Like us, you may have noticed recently that the abundance of pop hits coming out today are starting to sound just a little bit generic and at times, dare we say, even a bit dull and unflattering. It seems we might currently be in an era where pop music is struggling to find a bit of variety. But fear not, due to this abundance of today\u2019s generic sounding hits, there very much seems to be a revival happening which artists are using to spice things up again.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s right, the 90s are very much back in fashion! And you really don\u2019t need to look too far to see the influence this era is now having over today\u2019s pop music. The exact reason for this is hard to pin down – whether people love it purely for the nostalgic element, or whether this decade simply just did produce more vibrant and better music, with it\u2019s influence now rubbing off on today\u2019s artists – we do not know for certain, what we do know is the 90s are very much back, and judging on how positively this revival is effecting today\u2019s pop music, we\u2019d very much like this era to stick around for a while.<\/p>\n
Halsey\u2019s<\/strong> latest hit single, \u201cWithout Me,\u201d is in many ways entirely of the moment: a mid-tempo track with intense confessional lyrics\u2014seemingly about a recent breakup\u2014and a buzzy video<\/a> that features a look-alike for her real-life ex, G-Eazy.<\/strong> But it also has a decidedly old-school secret weapon: Justin Timberlake\u2019s<\/strong> 2002 hit \u201cCry Me a River,\u201d which famously was written about his<\/em> real-life ex, Britney Spears,<\/strong> and had a video featuring her look-alike. In the bridge of the song, Halsey slightly alters the lyrics to the Timberlake classic, serving to both evoke memories of the pervasive pop classic (as well as the video and the corresponding narrative around the song), while also, as they say, making it her own.<\/em><\/p>\n Evoking a song from the past\u2014whether via similar lyrics or an actual sample\u2014is of course nothing new. In all arenas of pop culture, nostalgia is a juggernaut force, whether it be the continuing churn of TV remakes or as evidenced in, say, Kim Kardashian<\/strong> dressing as Pamela Anderson<\/strong> for Halloween. And samples from previous decades have been a hallmark of pop for ages; sometimes an entire song is constructed around an iconic sample, like the 2009 Kesha-Flo Rida<\/strong> smash \u201cRight Round,\u201d which was built around the 1985 Dead or Alive hit. Other times it is a bit more subtle, in the way M.I.A.\u2019s<\/strong> \u201cPaper Planes\u201d borrowed a riff from The Clash. (Oftentimes, this sort of \u201chomage\u201d can hew so closely so as to result in a lawsuit, as Bruno Mars<\/strong> can tell you<\/a>.)<\/p>\n But the current nostalgia wave in pop marks a transition point: not only are we getting the earliest rounds of late 90s and even early-00s nostalgia, but it\u2019s coming from singers who were children, or barely even born, when all this culture came around the first time. In addition to Halsey\u2019s J.T.-spiration, Troye Sivan<\/strong> and Charli XCX<\/strong> recently released a song titled \u201c1999,\u201d which features references to Eminem,<\/strong> Spears, and Jonathan Taylor-Thomas<\/strong> (!) among many others. The video<\/a>, which has been viewed more than 12 million times, features an assortment of visual references, as well, including The Matrix<\/em> and TLC\u2019s \u201cWaterfalls\u201d video. (That many of these references did not actually occur in the year 1999 was not an apparent concern of theirs.)<\/p>\n