Why the song of the summer is almost 30 years old – and what it has to do with the nostalgic thirst of Gen Z for a “ summer from the 90s’ ”
“Because I do not think they will understand,” complained Johnny Rzeznik de Goo Goo Douls in “Iris”, who dominated the graphics from April to July 1998. He sang Nicolas Cage and Meg Ryan’s Angel / Human Romance in “City of Angels”, but almost 30 years later, he sang more for millions of people, many people, many people.
Google Trends’s September 3 news bulletin said the interest in research for “Iris Goo Goo Dolls” was over 15 years old, and since last week was “the most sought -after song of the summer”. On Spotify, it was a top 25 of the Top Global for several months of racing, The Wall Street Journal Reported at the end of August, even reaching n ° 15. This phenomenon is not only a quirk of algorithms or chance – it is the product of a wider cultural moment motivated by nostalgia and the changing ways that we connect with music. Gen Z, a generation already defined by an acute sense of nostalgia, popularized the concept of a “summer of children from the 90s”, restoring at an era before social networks and smartphones – the exact time of the greatest success of Goo GooLs.
The viral power of “the iris”
A large part of the renewed momentum of the song can be allocated to viral moments, such as the live performances of goo goo dolls in major festivals like Stagecoach and on the American idol Season final. Tiktok trends starring sequences and original covers have also propelled “IRIS” to new world streaming peaks, with more than 5 billion flows worldwide, by far the group’s first result on Spotify. Rzeznik told Australian Outlet Noise11 That his group must play live and “this is how we earn our lives”. With “Iris” at the $ 2 billion flow brand at that time, he added: “You are doing shit for streaming. People broadcast your songs and you don’t make money. ”
John says, “No one earns any more money to sell records because no one buys any more records. You do shit for streaming. People broadcast your songs and you don’t make money. You have to go out and play live. It takes a long time. I think the company has changed so much. It is not as fun as before. We can play live and that’s how we win.
The strange power of a three -decades song overlooking the summer reading lists is not an accident. As explored by the venerated musical critic Simon Reynolds in his influential work of 2010 Rétomania: the dependence of pop culture in its own past, We live in a time when cultural production is increasingly fixed on the recycling of the old rather than inventing the new one. Reynolds argued that contemporary pop is less a question of innovation and rather to revisit the previous decades, to blur the distinct eras and to nibble the identity of the present. He is far from being the only cultural theorist to spot the appeal of the recycled blow.
A few years later, in 2014, the cultural theorist Mark Fisher (who committed suicide later after a long battle with depression) published a test book, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hantology and Lost Futures. Among several memorable sentences, he introduced the concept of “slow cancellation of the future”: the persistent feeling that time is repeated and new ideas are in favor of familiar comfort. According to Fisher, our cultural imagination is more and more attracted to the recycling of past successes, not only in music but in cinema, fashion and art. The result is a present haunted by the ghosts of previous decades – where the future has faded in a “recycled present” and our continuous research of novelty is often satisfied by what we already know.
Nostalgia from the 1990s of generation Z
These ideas are going very well in recent consumer trends, especially among Gen Z. For many, the 1990s symbolize an era before smartphones and constant connectivity – a moment when summers were made up of bicycle walks, frozen trucks and garden pipes, rather than endless notifications and screen time. The “Kid Summer” trend of the 90s reflects an unstructured desire for play and analog pleasure, parents and young adults trying to recreate the freedom and creativity they associate with the pre-numerical era.
Google Trends reported that “the summer of the 90s” has reached a summit of all time in June and that “the summer of children in the 90s” was research in small groups in July. He presents close similarities with similar research: “Feral Child Summer”, which encourages parents to stop following each movement of their children (with technology that was not available in the 90s). They communicate a desire for another time with less technology, when “Iris” played on a loop again and again on VH1. For Gen Z, who has never really experienced the 90s but who grew up with his influence, revisiting this past by music as “Iris” is both escape and rebellion against the anxiety of the digital present.
When the Goo Goo dolls, with the denominational opening dashboard, played the Greek theater in Berkeley in September, the leader of the Emo Chris Carrabba group pointed out on all the teenagers who turned the Vintage Tees group in the crowd. “” Have they even MTV? ” He asked in comments on stage reported by SF door. Then he offered an explanation to his audience: “Families watched television in common. It was like a large Tiktok format.” SF Gate noted that the crowd had become too strong for the closing number of the show: of course, “Iris”.
Nora Primiotti of The ringtone Argued on September 3 that the summer of 2025 did not have a decisive “summer song”, with recent examples, notably “Old Town Road” and “Despacito” and an older classic, including “Hot in Herre” and “Summer Nights” Fat. She argued that it was a summer “without monoculture”, depriving many pretenders of the possibility of dominating the waves available for the goo goo dolls the first time, in 1998.
But in one way or another, “Iris” managed to dominate another type of air wave in 2025, emerging like a mastodon in a manner strangely adapted to a world where the prophecy of the retromanous of Reynolds is more true than ever. If Mark Fisher was also right to say that the future had been canceled, then another lyrical from Goo Goo Dolls, from their “name” from 1995, also comes to mind: “reruns become our history”.
