Entertainment: Nostalgia for '90s

Around here, we have a ton of nostalgia for the '90s, and part of that is due to the incredible music from the decade. There are so many unforgettable hits of the era, but right now we're thinking about the tunes that made you put your Beanie Babies aside, turn your boombox up, and get on the floor. If you're looking for the perfect mix of dance songs from the 1990s, look no further, because we've got 100 of them for that theme party you know you want to have.

In deepest, hippest Brooklyn a few years ago, I noticed a girl wearing tapered, bellybutton-high, comically unflattering denim shorts that nobody... well, certainly no 20 something had worn since the height of grunge. It was a visual shock, a retro fashion statement outlandish even by Williamsburg's infamous standards.

Today, you'll see '90s styles baggy jeans, chain wallets, corduroys, flannel button-downs, flowered Elaine Benes dresses, bucket hats, even bleached hair on any block of the city and beyond. '90s theme parties, '90s karaoke nights, '90s radio stations, countless '90s Internet listicles...

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No Doubt, Blink-182 and the Spice Girls got back together, and Sublime (kind of) got back together with a new, sound-alike singer, reminiscent of how boomers' favorite bands would tour with a dubious ratio of living original members.

My generation's favorite music had become golden oldies, and our adolescences had become ripe for marketing: Jurassic Park converted to 3D, Boy Meets World reimagined as Girl Meets World, and Tupac Shakur performing at Coachella, albeit in hologram form. There's a blockbuster Ninja Turtles movie in production, Will Smith scores millions of YouTube hits whenever he breaks out the Fresh Prince rap, and Urban Outfitters blasts Salt-n-Peppa for shoppers browsing through '90s-influenced apparel.

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Nostalgia is a cycle. In the aughts, our pop-culture glamorized the 1980s, itself a decade when Americans glamorized the 1950s. And, really, the '90s were a time of nostalgia for the '60s and '70s, from Woodstock II to Austin Powers to Oasis aping the Beatles to Tarantino resurrecting Travolta and Grier. Glamorizing the past, though, means sanitizing it.

There's another problem with too much nostalgia. You stop living in the now. When I realized that my music collection overwhelmingly dated to the '90s, and I could only name a handful of bands from the past few years, I knew it was time to expand my horizons. Because at some point, you're not actually enjoying an old song, you're just enjoying the memory of enjoying it. The '90s were an objectively better time, and its culture from music to movies to sitcoms, and even the goofy fashion are still worth loving. The colors were brighter, the humor was zanier, and nobody cared about zombies because everybody didn't feel half-alive.

But culture must move forward, not backward, or else it loses all purpose. And it's the same for us as individuals if we want to feel fully alive, which is something that can't simply be remembered.

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