Nostalgia is a hell of a drug. It’s also the only thing the music industry has left to sell us that doesn’t feel like it was generated by a server farm in Northern Virginia.

Lately, your feed has probably been haunted by a specific, high-energy growl. It’s Dhurandhar’s "Ramba Ho," a frantic, bass-heavy reimagining of a track that belongs to an era of baggy jeans and MTV India. It’s loud. It’s obnoxious. And, inevitably, it’s everywhere. Now, Leslee Lewis—the man who practically architected the 90s Indipop sound—is leaning into the chaos, claiming that "people want that 90s melody."

He’s right. But not for the reasons he thinks.

We aren’t craving 90s melodies because we’ve suddenly developed a refined taste for composition. We’re craving them because modern pop has become a race to the bottom of a frictionless well. Most "hits" today are designed to be played at 30% volume in the background of a Pilates studio. They’re sonic wallpaper. Then comes "Ramba Ho," crashing through the drywall with a hook that actually dares to go somewhere.

Lewis, one half of the legendary Colonial Cousins, is watching this digital resurrection with a mix of "I told you so" and genuine curiosity. To him, the 90s wasn't just a decade; it was a workshop. You had to have a hook that could survive a low-bitrate radio broadcast. Today, we have "vibes." You can’t hum a vibe. You can’t shout a vibe in a crowded club. You just kind of exist near it.

The friction here isn't just about the music. It’s about the tech that delivers it. The Spotify-fication of the human ear has rewarded "skip-proof" intros—songs that start at 100 mph and stay there because if you don’t grab a listener in three seconds, you’re dead. The 90s Indipop era, for all its neon-colored kitsch, understood the slow burn. It understood the payoff.

But let’s look at the price tag of this nostalgia. When a track like "Ramba Ho" goes viral, it’s rarely because of the songwriting royalty checks being cut to the original creators. It’s because an algorithm decided that the specific frequency of a 25-year-old hook pairs well with people doing synchronized dances in front of their ring lights. Dhurandhar didn’t just cover a song; he optimized it for the attention economy. He stripped the "melody" Lewis loves and turned it into a 15-second dopamine spike.

Lewis argues that the youth are tired of the "mechanized" sound of the 2020s. Maybe. But the irony is that they’re using the most mechanized tools in human history to find the soul they’re missing. We’re using billion-dollar neural networks to find a song that sounds like it was recorded on a dusty 24-track tape machine in a Mumbai studio in 1996.

There’s a specific kind of exhaustion that comes with being a music consumer in 2024. You’re constantly being told what’s "transformative" (oops, scratch that) or what’s "new," yet everything sounds like a derivative of a derivative. Then something like Lewis’s old-school sensibility bubbles up through the grime of the internet. It feels human. It feels like someone actually sat at a keyboard and argued about where the bridge should go, rather than just dragging a loop across a screen.

The industry is watching this play out and, as usual, learning all the wrong lessons. They won’t invest in new songwriters with the melodic chops of a young Leslee Lewis. No, that’s too expensive. Too risky. Instead, they’ll just mine the 90s catalog until there’s nothing left but the dust. They’ll "Ramba Ho" every single track from 1992 to 1999 until we’re all begging for the sweet silence of a dial-up modem.

Lewis is optimistic. He thinks this is a turning point. He thinks the "melody" is coming back to save us from the algorithm. I’m not so sure. To the kids scrolling through TikTok, "Ramba Ho" isn’t a bridge to the past. It’s just another audio asset to be consumed, discarded, and replaced by the next 15-second loop.

We don't want the 90s back. We just want to remember what it felt like to hear a song that didn't feel like it was trying to sell us a subscription.

If we’re lucky, we’ll get a few more melodies before the AI-generated "lo-fi beats to study to" finally finish the job. But I wouldn’t bet my last pair of wired headphones on it.

The question isn’t whether the 90s melody is back. The question is: if a melody drops in the middle of a 10-hour scrolling binge and no one listens past the first ten seconds, did it even happen?