The Reminiscence Bump
Why I think music and movies were better in the 90's
I briefly worked at a retail bookstore (one of the big ones that’s gone the way of Blockbuster Video) in the late 00’s. When business was slow, the employees would hang around the customer service desk and chit-chat for as long as possible before having to go work a cash register or reshelf books (this is what working in a bookstore is actually like). One day we were talking about music, and the manager on duty asked me an interesting question to try to get a sense of my tastes. “What’s the one band whose new album you’ll buy as soon as it comes out before you even hear it?” he asked. It’s the sort of question that can reveal something to the one answering it as well as asking, and it’s much more provocative and probing than the standard “what sort of music are you into” question, one that I rarely have the stamina to try to answer honestly.
Despite the refreshing novelty of the question, however, I didn’t have an answer. There wasn’t a single artist I could think of whose latest work I would buy sound-unheard. You could accuse me of merely being obtuse and uncooperative (for I can surely be those things), but I think the problem was the timing of the question, not my intransigence.
Had he asked the same question a decade earlier, I would have had at least one answer to the question – Dream Theater. (If you don’t know who Dream Theater is, don’t worry – this is about something much bigger than prog-metal.) My introduction to the band (and the genre, actually) was in middle school, maybe 8th grade, when a friend of mine gave me the band’s A Change of Seasons EP to listen to. The title track is a 23-minute prog-rock/metal epic, peppered with a kind of virtuosic musicianship that I had never heard before. I was instantly obsessed.
That obsession lasted for many years, probably reaching max intensity (in hindsight) around 2000, just after the band released Metropolis Part II: Scenes from a Memory. It’s my favorite album (from any artist), even to this day, by quite some margin. I get emotional nearly to the point of tears whenever I listen to it, still. I had it on the other day on the bus on my way home and had to turn it off because I was welling up. On some random weekday afternoon.
Alas, the good times did not last. Their very next album (Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence, 2002) was hit-and-miss. There’s still some stuff that I revisit, to be sure, but not much. Then there was Train of Thought (2003) which was a little less enjoyable still. Then Octavarium (2005), which had a song or two on it that I actively disliked. Then Systematic Chaos (2007), a bit of an uptick, but only for about half of the album. Then Black Clouds & Silver Linings (2009), which the band released along with a full second CD of cover songs. The fact that I only listen to the covers these days tells you everything you need to know about that one. Then came A Dramatic Turn of Events (2011), which I think is the last album I paid to own in some format. It’s ok, probably a little better than the previous few. Then they released an album confusingly just called Dream Theater (2013), which contains a single song I like, “The Looking Glass”, written deliberately as a tribute to Canadian prog-rock trio Rush. It’s a great song.
Then, oh boy, there was 2016’s The Astonishing, a 2-CD concept album about a dystopian future, released alongside a novelization of the story. (And people say prog rock is pretentious.) I listened to the first CD and was so put off that I never subjected myself to the second one. Yikes. Then there was Distance Over Time (2019), which I’ve never listened to, and then A View from the Top of the World (2021), for which the band won its first and only Grammy award. I haven’t listened to that one either.
Why am I talking about all of this? Well, Dream Theater is back again with Parasomnia, released earlier this year. I listened to it! And… I really don’t like it very much. Shocking, I know. I mean it’s not offensive or anything, but I won’t be sad if I never hear it again. (If you’re a metalhead and desperate for music recommendations, here are three: Jinjer’s Duél, Opeth’s The Last Will and Testament, and Opera by Fleshgod Apocalypse.)
I’ve spent quite a lot of time wondering what the hell happened here. My instinct is to blame the band, of course – they used to make good music, and now they don’t, so I don’t like it anymore. I could absolutely write an 8,000-word treatise about why an old album like Images & Words (1992) is objectively superior to Parasomnia (2025), and it would be well-researched and well-argued. Don’t even tempt me.
It would also be nonsense, because I think the actual reason that I prefer 90’s Dream Theater to 2000’s and 2010’s Dream Theater has nothing at all to do with Dream Theater1 and everything to do with the fact that I was a teenager in the 90’s.
Let’s talk about the reminiscence bump.
