Bring Back The 90's

I’m pretty sure that long road trips play games with my head and make me reminisce about the good ol’ days from my past when everything was so much simpler. That’s what happens when you stumble on to a 90’s hits playlist on Spotify somewhere in between Scipio and Beaver.

For full effect, download “Walking on Broken Glass” by Annie Lennox, and play at maximum volume throughout the duration of this post. And why did I choose that symphony you may ask? Because it is the theme song that epitomizes the decade I miss with a passion.

I never thought I would ever say the phrase “Back in my day”. That’s just an expression usually designated for someone who keeps their teeth in jars of Alka Seltzer and is legitimately looking forward to buying a new pack of diapers for themselves, but needless to say,” back in my day”, life was just awesome. True story, it really was. Back in my day things were so much simpler. Back in my day we had professional basketball players who made blockbuster movies with an all-star cast of cartoons and Bill Murray instead of idiot sports icons who cheated on or hit their wives in open public.

You see kids I grew up in a decade called the 90’s. Not to be confused with the 80’s, which was a neon concoction of Jennifer Grey movies, Teddy Ruxpin, and hairspray. Ask my Mom, the 80’s was an ugly time in all of our lives. The 90’s is also much different from the dreaded 00’s. How do you even say those numbers correctly anyway? The 00’s was a bunch of TRL reruns and Razr phones soaked in pictures of Paris Hilton. The 90’s were, well the 90’s were just perfect. All the way from the pilot episode of The Simpsons to the introduction of Napster and every single Goosebumps novel and slap bracelet in between. The 90’s was ten years of magic doused in Surge.

The 90’s was a decade of book covers and Bill Nye. Birkenstocks and boy bands. The 90’s owned one-hit wonders. Lou Bega, Chumbawamba, Sisqo, Deep Blue Something, The Rembrandts, Harvey Danger, the list could go on for miles. How many of us have cried to The Verve’s rendition of “Bittersweet Symphony”?  It was a decade where our own version of Spotify was when we made personal mixtapes by calling the local radio stations and requesting our favorite songs and then hitting the red record button on our stereo right when the guitar started to come on over the DJ’s voice. Yeah, mixtapes kids. We invented mixtapes. A true sign that you actually cared for another person.

90’s kids were so much more responsible in our youth. We were more organized and productive. We were taught the principles of marriage, career, financial, and family planning with sheets of paper with the letters M.A.S.H. boldly scribbled at the top. We wrote out, folded and gave notes to our crushes instead of just sending them a measly text message. Our lives weren’t dictated by social media distractions in the palms of our hands. The 90’s were the days when we could figure out what someone was thinking simply by asking them a question about their life, instead of stalking their Twitter feed or liking a bunch of pictures from their album. The 90’s was when the dial-up connection on our home PC’s was so mind-numbingly slow that we actually went outside in our backyards and made up our own characters and storylines.  

Things have changed. Life is much more harsh, more severe. The envelope has been pushed to its limits. Heck, when I was a freshman my Dad once broke a Blink-182 CD because he didn’t like the fact that it had a picture of a bunch of guys standing around in their underwear. Have you heard Pitbull, watched Chris Brown, or seen any of the Maroon 5 album covers? They make Mark, Tom, and Travis look like Saints. The 90’s was just so much more smooth. Heck, the worst public offense was our President lying through his teeth about having an affair with his secretary. Ok, never mind. That was kind of messed up. But we still love the saxophone-playing senator from Arkansas anyway.

Skee-Lo put it best with his one-hit wonder “I Wish”. I wish we still had the 90’s. I wish we still had bubble tape, Koosh balls, Oregon Trail and those little pencils that had like seven different pieces of lead all stacked on top of each other. I wish we had T.G.I.F. and Saturday morning cartoons. I wish I could keep all my work papers in a Trapper Keeper and go home and try to figure out where Carmen Sandiego really was hiding. I wish Macaulay Culkin would keep slapping his face, and I could roll one pant leg up to my knee. I wish I was a little bit taller. I wish I was a baller. I wish I had a girl who looked good, I would call her.

Cue rabbit in a hat, with a bat, and six-four impala.