On their quintuple-platinum 2000 album The Better Life, these Mississippi boys were The Last Southern Rock Band: They played slick, heroic neo-grunge for the Clear Channel era, where all regions melted into one long, Nickelback impression. They're still clinging to that anthemic plod a decade later, like an eight year-old who can't bear to throw out a dead hamster. "What I am is what I want/And I'll be this way 'til I'm dead and gone," Brad Arnold sings. And in a bygone time of rock-radio hegemony the grandiose guitar sheen of "Every Time You Go" and the beleaguered crunch of "When You're Young" would be worth another five million copies sold.

Listen to "When You're Young":

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“Too Close”

Next was formed in Minneapolis when the uncle of Terry "T-Low" and Raphael "Tweety" Brown, who was a gospel choir director, introduced the brothers to Robert Lavelle "R.L." Huggar. Sounds of Blackness singer Ann Nesby groomed the R&B group before handing them over to Naughty by Nature's KayGee, who wrote and produced "Too Close." The idea for the song was sparked "from a conversation we had with several girls at a nightclub," explained T-Low. "It's talking about the club scene, with guys getting out of hand and the female telling him to back up, asking, 'What are you doing?'"