Nearly nine years ago I felt compelled to call out a righteous streak of songs I happened to hear on the radio on a ride home.

Yesterday I was bumming around town with my boys in our Honda Accord when I opted to pop the FM on instead of their go-to musical fare. Here was the lineup we were treated to:

• “Genie in a Bottle” by Christina Aguilera 
• “Always Be My Baby” by Mariah Carey
• “Complicated” by Avril Lavigne 
• “Live and Let Die” by Wings
• “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” by Michael Jackson
• “Bye Bye Bye” by *NSYNC
• “Free Fallin’” by Tom Petty

You can quibble with the quality of some of these tunes all you want, but I won’t hear it. It was one bop after another on a perfect windows-down sunny day.

It did make me realize that the music I considered “oldies” when I was a kid, like The Beatles for example, was the same amount of time in the past then as *NSYNC’s heyday was to today. So that’s… something. 💀