I was maybe a little too amused the other day to learn that Carly Rae Jepsen is four days older than me. The Justin Bieber protégée, whose breakout hit is so ridiculous that it reminds me of a Robin Sparkles song, is 20 freaking 6.
Look, I don't fault the fresh-faced Canadian for "Call Me Maybe." The song is deceptively good, a rush of adrenaline so universal that Colin Powell and the Harvard baseball team alike couldn't resist it.
But it's hard to imagine myself -- or anyone in my circle of friends -- showing a new love interest that sort of enthusiasm without looking completely absurd. At its core, the song is indulgently immature; Jepsen's outlook is one you'd expect from Bieber's 19-year-old girlfriend Selena Gomez or even 22-year-old Taylor Swift. At my age, it's kind of nuts.
Then again, it's also kind of liberating. Imagine if all '90s kids acted with as little inhibition as Jepsen does in "Call Me Maybe." We do come from a simpler time -- when "Hey, I just met you" wasn't followed by "And I've already stalked you on Facebook and LinkedIn." That is crazy.
The '90s were killer (and I will not apologize for your inferiority complex). Our concerns were limited to maintaining pristine AOL profiles, getting high on Fun Dip and trying to emulate the Power Rangers' moves (oh, just me?). Sometimes we murdered our Tamagotchi pets, and sometimes we whipped up Slam Books that rivaled Regina George's, but we were never as convoluted as the kids these days. I'm not sure any of us really gave a damn about anything.
Much like Jepsen in "Call Me Maybe," we were laughably naive. That's how, as this Thought Catalogue blog post points out:
The Men In Black rap song, at the time, was created and received by the public without the slightest trace of irony.
Or how we believed that...
...all girls are entitled to dolphins covered with rainbows, jewel-encrusted frogs, and unicorns in acid-trip colors hugging each other.
For reals.
So if Jepsen can bounce around like the inner '90s kid we all wish we could still be, make a crap-load of money and claim -- let's face it -- the song of the summer, I guess the joke's on us.
Cheers to the '90s, y'all: