Last month, we wrote about a new music festival that will soon be heading to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the only town that could rival Austin as the world’s most potent hipster enclave. The inaugural 90s Fest is exactly what it sounds like, filled with artists, celebrities, and products you thought you’d never see again.
We were kind of harsh. Our reaction to 90s Fest wasn’t nostalgia, but confusion. It feels like we may just be reaching a point where we can’t discern what is a genuine love of old entertainment and products, what’s shrouded in hipster irony, and what’s just another way to sell stuff.
But frankly, it’s not hard to understand why we seem to love the ’90s and the early ’00s so much. It just seemed like a simpler time. Whether that’s actually true or not is irrelevant. We may look at it through sepia-tinted shades, but all of those ’90s memories make us happy.
Naturally, many of our fondest ’90s and early ’00s memories have to do with music, whether the struggle to actually get music in a pre-iTunes world or consuming the ridiculous music products foisted on consumers in that era. Here are just a few of our absolute favourites.
