What is your favorite “most 90s song” ever? Mine will always be Spacehog – In the Meantime.

Damn the 90s seem like such a different world now. I’m not going to bang on about it yet again, but the optimism of the time felt so great in retrospect. There is no going back, though. Only forward; nostalgia is a trap. But it’s impossible to describe to someone not there the experience of that glowing hopefulness.

Now with all that preamble, let’s get to the postamble. There is no way to choose the “most 90s” song ever as the era contained too many currents and trends and what existed in 1990 was quite different than what 1999 brought. So I am going to go a different direction and choose not a favorite song of the era, but rather a work that best represents all the crosscurrents of the 90s, all the optimism, all the zaniness, all the meta-textuality and the gonzo creativity of that time.

And that’d be Weezer’s “Undone (The Sweater Song).” As I said, this is not my favorite song of the 1990s. It’s not even in my top 50. But it holds all the 90s in a five minute package and that makes it my pick. The video was directed by Spike Jonze, the darling auteur of the 1990s, which certainly contributes to my choosing it.

(If I absolutely had to choose a favorite song of the 1990s personally, it’d probably be “Bells Ring” (Acoustic Version) by Mazzy Star. Hope sounds so amazing in that version.)