All of the music comes from a cassette tape belonging to Chris Pratt's character Peter Quill. He gets the tape from his mother on the night that she dies just before he's abducted by space pirates when he's nine years old. The tape is one of the few connections he has to his mother and his life on Earth while he's of gallivanting through space living my dream life. He spent most of his life having space adventures and listening to awesome music. Peter was abducted in 1988, four years before I was born. If I had left to have space adventures when I was nine my soundtrack would have been about 90% a mixture of Backstreet Boys and N*SYNC. The rest would have been 3% Aaron Carter, 3% Music From the Motion Picture 'Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius,' 3% Christian rock, and 1% not explicitly addressed but still very present emotional confusion about 9/11.
I mean I really liked the Backstreet Boys and N*SYNC. Almost every night I drifted off to sleep to the soulful sounds of Joey Littrell or Howie Chavez on my boombox. I should probably mention that no matter how much time I spent listening to these CD's and going through the liner notes I never quite grasped which was which. I couldn't tell you the names of the band members or which band they were in. However, I did know that when Justin Timberlake left N*SYNC it was a sure sign of the death of boy bands so I moved on to other things.
There was a time when I was ashamed that so much of my life was scored by boy bands. This was around the time I was watching a lot of VH1 and it led me to group all decades into multiple big "best of" lists. I believed that while I was listening to the Backstreet Boys in the late 90's I was missing out on all the cool grunge stuff even though Kurt Cobain died when I was an infant and BSB didn't release their first album until several years later when I was still an infant.
Nevertheless, I held on to these regrets for most of middle school and high school. I held a grudge towards BSB and N*SYNC for wasting my childhood on their bubblegum pop nonsense when I could have been listening to the Afghan Whigs like a normal well adjusted nine year old. For the next several years I listened to as much music as possible to make up for what I missed. That sentence kind of sounds like I would never accomplish my goal but I think I did. In the past hour I've listened to The Violent Femmes and Wheatus so I'm pretty confident in my alternative credentials.
Slowly my grudge against boy bands faded away and I barely noticed. Then I saw the film This Is the End. The movie features the Backstreet Boys' "Everybody (Backstreet's Back)" in an early scene then ends (spoiler [duh]) with the Backstreet Boys themselves appearing for a dance number with the stars of the film in Heaven. The appearance of the Backstreet Boys in a star studded movie in 2013 surprised me and made me realize how big the group was at one time. It occurred to me that for BSB to have been so popular they must have been at least kind of good. I'm not saying I went and added a lot of their songs to a bunch of Spotify playlists. I didn't think about boy bands much but when I did it was mostly positive. For instance, I was pretty excited to see the highly choreographed dance moves I remember show up in the form of John Krasinski in a recent episode of Lip Sync Battle.
I guess what I'm saying is I wouldn't mind too much if nine year old me was in control of the soundtrack for my space adventures. I probably wouldn't even notice because I'd be too busy having space adventures. Please someone take me on their space adventures. I listen to better music now, I promise.
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