Music Choice

I’ve been contemplating for weeks choices on music preferences and when we actually become conscious of them.  For the past few years, I had been listening to mostly country music, which was a bit of a change from my alternative rock days and my pop princess days before that.  Letely, however, I have been listening more and more to the “Adult Contemporary” stations, which is, I suppose, a combination of bubblegum pop and alternative rock with perhaps a little bit a dancey rap thrown in.  I started wondering why these changes occur?  Is it because of who we hang out with at the time?  Or what we do?  Or is it really just an evolution of who we are?  All of these things boiled down to one thing:  What made me consciously change my music preferences?

When I was a kid, I mostly listened to Oldies.  I listened to the likes of Elvis and the Beach Boys and other pop-rock icons from the 50s and 60s.  I remember going for an MRI when I was 8 and the technician asked what radio station I would like on the headphones, I said U92 (the oldies station at the time) and they were kind of surprised.  This was the only music I really knew, it was what my parents listened to and what we sang in the chorus performance at school.

Then came the 1997 Nickelodeon Big Help A Thon.  Even as a kid, I was a hippie, so of course loved the Big Help concept.  This specific performance, however, introduced me to what are still my two favorite bands today: Sister Hazel and Barenaked Ladies.  And I remember when they were first announced to take the stage I thought they were both girl bands!  So began my everlasting love of 90s pop rock.  (Shortly after this I got my first CD: No Doubt’s Tragic Kingdom).

In 1998, all my girl friends were obsessed with the Backstreet Boys and NSync.  Having always considered myself a “rocker”, I refused to buy into it.  That is, until I saw NSync performing at EPCOT for the Very Merry Christmas Parade.  It was a small gathering of around 60 people around a small stage that we happened to be there on a field trip during.  And I was hooked.   A few months later I saw the Backstreet Boys at what was my first real concert ever, and the next year some friends and I even made a video to try and meet NSync on MTV’s Fanatic.  I was, I will admit, a teeny bopper.

Throughout most of high school I secretly stayed a teeny bopper listening to boy and girl pop bands as they faded into history while all of my friends were “discovering” bands like the Smashing Pumpkins and Radiohead.

Then I went to a small preppy college in Georgia.  Here, my pop princess side was squashed and I was forced to listen to the likes of Dave Matthews Band (which I still never really got into) and was introduced to country (a love which lay mostly dormant until about 10 years later when I started line dancing).

So while every chapter in my life I am changing and expanding my musical tastes, I will probably always come back to those bands I saw while I was still so young and impressionable.  Maybe it’s because they take us back to a less complicated time in our lives.  Maybe it’s because they really do write great timeless music.  Maybe it’s because some bands know how to evolve with us.  Whatever it is, I bet everyone, regardless of how many different genres of music they listen to, has that one moment in their life when they legitimately became aware of music as more than just a noise in the background.  I’d love to hear your moments!