This week I talk with David Humphries, a professor of English at Queensborough Community College in New York City, about his excellent project Happy Nostalgia: Making Connections with the Music of the ‘90s, which collects essays from CUNY scholars on the last “analog” moment of music fandom, the beautiful and tragic 1990s. We get a chance to trade nostalgic stories about our own music obsessions of the ‘90s, and try to frame how things changed for us (and everyone else) when streaming music blasted a whole lifestyle into oblivion. What died, and what remains alive? And are we just being cranky old men about Spotify’s algorithmic nightmare? This is an intense and fun conversation about the meaning of nostalgia and how music gives us a constant pulse through the decades of technological and cultural evolution.

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