Music Ramblings: Growing Up and the Tastes of the People Around Me

My parents aren't the biggest fans of music. Mom grew up on '60s and '70s soft/pop rock and is a casual listener of "oldies" and Top 40 radio hits. I'm not convinced that Dad was ever that big of a fan of anything, really, and listens to talk radio most of time. He has told me what he likes and what he was into growing up, such as some Led Zeppelin, some Beatles, some Zappa, maybe Deep Purple, but I have seen no evidence or behavior that suggests he was ever gung-ho about anything in particular.

My parents' record collection is modest and doesn't highlight a fanaticism to any particular artist. Off the top of my head I can remember a couple of John Lennon albums, a Moby Grape album, an Elton John compilation, Electric Light Orchestra's Eldorado, King Crimson's In the Court of the Crimson King, Jethro Tull's Warchild, Talking Heads' True Stories, and Seals & Croft's self-titled debut. There might be some Paul McCartney and some Patsy Cline. Lots of others, though. I don't think they have any Beatles albums. I've bought my mom some Jethro Tull, David Bowie, and Elton John records. Throughout my childhood my mom was always talking about needing a new turntable to play all these old records, and when they finally bought one in 2002 it hasn't gotten much use at all. I've always thought when I was younger that this collection of music was pretty wimpy. I still think it sort of is. I'm trying to think of the heaviest album in their collection. I guess the King Crimson one, which is an oddity anyway because I don't think either of them even like it.

I was born in 1987, so my earliest sticking memories with respect to music involve two of Mom's cassette tapes in heavy rotation during car trips: The Bangles' 1990 Greatest Hits compilation, and Billy Ray Cyrus' 1992 debut album Some Gave All. I'm not going to give the Bangles too much shit, because they aren't awful and Walk Like an Egyptian is a good song, but Billy Ray fucking Cyrus? This is the album with Achy Breaky Heart on it, widely considered to be one of the worst popular songs of all time. That album cover is forever burned in my brain, because Mom made a point to let my 4-year-old self know how attractive she thought Miley's dad was in his denim jacket, and I remember how much I thought how stupid that American flag patch looked on his dumb butt. When we would listen to the "oldies" station it would likely be folky, rootsy, inoffensive classic rock such as the early Beatles, the early Rolling Stones, Byrds, and Kinks, and anything on contemporary pop radio at the time would be stuff like Phil Collins, or Bryan Adams, or Paula Abdul. Needless to say, Mom's music didn't make much of an impression on me, but as I got into my 20s I started to appreciate some of this stuff a lot more.

Yeesh. Is that a rattail too? Gross.

So Mom's listening to schlocky adult contemporary, Dad's listening to Howard Stern and local Detroit morning talk radio, so what's my teenage sister listening to during my formidable years? Her collection of cassettes and CDs also suggested no particular affinity with a specific artist. Off the top of my head here I can remember Green Day's Dookie, Red Hot Chili Peppers' Blood Sugar Sex Magik, Alanis Morissette's Jagged Little Pill, "Weird Al" Yankovic's The Food Album, Weezer's Blue Album, Nirvana's In Utero, The Presidents of the United States of America's self-titled debut, and maybe an album or two from Soundgarden, Beck, Smashing Pumpkins, and Pearl Jam, plus a ton of others. Basically, anything you'd hear on an episode of MTV's Daria. I also remember the soundtrack albums to Forrest Gump and Dumb and Dumber, and she used to like those Now That's What I Call Music! compilation albums. None of this music particularly thrilled me at the time either. She also had two albums that would prove to be a SIGNIFICANT influence on my life, and they're Adam Sandler's They're All Gonna Laugh at You and What The Hell Happened To Me? I can trace all my current comedy and music influence back to those two albums. Sad, isn't it? I like modern experimental klezmer music because I liked Adam Sandler. That's a topic for another post.

And my friends? Fuck them. In middle school and high school, the years where people generally find their taste, they were all listening to shit like Eminem, blink-182, Rammstein, NOFX, Linkin Park, HIM, Third Eye Blind, the Offspring, Three Doors Down, Dave Matthews, John Mayer, all sorts of stuff that even now I can't really bring myself to appreciate whatsoever. These are all the same people who will make fun of Nickelback when their whole music collection consists of bands that sound exactly like Nickelback (and probably some Nickelback anyway for good measure). I had one friend in high school who had some overlap with my then-meager musical diet, but this was discovered after my interest in music began anyway. And then I learned of another friend from high school who was as open-minded as I was, but this wasn't discovered until later in college. So, none of my friends influenced my taste either, and if anything put me off popular music since I thought this was all there was.

So, in summary, I can say with confidence that none of the people around me were significantly shaping my musical horizons. If only I had known back then that the word of music was way, way, WAY more diverse, but I had to learn that the hard way from scratch. And I'm better for it, so it worked out.

Those Adam Sandler discs, though. Man.