"Fat Lip" by Sum 41
Three voices trading off one bratty anthem — "storming through the party like my name was El Niño." It ruled MTV and every skate video in 2001, went 2× Platinum, and the band never even meant for it to be a single.
Sum 41 released "Fat Lip" on April 3, 2001, off their debut album All Killer No Filler — the last track written for the record, assembled from a riff, a chorus, and verses the band had been sitting on separately, and never intended as a single. The three-way vocal trade between Deryck Whibley, Dave "Brownsound" Baksh, and drummer Steve Jocz clicked anyway: the song topped Billboard's Modern Rock Tracks chart, reached #66 on the Hot 100 and #8 on the UK Singles Chart, and hit #1 on MTV's Total Request Live.
That run made it shorthand for early-2000s rock culture — the sound of skate parks, headphone splitters, and every household with a Tony Hawk game in the disc tray. It was bratty, fast, and shouted in groups. The single went 2× Platinum in the US, and its legacy is how accidental it all felt: a leftover track nobody planned to release became the defining blast of the pop-punk summer of 2001.
Similar items
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater
Activision and Neversoft's skateboarding game, first released in 1999, about chaining tricks into massive combos and collecting the letters S-K-A-T-E across increasingly iconic venues. The punk, ska, and hip-hop soundtrack defined the era. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 (2000) is widely considered the series' peak and one of the best games ever made.
Avril Lavigne
The Canadian pop-punk singer who defined early-2000s teen rebellion with a necktie knotted over a tank top, chain wallets, and an I-don't-care-what-you-think attitude. Her 2002 debut Let Go crashed onto radio with "Complicated" and "Sk8er Boi"—instant anthems—and positioned her as the voice of a generation of mall-goers who wanted to be skaters but shopped at Abercrombie. Follow-ups Under My Skin and The Best Damn Thing kept her reign solid through 2007.
Emo / Scene-Kid Wave
The mid-to-late-2000s youth subculture built around emo and pop-punk bands like My Chemical Romance, Fall Out Boy, Panic! at the Disco, and Dashboard Confessional. The look: long side-swept bangs over one eye, black skinny jeans, band tees, studded belts, thick eyeliner, Converse, and dyed or straightened hair. It lived on MySpace through dramatic high-angle selfies and Top 8 drama, shaping a generation's teenage aesthetic.
"1985" by Bowling for Soup
Pop-punk's sneakiest hit started as an SR-71 album track before Bowling for Soup rebuilt it into a double-Platinum sing-along about a suburban mom stuck in the era of "Springsteen, Madonna, way before Nirvana." The cruel joke wrote itself: the song about being nostalgic for the wrong decade is now the thing you're nostalgic for.