declanmacmanus replied to your post “Adam was also surprised to hear that I am a Def Leppard fan which is...”
okay, def leppard was my favorite band when i was like 9-10, thanks in part to my mom's hair metal influences. I kinda see it as 'joke' music now, but, like, for what it is, it's like the best of what it is. And the fact that it can be considered power pop shows that one's musical tastes build off of a foundation that started when you first started choosing what music to listen to
I feel like everybody talks about the beloved music of their teenage years because it’s the most emotionally salient, but I am personally super interested in how childhood factors into taste -- specifically those ages you mention, 9, 10, 11 -- because, at least for adults in our demographic, that was where the first glimmers of individuation tended to appear.
Your frame of reference is still heavily governed by passive exposure, i.e., what your parents or siblings have been playing around the house or in the car, what television channels and radio stations are on, what records you can "borrow,” but you’re becoming aware of an enormous world outside it, one in which you can take an active and investigative role. It’s the beginning of the lifelong negotiation between familiarity and novelty, and which foundational principles you choose to embrace or reject. To be a preteen is to be at the very root of the preferential decision tree.
I had an allowance by that age, so I could ask my parents to take me to HMV or Tower Records and pick out what I wanted to buy. I was paying attention to songs on the radio with sudden and piercing acuity.
PLJ, a local station, played “The Way” by Fastball during the summer of 1998 and lightning struck because it was everything I had ever heard before from the very moment I had a sense of my own consciousness -- it was the Beatles, duh -- but it also very much wasn’t, couldn’t have been, because my parents were inexplicably unmoved.
I sure was.
