1999 is truly a rush of blood to the brain...

 1999, An Era I Can Already Feel Throbbing

Back in 1982, Prince dreamed of 1999 as a dance party on the brink of apocalypse. Now that Y2K paranoia is lodged almost two decades in the past, Charli XCX and Troye Sivan have linked up to revisit the year from the future. Their new joint single “1999” is steeped in childhood nostalgia for a half-remembered era. Over fuzzy sawtooth bass and sparkly Eurodance keys, the two pop provocateurs yearn for a time before smartphones when they could sing along to Britney Spears and Michael Jackson without a care in the world. 

Like a lot of retrospective musings, “1999” is more concerned with the act of remembering than with the specifics of the year it calls up itself. The snare-heavy beat fits in right alongside the rest of Charli XCX’s sleek, forward-looking pop songs; the only instrumental throwback comes in the form of that piano figure, which harkens back to Eurodance hits like Real McCoy’s “Another Night” (a 1994 cut that lingered on pop radio into the next millennium). But that confusion between the present and the past also figures into the track’s lyrical core. Toward the end of Sivan’s first verse, Charli interrupts his reminiscing to ask abruptly, “Does anyone remember how we did it back then?” It’s not that 1999 was a perfect year; it’s just that to stay sane in 2018, ’90s kids have to remember it that way.