This Website Lets You Reflect or Regret Your Entire Life Through the Medium of Pop Music

When you get to the frail, withdrawn but wise old age of 26, you slowly start to consider that maybe your best days are starting to fall behind you. For a start, you no longer jump fences or walls; you momentarily sit on them instead and flip your legs over, scrunching your junk as you mount. You watch the news on the television. And your relationship with music gradually turns from a voyage of discovery, into a stagnant pool of smelly reflection.

That’s why I’ve spent the last hour messing around this new web app, Retrojam. It’s a free and breezy thing from two developers who premiered it on Reddit yesterday afternoon, to much applause, criticism and dick jokes. The idea is that you enter your date of birth, and Retrojam creates 20-plus song playlists from all the hits that soundtrack various periods of your time on earth.

Also, it dines out on a particularly mainstream song database, so if you’re expecting mid-80s rare groove and Squarepusher b-sides, then you’re in the wrong place. Still, the premise works pretty well, and Retrojam pulls up all the chart smashes from each chapter of your life, helping you re-plot your meaning in the world via the music of Toni Braxton and Deep Blue Something.

Mine seemed pretty inconsistent. Then my “second grade playlist” of 1996 absolutely blew the doors off the sentimental chamber in my brain. No Doubt’s “Don’t Speak," yes; Mark Morrison’s “Return of the Mack," yes; The Fugees “Killing Me Softly," yes; Spice Girls’ “2 Become 1," YES. Absolute fire, mate.

Go to Retrojam, find that moment in your life when you listened exclusively to shitty chart music, and bathe in the hysterical warmth of a simpler time.

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