90s Nostalgia

Recent nostalgia for the 90s in popular culture has me reexamining my childhood experience of the world. The 90s in its entirety excites me with its myriad of baggy pants, platform shoes, braided hairstyles and neon-colored rave culture, despite my being born in 1992.

Earlier today I began to think about the idea that people lose their imagination as they grow older. My childhood mind was absent of the filters of intellectuality, analysis, criticism and much thought in general. My mind absorbed colors, shapes and sounds without rationalization or understanding, and thus everything it encountered it intensified. As a child, the world acted upon my senses and my mind took it in the way lungs take in air after one holds their breath under water. And as I grew older I learned to act back—to intellectualize, to analyze, to criticize.

This could explain why I’m nostalgic for a decade I remember only the concluding three or four years of—a decade I didn’t experience in its entirety. My childhood is locked in a box of VHS tapes, a Sony Walkman and my mother’s CrazySexyCool cassette she’d play in the car when there was nothing good on the radio. This could explain why no matter how many giant, geometric shapes and colorful wigs current pop stars adorn themselves with, they’ll never be as amazing as Aaliyah’s bangs, Melanie B’s leopard print pants and Missy Elliott’s Tim’s.

Am I nostalgic for the 90s or my childhood self?