A big part of how we feel about who we are as individuals comes from autobiographical memories, mental impressions of personal experiences that we can explicitly recall happening to us in specific places and at specific times. As a general principle, the strength of our memory is a function of recency. I can remember what I had for breakfast this morning but not on this same day one year ago. This is a woefully obvious assertion. Human memory, however, is not a decreasing linear function from today back to birth. Instead, for some reason, we have an outsized number of strong autobiographical memories from our teenage years. We also tend to retain our preferences in movies, music, and team sports from that period of life.
If you’re over the age of, say, 35, take a minute and test this theory for yourself. Try to remember what your life was like when you were 16, and then again when you were 26. When I was 16, I was rocking out to Rush and Dream Theater (and Smashing Pumpkins, and King Crimson, and Symphony X, and Primus, and) with my friends, playing in bands both in and out of school, trying to figure out how not to be a dweeb around girls, teaching myself HTML and web programming, watching the Special Edition re-releases of the Star Wars movies in theaters, and cheering the Yankees to their World Series victory over the Padres. When I was 26, I was… I have no fucking clue what I was doing when I was 26. Was I ever even 26?
There are competing theories about why this happens. One, for example, stipulates that our brains require more cognitive processing for novel experiences. Adolescence, then, barreling freight train of novel experiences that it is, makes up the lion’s share of our most strongly encoded memories. Another theory posits that our brains are starting to reach their peak functionality during this period, so memories that happen to form during this developmental milestone remain ever salient. Other frameworks invoke cultural explanations: we’re told that key life experiences like our first kiss, learning to drive, and graduating high school are extremely significant, so we dutifully attach outsized significance to them.
Why does this matter? Two reasons I can think of. First, it’s important that we all realize that the music and movies that we love to the very core of our being may not be as objectively great as we think they are. (This is very difficult for me to admit as someone who reached adolescence in the early 1990’s, the heart of the grunge and alternative rock era.) The next time you play one of your favorite songs from your teenage years for someone who was a teenager at a different time, remember this explanation when you don’t get the instant and total affirmation that you’re looking for.
The other is that it provides valuable context for forming relationships (or failing to do so) as we get older. When I meet a new person these days, I’m more relieved than ever to discover that we’re the same age, because I instantly know that we’re going to have a ready supply of things to talk about. Someone ten years younger? I brace for a struggle. I recently had the unsettling experience of discovering that a younger coworker had never heard of Nirvana. I’m not even being dramatic when I say that I found this deeply disturbing. So did several others within earshot. “Smells Like Teen Spirit?” we were asking, humming the riff, some of us reflexively head-banging. Crickets. Never heard it.
At least now I can take some comfort in the knowledge that my coworker is going to have the same experience in ten years with a younger colleague who doesn’t know something from the early 2000’s. What the hell was even popular then? Limp Bizkit? Justin Timberlake?
What are the most salient cultural touchstones from your adolescence? To wrap this up, I’m going to take an endorphin-inducing trip down memory lane myself and reveal some of my teenage obsessions. Feel free to play along at home!
The following albums, in no particular order (on CD, obviously): Green Day, Dookie; Smashing Pumpkins, Siamese Dream; Primus, Sailing the Seas of Cheese, Pearl Jam, Ten; Nirvana, Nevermind; Red Hot Chili Peppers, Blood Sugar Sex Magic; Rush, Permanent Waves and Moving Pictures; Dream Theater, Metropolis Part II: Scenes from a Memory; King Crimson, Discipline; Rage Against The Machine (self-titled); No Doubt, Tragic Kingdom
Movies: The Matrix, Office Space, Gone in 60 Seconds, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Star Wars (the original trilogy), Ronin, Hackers
Video games: Mortal Kombat, Total Annihilation, The Sims, Sim City 2000, Rollercoaster Tycoon, X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter, Riven, Need For Speed
TV and the internet: The Simpsons, South Park, Futurama, SNICK, Homestar Runner, IRC, Winamp, Windows 2000
*Or many other bands for that matter. I could illustrate this phenomenon just as easily with Green Day, Smashing Pumpkins, Primus, Rush, or the Red Hot Chili Peppers, all of whose earlier music I prefer. The only exception I can think of is Green Day’s American Idiot (2004), which I didn’t discover until years later but really enjoy. It’s the only one of their albums I listen to made after 1994’s Dookie, so I guess it’s the exception that proves the rule.