Late 1990s Pop Music Trivia Quiz

Answer: *NSYNC

Perhaps their best-known, it's the one that propelled the five-piece boy band from stardom to superstardom, featuring the tracks "Bye Bye Bye", "It's Gonna Be Me", and "This I Promise You". By this point, *NSYNC was perhaps the only group to rival the Backstreet Boys in popularity. "No Strings Attached" ended up having the highest first-week sales of any album released to date, a record it would hold until Adele's release of "25" in 2015.

They would release one more album, "Celebrity", before splitting up.

Answer: 98 Degrees

While other boy bands of the '90s were often purpose-build by record labels and talent scouts, 98 Degrees defied expectations by forming independently, eventually signing to Motown Records and releasing a handful of increasingly popular albums (and doing the typical Christmas album). Brothers Nick and Drew Lachey continued to find B-list fame in the years after the band waned in popularity with the former marrying Jessica Simpson and the latter joining the cast of "Spamalot" on Broadway.

Answer: Britney Spears

Both of the songs in the question were tracks from her first album, "...Baby One More Time", which was also the name of the song that jumpstarted her career into pop music. She would become one of the most profitable artists of the next decades, releasing several hit albums and reshaping the pop-dance scene before settling into a Vegas residency in the late 2010s.

Her album, and other tracks (like "Sometimes") were amongst the most heard on radios going into the new millennium.

Answer: The Dixie Chicks

Then known as The Dixie Chicks, this threesome of country musicians were one of the top acts in the genre going into the 2000s though they made their mark with soundtrack singles and their fourth and fifth albums ("Wide Open Spaces" and "Fly"). By this point they'd already pushed out tracks like "I Can Love You Better" and "Goodbye Earl". Moving into the 2000s they would become featured in the media for their opinions about Republican President George W. Bush to the point where they receded from the industry for nearly a decade.

When they came back to releasing albums in 2020, they rebranded as The Chicks.

Answer: Third Eye Blind

Releasing in 1997, Third Eye Blind's self-titled album featured a number of hits that nabbed substantial radio play. Besides "Jumper", which featured on film soundtracks for decades to come, alternative listeners would be quick to recognize "Semi-Charmed Life" and "How's It Going to Be" from their opening riffs. Third Eye Blind persisted with albums for decades after but never quite achieved the success of those they released in the 1990s, acting as a backing track to teens growing up with radio rock in the decade alongside Weezer and Oasis.

Answer: Blink-182

Being wildly influential in the way of punk rock in the late-1990s, Blink-182 was a trio of musicians who brought their hits into the mainstream quickly, headlining major concert festivals and tours while finding tracks like "What's My Age Again?" being used in movie trailers for teen comedies for years. "What's My Age Again?" was on their third album, "Enema of the State", which released in 1999. The disc also featured "All the Small Things" and "Adam's Song", both of which are definitive classics in the genre.

The music video for "What's My Age Again?", which saw the band running naked through the streets of Los Angeles, was filmed over fifteen hours; they wore flesh-coloured speedos.

Answer: Jennifer Lopez

Releasing in 1999, Jennifer Lopez's "On the 6" featured some of the early Latin-pop-dance stylings that would follow J.Lo throughout her career including "If You Had My Love", "Let's Get Loud", and "Waiting for Tonight". Lopez would stand up next to Spears and Aguilera as one of the major beneficiaries of the early internet era, being featured online, in accessible music videos, and eventually in film in significant ways (often as a star).

Interestingly, Lopez was in films before becoming a singer, having appeared as the lead in "Anaconda" (1997) and as Selena in the biopic of the same name (also 1997).

Answer: Mariah Carey

Carey's first album released in 1990 and she continued to ride the wave of success all through the 1990s, leveraging her career as a massive R&B artist into film and mainstream pop albums. She had seven albums in the 1990s and another five in the 2000s; half of all of these became number one albums on the U.S. Billboard Charts and a couple of them went Diamond per the RCAA.

She broke the record for most number one singles by a solo artist in the United States.

Answer: Brian McKnight

A single from McKnight's fifth album, "Back at One" was a major chart success upon its release in 1999 but saw itself knocked off the chart on a number of occasions by other hits at the end of the decade (most specifically "Smooth" by Santana and Rob Thomas of Matchbox Twenty). Nonetheless, the song helped pull McKnight out of the smoother contemporary stylings he held through the '90s and into the R&B/hip-hop genre he would push into the new millennium.

His album, also titled "Back at One", would be nominated for a Grammy for Best R&B Album, losing to TLC's "FanMail".

Answer: Lonestar

In a time when country music was predominated by solo acts, Lonestar broke into mainstream radio play with "Amazed" in 1999. Though most pop listeners might not hear of Lonestar's other 1990s albums, "Lonely Grill" rose through the charts as a result of this one track which would appear on five Billboard Singles Charts in its year of release.

Interestingly, the song was offered to Boyz II Men before it landed in Lonestar's hands. Like a number of Shania Twain singles of the same era, the song was remade for pop radio, and that's likely the one listeners remember the most.