You're at Showbiz Pizza (there isn't, and never will be, a Chuck E. Cheese's to your eight-year-old mind) and you have your run of the soda fountain. One of the dangerous joys of pizza parlors in the ‘80s, the free refill, the do-it-yourself soda fountain, saw you tumbling down the slope that saw Cherry Coke, Sprite and Orange Crush being wantonly sloshed into large textured red plastic cups, sans ice. IDM laptop musician Bit_Meddler knows this time, he's stuck there, using his programming software not to create a new musical template, as others of genre did around the millennial turn did, but to smash together the songs of a junior high school dance. Besides the title, Meddler pays the songs of Vanilla Ice, Kriss Kross, C+C Music Factory and Tag Team a straightforward homage, tweaking the vocals only slightly. Together the songs all sound as though they belong together, eliminating the individuality of each artist and the embarrassment of forcing the listener to remember all the facts they remember from the backs of Yo! MTV Raps trading cards.
Letting each song sing for itself for a brief time, instead of for its entirety before slipping into another, helps cut short the nostalgic baggage that is attached to such meaningless songs by the child listeners of the time. When a song is self-important, its own meaning is implicit and the listener can forget it until it is played again. However, with the vacant pop song, cloaked in its dramatic synth washes and screaming choir of black women in bicycle shorts, the temptation is to inlay the dramas of your own life as to fill the meaning that is so missing thus giving the song far more weight than it ever should have had. This is just a quick gloss-over, of course, watching nights of prime-time television, talking on the phone for hours about the sacred nothings of childhood evenings, making cassette-tape maxi-singles, kissing neighbors in empty hallways – a time that seems more important than the adult life that children think they're going to live.
You're at the soda fountain again at some cheap facsimile of Showbiz, but it has a plastic ball pit in which to dispose of your own over-sugared child. You don't look for how many mixtures that can fit in your red cup, now, you look for the unsweetened Lipton Tea spout, or at least the ice water canister.
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