Love Is A '90s Mixtape

A few months ago, I was getting my hair cut on the salon's last slot, late on a Friday afternoon; it was just me and one other patron. My hairdresser and I were chatting, as you do; I had a pleasant feeling of calm and well-being. At a certain point, the conversation came to a lull, and my hairdresser -- who I think was just barely north of thirty -- asked, "What is with this music?" I realized then that it's not normal, in the year 2014, to be out somewhere in public and year songs like "Find The River" or "Polyester Bride" or "No Myth," as we had been for the past half-hour, and told my hairdresser, "Someone my age just plugged her phone into the speakers." Obviously, I was right. And apparently, that same person my age has moved on from cutting hair on Melrose Avenue to being the music supervisor on Hindsight, and I am very into it.

In case you haven't been watching Hindsight -- and judging by the lack of buzz for this really fun show, you're not -- the premise is that, on the eve of her second wedding, Becca hurtles backward in time twenty years, to the day of her first wedding, and then stays there, getting the chance to make different decisions than she did the first time. The (few) viewers who weren't the characters' age in 1995 probably think it's hilarious -- not just the characters' wardrobes (my god, the chokers) or the barely-nascent internet (the iPhone still being more than a decade away), but I have to think that even they don't have any quarrel with the soundtrack.

(See also: the London season of The Real World, which I watched for the first time in the early '00s with my esteemed colleague Kim. MTV was having a marathon of the whole run of the show to date, and I drove from Toronto, where I lived at the time, to Syracuse to watch it with her. I couldn't figure out for a while why London seemed so superior to the two previous seasons we'd just finished watching, until I realized it was the music: every other song was one I'd just heard coming out of the car CD player on my way to Kim's house.)

Granted, you can make any decade seem cool with some judicious picks from the top of the Billboard charts: this is how soundtracks like those of Forrest Gump or The Big Chill come to be. And even Hindsight goes for some obvious Now That's What I Call Music choices -- your "Linger," your "Stay." But this week's episode gets a little deeper into the '90s catalogue by opening with Matthew Sweet's "Sick Of Myself," and even before the action starts, I feel like I'm home.

I don't want to take the rest of my generation down with me, so I will only say that I have reached a point in my life where discovering new music is something I don't think about much anymore. Some of it isn't my fault: it's not like there are that many record stores anymore where I might walk around browsing and decide to buy whatever the clerk had put on that sounded cool. (Well, my old neighbourhood store, Soundscapes, is still keeping on in Toronto, but I no longer live within walking distance.) The advent of Bluetooth car adapters has meant that I don't stumble on things listening to the radio: if I'm driving, I'm listening to a podcast. I see people tweeting about albums sometimes, but rarely make it a point to check out whatever seems to be a big deal. I had been reading "Roar" jokes for weeks (maybe months!) before it came on the sound system at the gym and I figured out that's what it was. One of my favourite former bosses works at Spotify, but can I be 100% with you for a second? I'm not totally sure what Spotify is.

Basically: if you want this forty-year-old to check out your newest track, put it in a Target commercial.

It's not that I think it's impossible as an older person to stay on top of the music scene. (Though being the kind of person who doesn't describe it as "the music scene" is probably part of it?) I'm saying that, for me, the music that has the tightest grip on my heart is the stuff I was listening to in my late teens and early twenties -- what came out of the radio when I first learned how to drive, and would put on my Doc Martens and go to the video store, just like the characters in Hindsight. Not everything about the show is pleasantly nostalgic, and purposefully so: a lot of aspects of Becca's life are harder (or even just more inconvenient) because the world hasn't caught up to what used to be her normal when she lived in 2015, and I'm not only referring to her pager, but good lord, PAGERS WERE ONCE A THING. But the soundtrack of her life -- the jangly guitars; the hip-pop crossovers; even the Spin Doctors, you guys! -- is on point. I mean, at the end of the pilot, Becca may have misgivings about her sudden and inexplicable twenty-year do-over, as any of us would. But there's no way her mood could be anything but euphoric once her best friend Lolly goes to the jukebox and puts on "Groove Is In The Heart."