<\/p>\n
The older I get, the more I gravitate to the things I grew up listening to. Not just the music I loved in the \u201890s and \u201800s like *NSYNC or Spice Girls or Fall Out Boy, but also the things I heard in the living room on a Saturday morning as my mom cleaned the house, or the songs she played in her black Grand Am with all the windows down as she smoked a cigarette in between errands.<\/p>\n
And apparently, all of us are looking for that vibe \u2014 because cigarette mom rock is officially a genre. A genre, it must be said, that\u2019s open to interpretation.<\/p>\n
The category\u2019s been going around social media for a bit, but there\u2019s even a domain exclusively for Cigarette Mom Rock<\/a>. There, the meaning of the genre is described as a \u201cfeminine counterpart to \u2018divorced dad rock,\u2019\u201d but is also meant to conjure up images of your own hard-working \u201890s mom, driving you to baseball practice with the windows down and a cigarette in one hand. What was she listening to? What lyrics did you already know at 10 years old? What was her song choice at karaoke?<\/p>\n For a lot of us, Cigarette Mom Rock includes a Lilith Fair-type genre. Lots of Fiona Apple, Sheryl Crow, and Tracy Chapman. For others, it feels a lot like Fleetwood Mac, Pat Benatar, and Joan Jett. And for some, it\u2019s the alt-rock icons of the \u201890s like Gwen Stefani, Garbage, and Hole.<\/p>\n Basically, it\u2019s interpretive<\/a>, and that\u2019s kind of the fun of this genre. My own \u201890s cigarette-smoking mom loved everything from Bryan Adams and Fleetwood Mac to Mary Chapin Carpenter and Tricia Yearwood. The Cigarette Mom Rock genre is all about what feels right to you and what makes you feel like you\u2019re riding alongside your mom, with nothing to think about except if she\u2019s going to let you get french fries from the McDonald\u2019s inside Walmart while you shop.<\/p>\n The author\u2019s own \u201890s mom.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Courtesy of Samantha Darby<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n If you check out playlists on Pandora or Spotify, you can see that they run the gamut. Some user-generated playlists include Evanescence, Creed, and Alanis<\/a>, while others include Sixpence None the Richer, Faith Hill, and The Chicks<\/a>.<\/p>\n