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Ahhh, the ’90s. Parachute pants, puffy vests, singers with bleached blonde hair, BOY BANDS.

And for many of us high school dances. Would we be wallflowers all night, relegated to sitting on the bleachers? Would that cute guy from Algebra finally notice us and ask us to dance?

Would it be more fun to stay home and wash our hair? 

(The answer to that last question is unequivocally yes. Yes it would be more fun to wash your hair than worry about just how bad your acne will look in the dim lights of the high school gym and whether or not your bangs will stay teased and lacquered in place all night long.)

But since it IS Flashback Friday, let’s take a very, very awkward walk down memory lane with 31 slow dance songs from the 1990s that we had no business slow dancing to at all ever and especially not at the tender age of 14. Looking at you, "2 Become 1."

Fun facts about some of these videos:

N*Sync’s "(God Must Have Spent) A Little More Time On You" is actually about a mother and her son, is set in the early 1900s, and features an angelic-looking boy band comprised of Justin Timberlake, Lace Bass, Joey Fatone, J.C, Chasez, and whoever that dude is with the dreads.

Backstreet Boys totally ripped off their all-white look for "I Want It That Way" but that’s cool since Backstreet Boys basically ripped off everything N*Sync did.

 

I DISTINCTLY REMEMBER the Making the Video for 98 Degrees’ "(I Do) Cherish You." It features Doritos Girl Ali Landry essentially marrying all four boy band members. And yes, she will forever and always be known as Doritos Girl, which is how they all referred to her while making that incredibly awkward video. 

It’s totally not on the list, but Boyz II Men’s "I’ll Make Love to You" was a staple at middle and high school dances. I can only assume that the chaperones had spiked their own punch because FML Middle. School. DANCES. and were completely oblivious to the lyrics blasting out of the loud speakers.

(Side note: I remember a high school dance where the dance planners were too cheap to hire a real DJ and used the choir teacher instead. The running joke of the evening became seeing how many times he’d miss bleeping out "ass" in "Back That A** Up" since he didn’t have the edited version safe for school dances. FUN TIMES!)

And let’s talk about Shania Twain’s two hits on this list.

First, there’s what became everyone’s wedding song for 52 weeks running, "From This Moment On." BUT, on the same album, Come On Over, if you were curious, "You’re Still the One" appears.

She spanned a decade of time in two songs. Amazing.

Finally, the saddest sad to ever sad, rock gods Aerosmith had their FIRST #1 single with "I Don’t Want To Miss a Thing" and it was all because of the blockbuster Armageddon. But it DID sort of revive their musical career and get the band back together for a while and led to an amazing two seasons of Steven Tyler hilarity on American Idol so hey, we’ll take the wins where we can get them.

Now I’m going to go watch this slideshow again and relive the glory days of my youth where I actually thought I could be Mariah Carey because surely someone would notice me and give me a record deal if I sang "Hero" in the school talent show again for the third year in a row.