don’t miss it. The beauty of having music in your background made it way more interesting than any other social media site.