An unexpected delight of years of using the SoundHound app to identify unfamiliar shitty pop music around me (it's like Shazam but better) is that since it never forgets any song I look up, I have an honest historical record of the soundscape of New York City going all the way back to 2017.
Anyone who lived through the nineties and naughts knows that period films and TV shows misrepresent the past to flatter the people who remember it--it is an absolute fiction that shopping malls and Blockbusters and Cheesecake Factories all over America were blaring the likes of Nirvana and Prince and Bikini Kill in like 1998. But this hole in our collective memory is not exclusive to those eras. It is produced by the sheer number of forgettable one-hit wonders, superstar B-sides, and mediocre Top 40 hits we are inundated with every time we go to a pizzeria or a CVS or an OfficeMax. These are songs that quietly define a period in American cultural history and then vanish from our collective memory forever, timeful music that is no one's favorite and never shows up in karaoke playlists but indelibly reminds you subconsciously, everywhere, what year it is.