The Power of Nineties Music: Why I Love Being a Nineties Kid

By Amy Wagner on March 4, 2013

Disclaimer: I am a nineties kid and proud to be one. Born in November of 1992, I remember the late nineties most vividly. Although there are many fantastic aspects of this era, music has to be the one that evokes the most memories for me. The music I’m referring to here is mostly pop, targeted towards people under 20, heck, maybe even under 15.  I’ve always believed that nineties music extended slightly into the early 2000s, as the music was still the fantastic stuff of childhood that I remember to this day. My once-beloved Radio Disney is now full of Miley Cyrus, One Direction, Miranda Cosgrove and Demi Lovato, which is enough to make any nineties kid sigh with exasperation. (And don’t get me started on how the quality and originality of Disney Channel shows has deteriorated - the nineties was their heyday by far.)

Photo from Flickr.com courtesy of City of Marietta, GA

I turned the radio on to a random station a day or two ago, only to hear the beginning of “Fly” by Sugar Ray, with its wonderfully island-esque sounds. I knew what song it was within five seconds and it instantly took me back. I was no longer focusing on what Mark McGrath was singing.  My mind was suddenly flooded with images of me, hair in a scrunchie and decorated with butterfly clips, wearing a cropped t-shirt, shorts, a choker necklace, multiple rings and a slap bracelet (yes, we really did wear all of these accessories at once). Of course I was riding in my mom’s van, accompanied by a few friends, no doubt headed to a Radio Disney event at the nearby mall. Then there’s me, sitting on the floor of my room, listening to CDs on my brand-new blue boombox. (I guarantee that no one fifteen or under knows what that is.)

I remember running around at recess with friends, singing my favorite songs at the top of my lungs because I had listened to them so much that I knew every single word. Going into Sam Goody, also at the mall, and marveling at all of the CDs and making mental lists of which ones I needed to save my allowance for. The joy when I received a shiny CD in its plastic-wrapped glory as a birthday or Christmas gift, because I didn’t know about iTunes or iPods or listening to songs online. All of our amazing music was in CD form, and that was the way we liked it.

I smile as I recall these memories. So much of my childhood revolved around music that I still get an idiotic smile on my face when I hear said music. I have copied all of the CDs onto my laptop with absolutely no shame. To an eighties kid or a 2000s kid, these may merely sound like silly pop songs. To me and my fellow nineties kids, however, they are so much more. They are a bundle of lovely memories from the first portion of our lives that we remember vividly, wrapped up into a three-minute, thirty-second ditty with a particularly catchy chorus. Some of the more well-known songs are American cultural icons that are perhaps just a bit more iconic to us. When played from our laptops on a whim, they bring us back to a simpler time – a time devoid of homework, applying for internships, roommate issues, balancing work and school, final exams, registration, relationship drama and everything else that we struggle with now. And even though this simple time as young children may not be familiar anymore, we can still look back to it…and smile.

So go dig up those CDs from your basement. Find your favorite nineties songs on Youtube. Whatever you do, don’t let these memories go.

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