*NSYNC's No Strings Attached Tour is Old Enough to Purchase Alcohol, and It's Not Okay.

The VHS tape that raised me is celebrating its 21st birthday, and I'm having a hard time.

Unlike many in my age group, I’m not prone to performative lamenting of my age, how I’m “so old!” and I’m “such a nana” because I “don’t get Tik Tok!” At 30 years old, I feel fine and chill and mostly indifferent about my age, and, yeah, I don’t really get Tik Tok, but you won’t ever catch me saying that out loud as if it’s an interesting thing to say.

But a recent anniversary has me absolutely — “as the kids say”*— shook (*as other people my age say).

This week, *NSYNC’s No Strings Attached tour is old enough to purchase alcohol, and it’s extremely not okay.

JC, Justin, Lance, Chris, and Joey (listed in the order of my crushes on them) are in their full glory in the recorded version, Live from Madison Square Garden, and it’s nothing short of a Y2K masterpiece. This VHS tape was my life from 2000 to 2003. This concert was so present for my tween years it was practically a third parent: a third parent who made me extremely horny, even though I didn’t really know what that was yet. 

Revisiting the show as an adult has been an incredible gift. It’s wild to see what holds up (the choreography, the guys’ undeniable charisma) and what doesn’t (Chris Kirkpatrick in general). 

Imagine 20,000 tween girls in an arena all having an exorcism at the same time, and that’s pretty much what’s going on in Madison Square Garden when the guys drop onto the stage for the climactic opening moment.

Watching now, these girls’ unadulterated joy is a balm. Being a teenaged girl is really shitty — the whole world simultaneously hates you and wants to fuck you —so it’s really sweet to see them all taking part in a ritual of performing their attraction en masse and being, like…joyfully horny. (Of course, it’s also important to say that this joyful horniness is largely reserved for teenaged white girls, whose sexuality is deemed safe and unthreatening; teenaged Black girls are generally not afforded the same leniency, and grappling with that fact has been a huge part of my return to boy band land.)

From the very first line (“Baby, you’re not the only one…”), punctuated with staccato dance moves, I’m somehow 12 again, gripped by the group’s magnetic sex appeal and showmanship. For the following 90 minutes, I’m transported to a time when my weekends were spent eating 3D Doritos and drinking Pepsi Blue at sleepovers, watching slack-jawed as the guys raunchily humped the air and revved up the crowd. A time when I thought “This I Promise You” was the truest, most profound expression of romantic love I’d ever heard. A time that is somehow 21 literal years ago, despite my objections that “no it isn’t.”

Can I say something else?

We were wrong about Joey Fatone.

We all had him listed as the #5, right? This guy was last in every single one of our lineups. We put Chris Kirkpatrick above him, y’all. But it turns out he’s the best dancer of all of them, and it’s fucked that we didn’t see that before. I hope you’ll go watch this video and see the error of your ways and then we can all apologize to him for laughing at how his last name was literally “Fat One.”

And I’m sorry, I know this feels bad because we’re projecting what we know now onto his younger self, but Justin Timberlake was a fucking star. Just unbelievable stage presence and a voice like making love to a slab of butter. Some of the arrangements are absolutely off the wall. Vocally, “(I Drive Myself) Crazy” is the standout number of the entire show (after Chris’s verse, no offense). It’s straight up gorgeous, and I know that because I watched it a second time when I wasn’t stoned off my ass and it was just as good. I had to get high, you see, to deal with the fact that this was actually 21 years ago and if the No Strings Attached tour showed a convenience store clerk its ID bearing its July 25, 2000 birthdate and asked for a fifth of Buffalo Trace, the clerk would let the No Strings Attached tour purchase the Buffalo Trace. Because it is 21 years old.

The choreography is grueling and you and I would be hospitalized after doing 8 seconds of it, for real. They’re throwing their bodies into every step for an hour and a half and not lip syncing, and we know they’re not lip syncing because Lance’s mic is fucked up and for most of the show you can hear his low (and bad) voice underneath the others’.

The No Strings Attached show is so much more than just vocals and choreography, though. I find giddy, nearly transcendent glee in the hokey fakeness of the backstage video sequences, the ham-fisted “spontaneous” beatbox battle Justin has with the band, the shameless pandering of JC saying, “I gotta tell ya, I’m feelin’ this crowd. I feel like I wanna get a little closer to them,” before the stage lifts them up and out into the middle of the arena. Can you imagine the blissful existence of being a person who could think that was real? That was me, 21 years ago.

When I finish watching the concert, my joy is soon tempered by this incredible sense of yearning. I’m nostalgic for the days when I found this not only believable but intoxicating. The spectacle of the enormous arena concert and the awakening feelings of sexual attraction were all-consuming. I thought the world was really big but also really simple. I thought my life could be full of this kind of magic. I truly believed in my heart that JC Chasez could become my boyfriend at any second.

I don’t want JC Chasez to be my boyfriend anymore - I’m actually way hotter than him now - but I want to live in a world where JC could be my boyfriend. I want to live in a world where miraculous things are happening all the time, like marrying a pop star or digesting 3D Doritos and Pepsi Blue without medical intervention.

I was obsessed with this concert during a time when life felt dreary and confusing. In the thick of middle school, I felt like everyone else was figuring something out that I wasn’t. Suddenly there were cliques and couples and constant fear that people were talking about me, and I felt like a freak for not “getting” it, even though I didn’t know what “it” was. For 90 minutes every weekend, the No Strings Attached tour took me away from that, and even though I’m sad for the young girl who thought she was the only one feeling hopeless and confused, I envy that her problems were ones that could be solved by pyrotechnics and 5-part harmonies. I want to be her again, and I know I’m romanticizing the past, but I can’t help it. I want to drown my pre-algebra troubles in catchy choruses and high-octane dance numbers. I want to believe that my soulmate is just someone who I think is super fucking hot.

I don’t want to be 30, paying rent, going to therapy, doing stupid shit all the time like renewing my car insurance and throwing away the asparagus that I forgot to use again.

And that is why I’ve decided to simply reject the idea that the No Strings Attached tour is 21 years old.

Fellow millennials, I invite you to reject it with me. Time is a construct whose bullshit we do not have to take. We can be sad horny middle schoolers if we want to be! We can effect real change! Quit your job and stop paying your rent. If we all do it together, they’ll have to make it 2000 again. 21 years can’t pass on ALL of us.