Cast your mind back to 2004. George W. Bush was President of the United States. Usher's 'Yeah!', D12's 'My Band', and Eamon's 'F*ck It (I Don't Want You Back)' were on the airwaves. At the movies we were blessed with Mean Girls, Shaun of the Dead, Anchorman, and... uh... Catwoman. Okay, scratch that last one.
While most of the world had no clue what it was at the time, Mark Zuckerberg started up a social networking website, which some of you are probably pretty familiar with by this point. Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake were involved in the infamous Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction. Friends came to an end after 10 seasons, and so did Sex and the City. Britney Spears got married... twice.
It's weird to think that all of that happened 14 years ago. Yep, there are a bunch of kids in their mid-teens right now, going about their business, who weren't even born when Britney's 'Toxic' came out. Feel old yet?
One more bizarre moment from the year of 2004 that you may have forgotten about was an embarrassing incident involving Ashlee Simpson on Saturday Night Live. Honestly, until today I had completely forgotten about the infamous lip-syncing fiasco myself, but now we are all here to re-live the cringe.
Now that Simpson is coming back to the small screen with her new TV show 'ASHLEE + EVAN', she's addressed how she feels about that moment, 14 years ago.
Back in '04, she was a pretty big star on the music scene. She had her own TV series, 'The Ashlee Simpson Show,' and her first album 'Autobiography' was in the charts. That album debuted at number one on the US Billboard 200 chart, and was certified triple platinum that year - with the single 'Pieces of Me' being a highlight.
However, it all went south when she put on a performance of the single on SNL. The band started playing, but Ashlee missed the cue, the voice track started to play, and she wasn't moving her lips. Pretty awkward, right? Well, to diffuse the tension, she did a little dance. A dance that is now burned into my memory.
Afterwards, she shifted the blame to her band. "I feel so bad," she said at the time. "My band started playing the wrong song and I didn't know what to do."
Later on, her record label issued a statement claiming that there was a computer glitch, so when a member of her band tried to play pre-recorded drums, the vocals played instead. A few days later, Ashlee explained on her blog that she recorded the backing vocals just in case, as she'd been having problems with her voice.
"I can’t cancel something like SNL," she wrote, according to Today. “You and I know that even if I synched on it or not, I’d still get seen by millions, maybe even make a few more fans." Regardless, her career seemed to fizzle out past this point, and she became the butt of many go-to jokes during the time. Recently, she spoke to E! News about what happened, and seems pretty over it:
"It's definitely not difficult to talk about…that was a very long time ago. It's something that happened to me and things in life happen to you and they make you stronger and they make you a better performer, a better person.
"I think things like that build your character and your strength and it's how you handle them."
Her new show, in which she stars with her husband Evan Ross, son of Diana Ross, premieres this September.
