WASHINGTON — When you think of D.C.’s major cultural exports, punk and go-go come to mind. But over the past decade, a new contender has emerged: ’90s nostalgia.
The No Scrubs: ’90s Dance Party, which launched in D.C. in 2003, has gone on to pack venues in Atlanta; Birmingham, Ala.; Charlottesville, Va.; and Baltimore, according to co-founder and DJ Will Eastman. D.C.-based ’90s cover band White Ford Bronco has risen to monster success since forming in 2008, recently playing to a crowd of 1,200 in New York. Peach Pit, a ’90s dance night at DC9, is taking the party to Minneapolis for the event’s 10th anniversary. And a new R&B-focused event, Nostalgia: The 90s Experience, may soon pop up in Los Angeles after its inaugural edition here, according to organizer Fred Baum, 50.
“The interest in the ’90s is going strong everywhere, but it’s really strong in the DMV,” Baum said of the D.C.-Maryland-Virginia area.
One likely reason D.C. is a ’90s nostalgia hotbed is the region’s great concentration of millennials, who are getting misty-eyed for their youth as they take on grown-up responsibilities. But ’90s love is turning out to be a bigger phenomenon than the usual, 10-year nostalgia cycle. Starting just a few years after the turn of the 21st century, it’s since become a major force in fashion (scrunchies), music (MC Hammer’s on tour) and screens both large (“The Lion King”) and small (“BH90210”).
Another factor that may be driving ’90s madness is our current dumpster fire of a century, which ignited on Sept. 11, 2001, blazed on with the Great Recession and continues to cough up fresh nightmares on an almost daily basis, says Jacob Juhl, a nostalgia researcher at the University of Southampton in England.
“People become nostalgic in response to adversity or psychologically negative states,” Juhl says. “Nostalgia helps restore people to a psychological equilibrium.”
Scientists have induced nostalgia in the lab by prompting people to contemplate the vast and random universe as well as by simply pumping up the air conditioning and making people feel uncomfortably cold, Juhl says. Researchers have also found that nostalgia comforts us by making us feel connected to one another and to a shared past, he adds.
Since the ’90s were the last moment before the internet splintered mass culture, the decade is particularly good nostalgia fodder, says Peach Pit DJ and founder Matt Bailer, 42.
“In the ’90s, everyone listened to the same one or two radio stations in their city that played all the Top 40 hits, spanning all kinds of genres,” he says. “After that, people started having their own ways of accessing and acquiring and listening to the music they chose to listen to, so there wasn’t such a general pool of commonality.”
Without those shared cultural touchstones, the current decade may prove difficult to reminisce about down the road, says David Newman, a nostalgia researcher at the University of Southern California.
“Since everything seems to be more individualistic now and people are all having different experiences, we might have fewer of these collectivistic nostalgic experiences overall,” Newman says.
Mass culture in the 21st century feels more like a grab bag of random events than a coherent narrative, notes Nick Gatewood, 40, an Ohio-based rapper who goes by the name Vice Souletric and tours the country with his nostalgia event, the Nu 90s Experience.
“Everything moves too fast now. By the time you’ve heard about something, there’s already a backlash,” he says. “No one is going to have a deep, personal connection to Pizza Rat.”
Another factor driving ’90s nostalgia is how the internet has made the past more accessible than ever before, says White Ford Bronco singer-guitarist Diego Valencia, 37. In the ’90s, you had to wait for your favorite song to play on the radio or buy a CD, so music felt more precious back then. Now you can watch or listen to anything you want, from any era, on demand — and that seems to have made people more interested in rehashing and remixing the past rather than creating new, original things.
“If you listen to contemporary music now, a lot of songs sound like something that we’ve already heard before. If you look at, say, ‘Uptown Funk’ or ‘Blurred Lines,’ they sound so much like other songs,” Valencia says. “Or there’s DJ Khaled, who has made a career out of taking other people’s ideas and adding his name to it.”
While Valencia suspects our extended ’90s obsession marks the end of reminiscing as we know it, Eastman, 50, sees a future in nostalgia. In fact, he’s banked on it with another party, Hot in Herre: 2000s Dance Party.
