A Playlist For Your Final Day of Xanga

It's truly the end of an era as Xanga, once one of the Internet's most popular and innovative blog sites, will vaporize into ghosts of the world wide web at the end of the day today. Before Facebook, Twitter and even MySpace, Xanga was the popular customizable hub for friends both near and far to share their opinions and experiences. Launched in 1999 with mainly media reviews in mind, Xanga went on to serve 30 million uses in the early 2000s. With its accessible basic blogging tools and limitless customizability, it became the choice of web fandom and high school chatter for a few solid years. With the plug being pulled today, we at the Weekly decided to offer what we could to help you cope and bring you this playist for the final day of Xanga. Fire up the 56K and revisit those awkward angsty high school years, it's Xanga time.

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Freelance Hellraiser – “A Stroke of Genie(Us)” 2002

Xanga attracted many users from various walks of life, gave them each the same chance to be heard as well as the freedom to be themselves. As a result, with millions of users on the same site, each one had an entirely different highly-customizable experience. The excitement for such a site is comparable to the contemporary explosion of mash-ups that began to happen around the same time Xanga popped off. One of the most memorable had to have been the Strokes vs. Christina Aguilera mix “A Stroke of Genie(Us)” a song that takes the pulse racing elements of two different songs to create something brand new. Just like Xanga.


A Simple Plan – “Untitled” 2005

For many of us, those Xanga years were how we shared all the emotions we had bottled up as high schoolers. All the exuberant fun of dances, tender moments in private, and, of course, the pain of pretty much everything. A lot of us just wanted someone to talk to, and with Xanga, you could talk to pretty much everybody all at once. Of course, this would lead to moments of throwing your hands up and asking “How could this happen to me?” Yes, dear Xanga, A Simple Plan can relate.


Limp Bizkit – “The Truth” 2005

The highest profile celebrity on Xanga was probably Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst who used the site to give a window into his thoughts and his process of making music. His page, American Alien, was named by Rolling Stone as one of the best rock star blogs. It was Durst's first foray into social media, and now that he's become a Twitter darling, his site serves as a fine archive of how to get your Durst fix without being limited to 140 characters. If you wanted to know what was going through Durst's brain while making the maligned mid-2000s Bizkit output, this is your best best.

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Heems – “Bangles” featuring Fat Tony and Big Baby Ghandi 2012

While Paul Wall had the Internet going nuts, and by the mid 2000s you had media obsessed MCs namedropping whatever media extensions they could, the number of rappers to actually mention the word “xanga” was incredibly slim. Fat Tony is one of the brave few, joining Heems for “Bangles” and remembering “Just used the internet and took pictures / Used to put them up on my LJ, my Xanga, my MySpace,” a common practice for hip-hop fans of the social media of yesteryear.


Vitamin C – “Graduation (Friends Forever)” 2000

You probably haven't heard this song in a few years, and you probably haven't been on Xanga in about the same amount of time either. But Xanga, to its dying day (today), still maintained a pretty strong group of loyalists. It hosted several communities of people who just wanted to share their thoughts with likeminded individuals, a prime tenant of basic human interaction. For some it was the most comfortable and preferred outlet. But while the end of Xanga brings with us the flood of memories of our time on the site, no matter when or where it was, it's important to remember that we're moving on. Those eProps came from the heart, and that subscription list is just waiting for you to take the next step. So bravely enter the post-Xanga world knowing that we're still friends forever.

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