90's mom cleaning playlist
And other tales of 90's moms
I’m someone who needs a lot of motivation to clean because in general I don’t like doing it. In addition to inviting people over, which gives me a deadline, another tactic I use is putting on fun music.
Recently, I came across a playlist on Spotify called 90’s Mom Cleaning Playlist by beccaroo20. It’s an interesting mix of music, mainly released in the 90s, and spans genres including country, pop, rock, and rap. The playlist features a lot of obscure hits that characterized my teen years (e.g., “Thong Song”).
The fact that its mainly music from my adolescence makes me wonder about the “90’s Mom” descriptor used in the title. Is it what a mom would have listened to while she was cleaning in the 90’s? Is it a playlist for current moms featuring mostly 90’s music? Or is it a playlist for moms who grew up in the 90’s?
I can say for certain that it is not the music my mom would have listened to when she was cleaning in the 90’s. My mom played full albums off of CDs. If you want to clean like my mom in the 90’s, turn volume way up on When I Was A Boy by Jane Siberry.
A 90’s mom “Pony” experience
The 90’s Mom Cleaning Playlist includes the song “Pony” by Ginuwine, which debuted in 1996 and was topping the charts around the same time as the release of the movie Romeo + Juliet starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Clare Danes.
I have a fuzzy memory from this era of being driven home in a minivan after my first co-ed movie outing to see Romeo + Juliet. We were a mix of girls and boys, all Catholic school kids, and one of the boy’s moms was driving us home in her hunter green minivan, a totally 90’s mom thing to do.
The song “Pony” came on the radio. I think it was the first time I’d ever heard it. The lyrics are so sexually explicit (“you’re horny, let’s do it”), and I was already emotionally revved up from watching a Leonardo DiCaprio kissing movie (see my Titanic post for more on this phenomena).
I have a few songs that always return me to a particular moment in time. Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” takes me back to slow dancing to the last song played at mixers during my freshmen year of high school. Bone Thugs-N-Harmony’s “Tha Crossroads” reminds me of being with my mom and sister in our red minivan driving out to this garden where we all worked together the summer that song was popular. Jane Siberry’s “Love is Everything” transports me to my childhood home where my mom is cleaning and I’m most likely sitting around not helping.
“Pony” will always take me back to the minivan ride after my first co-ed movie. The song was so sexually potent, and I was so beautifully naive at that age, that I was absolutely mortified to be hearing it, not only in front of boys, but also one of those boy’s 90’s mom.
What are the songs that always take you back?
Standing outside a broken phone booth with money in my hands by Primitive Radio Gods for some reason takes me back to camping trips. I think I listened to it on a radio in the tent and I really liked the song. Nice post!
My earliest musical memory is a 45 on the record player, Nat King Cole singing "Ramblin' Rose," released in 1962 when I was seven years old. I can still see the label. My mother loved that song, and I wondered why, and continued to wonder over the years. Probably she ... a housewife first, then divorced, then tied to a dead-end job before she met a new man with money ... liked to imagine herself a Rose, ramblin'. The way men like to imagine themselves as the wanderer, that song.