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World Cafe 30th Anniversary Playlist: 2001

World Cafe celebrates 30 years with a 2001 playlist.
WXPN
World Cafe celebrates 30 years with a 2001 playlist.

To celebrate the 30th anniversary of World Cafe, we're looking back and posting playlists from each year of the show. As music has evolved over the years, so have our playlists, which have grown to reflect a much wider range of music than when we first set out.

Two decades ago at this time, we were looking back on a year punctuated with big pop hits and a ton of breakouts throughout rock, indie-rock, hip-hop and alternative music.

Those breakouts included Gorillaz, The Strokes, The White Stripes (their third record, which was a catapult for their profile), The Shins, and My Morning Jacket. We were introduced to a young Pharrell Williams, along with his Neptunes production partner Chad Hugo, via N.E.R.D. and In Search Of...On the pop side, Train and John Mayer each released massively popular records, and Jay-Z released the instant-classic Blueprint.

Sandwiched in between the pop, rock and hip-hop albums that year were excellent releases from Lucinda Williams, Gillian Welch, Bob Dylan, Drive-By Truckers, Spoon, Ben Folds (his first solo album sans the Five), Rufus Wainwright, Pete Yorn and blues legend Buddy Guy.

Copyright 2021 XPN

Bruce Warren is assistant general manager for programming of WXPN in Philadelphia. Besides serving as executive producer of World Café, Warren also contributes to Paste magazine and writes for two blogs: Some Velvet Blog and WXPN's All About The Music Blog.