Taking Out the Garbage, the Era Not the Band

My musical evolution took a distasteful detour in the mid-late 90s with the ownership of a Walkman. I could listen to musical privately, and discovered that there were other radio stations on the tuning dial. Who knew!? This preteen journey into pop culture, which would eventually lead me to Seventeen magazine and kissing boys, started with Meredith Brooks and Ace of Base. When Diddy was Daddy and singing “I’ll Be Missing You” was a girls soccer team favorite and Mariah Carey was a coveted choir concert solo. And who can forget those “Barbie Girls” “walking through a spiderweb” while eating “Millions of Peaches”? Ah, I just threw up in my mouth a bit. Might have to hit up the Tums before I get to 2002…as a 30-year-old music consumer who has had some time to evolve my musical tastes, I look back on most of my high school music memories with distaste. Exhibit A- my first kiss was to a Creed album. The memory is all-around gross. And most makeout tapes included songs from artists like Vertical Horizon, Matchbox Twenty, Crazytown and Goo Goo Dolls. Girlfriends, feel free to jump in if I’m leaving out a classic. Oh, the hours we wasted driving around our small town cruising to Nelly and Jarule.

You can’t talk about this era without mentioning boy bands! I may have missed the New Kids on the Block, but I was fully engaged for the entrance of the Backstreet Boys, 98 degrees and N’Sync. And don’t forget their female counterparts: Brittany, Christina and Shakira. Remember when MTV used to just play music videos and Carson Daly was chubby? We were there for the transition of cassettes to CDs and VHS to DVD to DVR. Kids, I didn’t have a cellphone until I was 20-years-old, and all it did was call people! I can remember when we had house phones, and you had to call a place and not a person. No wonder generations have a hard time relating to one another! We had different experiences with technology, community, media, and values! But I digress, back to my music monologue.

Let’s end the 90s and early 2000s on a positive note. Which artists did adult Lauren keep in her collection? It’s a small and elite group consisting of Nirvana, NIN, Jeff Buckley, Usher, Fiona Apple, Radiohead, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Rage Against the Machine. And most of the list was introduced to me much later by a music savvy boyfriend, but that is a musical journey for another day! Children of the 90s, who still lives in your iTunes library? And be honest!

All the best,
-lr

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