Cheeseball

The "Limp Bizkit craze" seemed to hit Europe a bit later than it did the U.S. Looking back now, the tour in support of their third album, 2000's Chocolate Starfish and the Hotdog Flavored Water, was when you could start seeing cracks in the band's armor. Besides the fact that rap-metal was finally on its way out, this would prove to be the start of the on-again, off-again relationship between the band and guitarist Wes Borland (the only element that many took seriously in the band in the first place), resulting in the group's popularity taking a nosedive on subsequent releases. But overseas in the time frame of 2000, the Bizkit boys could still headline enormoudomes, and get the teens bobbing up and down in unison to rage and rubbery detuned guitar riffs…

In early 1990, when she was one of the biggest pop stars in the world, Gloria Estefan suffered a broken vertebrae when her tour bus was struck in an accident, and her miraculous recovery from that near tragedy greatly informed her successive album, Into the Light. Though often noted as a "comeback" album, that descriptor is misleading. Yes, Into the Light is a comeback – a comeback from her accident, that is. It's not a comeback in the sense that her previous album, Cuts Both Ways, had been a failure or even a disappointment. No, Estefan hadn't fallen off, so to speak, with that album. Quite the opposite. It was a monster hit, breaking into the Top Ten and scoring a couple of high-charting ballads: "Don't Wanna Lose You" and "Here We Are." It also marked a drastic shift away from the unabashed dance-pop of her Miami Sound Machine output toward a more respectable adult contemporary appeal. This shift affected not only her image but also her audience as a result, and that shift is even more apparent on Into the Light. In fact, the shift seems complete, as this is full-fledged adult contemporary album with serious themes and toned-down production.