Aaron Carter

By: Andre Csillag/Shutterstock

Twelve years before Justin Bieber dropped his debut album, My World, and shook the tween universe with his side-swept bangs, there was Aaron Carter.

The younger brother of Backstreet Boy's heartthrob Nick Carter, Aaron was responsible for some of the most iconic hits of 2000, from "Aaron's Party (Come Get It)" and "That's How I Beat Shaq" to his overplayed cover of The Strangelove's "I Want Candy." Carter arguably "paved the way" for today's tween pop stars like Bieber to become cultural phenomenons.

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My Humps Black Eyed Peas

It's hard to think about the music that came after 2000 and before 2010.

Filled with a seemingly endless collection of plastic, surface-level pop songs that served no purpose other than to dominate the radio and wriggle themselves into our eardrums, the first half of the 2000s was a special kind of terrible.

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CULTURE

A Defense of Face Tattoos (and a Few Cautionary Tales)

Face tattoos are far from just SoundCloud trends.

Photo by Nina Westervelt/Shutterstock

Face tattoos have a pretty bad rap.

We love to make fun of them, laughing at the knowledge that there are people out there who are going to be stuck with a garish numerical figure on their foreheads or a phrase like "Always Tired" under their eyes for the rest of their lives.

On the other hand, tattoos in general have always received harsh criticism. Though every millennial seems to have at least a few fine-line arm tattoos nowadays, all over the world and in many faiths, tattoos are sacrilegious, evidence of Satan's corrupting influence or its many iterations. Thus, tattoos have always been mechanisms of subversion and counterculture, whether as markers of membership in certain groups, or monikers of individuality, or signifiers of devotion to a certain kind of art or person. They've been ways of reclaiming or altering one's physical appearance, ways of taking ownership of a body that, all too often, capitalism and the media try to devour or force to align with some standard.

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