90s – A.P. Miller

I Hated 90’s Pop Radio (And Now I’d Do Anything to Have it Back)

Posted on 6 Oct 20239 Sep 2023 by A.P. Miller in Uncategorized

Do you remember when the CEO of TikTok was dragged in front of a Congressional Panel and the world had to watch a bunch of dinosaurs figure out how technology worked? I’m honestly shocked the poor man wasn’t taken to Salem, tried for being a witch, and burned at the stake. I will say I think the CEO of TikTok was paraded in front of the wrong panel—that man should have had to face the highest spiritual leader of every faith system on this planet—TikTok is sucking life from people like someone chose the wrong Holy Grail in an Indiana Jones movie. I’m guilty of it too. I’ll sit down after work, commit to a few minutes of doom scrolling, and realize it’s time to get up, and file for retirement.

No one ever prepared me for the young people on that app gushing over songs from the 80s and 90s, saying shit like “this song hits me in the feels.” It hits me in the feels too—mostly how it felt to have to hear the same song on the radio for the 47,952nd time on the radio. Let’s be perfectly clear, there was no skipping songs, hitting next, or streaming another channel. When you’re eight years old, locked in a vehicle while your mom is smoking her second pack of Marlboro Reds of the trip, and in the driver’s seat, there was nothing to listen to other than the radio, or the minutes of your life being stolen from you. Sure, we had cassette players, CD players even, but can you imagine how far that gets you when you have ADHD so bad you’re giving the people around you a learning disorder? Worse than that, if you caught a brief glimpse of a song you might like, and someone changes the station before you can find out what the song is, your only hope is that you’ll find out what the song’s name is in the next life.

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Panic in the 90s! (A Mother’s Love Mixed With Moral Panic)

Posted on 10 Mar 20234 Mar 2023 by A.P. Miller in Blog

Between the ages of five and twelve, my mother raised my kid sister and me by herself. My mother was many, many things—loving, sincere, uplifting—but chief amongst them was GULLIABLE. Bless my Mama’s heart, that woman could be talked into believing just about anything, which was extremely problematic for a single mom with two world-class wise-ass children. Mama was so gullible, she actually bought a vacuum from a door-to-door salesman, in the 1990s. My eldest sister’s favorite story to tell about my mother is that my father had my mom convinced that he could breathe through his ears, and could hold his face underwater for prolonged periods of time.

Bless. Her. Heart.

Part of the gullibility was susceptibility to the scare tactics of the media at the time. 20/20 had my mother convinced that overseas drug lords had spiked her off-brand Tylenol and she did an audit on every pill bottle in the home. There was a period of time when it felt like 90’s day-time talk show hosts were taking turns to see what absurdity they could make my mom believe next. God, I miss that woman.

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Final Exam: 80’s & 90’s Cultures

Posted on 6 Aug 20211 Aug 2021 by A.P. Miller in Blog

Before wanting to be a writer, I wanted to be many things. At one point, I wanted to be a teacher – not because I was excited about educating children – mostly because I wanted to watch them suffer. I always wanted to be that wiseass teacher that had tests that were complete mindf***s.

As an observer of society at current, I have seen things that have made my hair grow, then curl, then fall out all over again. I saw a video of someone referring to the band N*Sync as “N S Y N C.” I’m not going to lie: I tried to pickle my brain to get rid of that realization.

To cleanse my brain of such atrocities, I have decided that if I ever did become a teacher, or professor, I’d teach 80’s and 90’s cultures. For this week’s blog, I decided to share my final exam with you all. Please post your test results in the comments and share with your friends to see if they’d pass Mr. Miller’s class.

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Loving Books in the 1990’s

Posted on 22 Mar 201918 Mar 2019 by A.P. Miller in Blog

Truth be told: I am only a little bitter about the advancements in technology; only slightly. I can’t tell you how often I see kids rockin’ and rollin’ on smartphones and tablets to entertain themselves — I’m not drinking Haterade either; if I had the ability at that age, you best believe I’d be discovering the world (or using Google maps to look at my house — I was that kind of kid) with the best of them. For fleeting moments, my amazement at how the world evolves degenerates to venomous envy and bile-boiling rage. Do you know what it was like to love books when I was a kid? It was archaic hell. We had to go to stores, we had to wait in lines, and the only leg up we had on the cavemen was the printing press.

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