iTunes Party Shuffle can be a magical thing.
At any given moment a new song can pop up and take you back to a moment in your past or remind you of something you must do today or what is to come in your future.
It has this weird quality to choose the exact song you need in that exact moment to describe how you're feeling or what's going on in your life.
Or it can awaken the nostalgic monster inside you and immediately you're back in a previous life doing and saying things maybe you had forgotten.
Something like this happened to me the other day.
As you know, I've been feeling pretty nostalgic recently. So it's no wonder how happy it made me to hear a song from my boy band past shuffle up on iTunes.
I'm not talking about NSYNC or the Backstreet Boys or UFO (oops, I mean LFO) or 98 Degrees. Oh no, I'm talking about 2gether.
If you aren't familiar with 2gether, you must not have been a teenybopper in 2000 when MTV debuted their first tv movie ever, which, like most tv movies, covers whatever is current at the moment. And what was current in 2000 was boy bands.
It was February of 2000, probably the height of boy band hysteria. I was feverishly counting down the days until No Strings Attached came out. Then I heard about this mockumentary premiering on MTV, called 2gether. Hmm, a movie about a fake boy band? Would this be popular among the dozens of boy bands already out there?
And for me, the answer is yes. I immediately made plans to watch the movie over at my best friend's house . She wasn't a boy band fan really, but she indulged in my boy band habit as long as I didn't make fun of her obsession with Ricky Martin. But really, we were two peas in a pod, since Ricky Martin got his start in a boy band.
Anyways, we watched the movie and were instantly hooked. It wasn't long before we were quoting it, singing the songs and picking out our favorites (mine was and still is Chad, the shy one).
And that was just the beginning. 2gether actually became a legit boy band. They had a video on TRL (back when TRL was good) and even opened up for Britney Spears (back when Britney wasn't crazy).
It's a song from their second album (yes, they had two albums!) that came up on my iTunes that put me on this way back machine. The Hardest Part of Breaking Up (Is Getting Back Your Stuff). Catchy, no?
Well, maybe 2gether won't stand the test of time, but in that moment, they were what I'd like to call a snarky pop music pleasure.
Because they never took themselves too seriously. It was always about poking fun at boy bands and the hysteria that followed them around. But even when they became one of them, it was still all good fun.
And that's why I love my iTunes Party Shuffle. Just a single song can bring up all this stuff from my pop culture past.
Who knows what a tap of the next button will bring?
