An Evolution In Musical Taste

My little sister Elise and I are 2 ½ years apart in age.

Aside from a few instances, such as…

…it was by and large the music of our older siblings that provided us with our earliest musical memories. 

Eventually, we discovered the hallowed ground of our brother Greg’s peach crates full of albums.

Greg was already an adult. Setting foot into his room was like entering a fascinating foreign land full of curiosities.

When we dared to venture in, just thumbing through those records with their mystical, enchanting cover art became an otherworldly experience.

Though all of our siblings’ musical proclivities seeped into our bloodstream, everything from Motown to rock to singer/songwriter to disco, those peach crates seemed to be the beacon in the night, guiding us to our rightful place on our musical journey.

When we would strike out on our own and start getting into something such as, let’s say, Barry Manilow Live, which we absolutely adored, Greg was right there, letting us know in no uncertain terms that we had strayed from the path.

As we got older, both Elise and I began to carve our own musical identity.

I stared, mesmerized at the cover, and asked aloud how the band came up with the idea of naming the album after an old theater. Elise quickly responded with:

“Because Dennis DeYoung is a genius, that’s how.”

The rock bands she initially embraced such as Styx, REO Speedwagon, Survivor, and Journey were not radical choices, as Greg owned albums by these bands, or at the very least was into them.

 When she came home with a Van Halen album, things got shaken up a bit.

Other than some of the harder stuff, Elise didn’t veer that far off course from the rest of us, until she was well into high school.

She went from what could be considered to be a conventional 80s suburban teen to someone altogether different.

She began dating a punk rocker, an actual punk rocker with a mohawk. I didn’t even know you could find one of those in our town. (Word had it that he eventually became a Buddhist monk.) Gone was the feathered hair, replaced by a shorter do. Gone were the rock and roll records, replaced by bands unfamiliar to any of us.

Greg and I had a field day with Echo and The Bunnymen.

She in turn would call into question the Christian Rock bands, like Petra, that I would blast on the stereo. Fair enough. When I reminded her that she used to love Van Halen, she vehemently denied it.

We were at an impasse.

But a funny thing happened: 

I actually liked some of what I was hearing from her collection.

One of the first things to catch my ear was Love My Way by the Psychedelic Furs. The spacy synths, the cool marimba line, and Richard Butler’s raspy vocal delivered in a thick British accent all captivated me.

I was also drawn to the minimalism of Kraftwerk’s Computer World.  In particular, I found the track Computer Love, all seven minutes+ of it, irresistibly hypnotic.

Once Elise saw that I was warming up to some of her records, she began playing things for me she thought I might like:

Such as The Cure’s The Love Cats, with its jazzy acoustic bass line and barroom piano sounds.

As she began exploring the Goth world, darker sounds began emanating more frequently from her room, such as a Ministry 7” or Bela Lugosi Is Dead by Bauhaus. Being into the Moody Blues, I remember thinking, “Oh, it’s like ‘Timothy Leary’s dead’- but a totally different person.” 

She began spending more time in the city (Chicago).

I was never there, but I’m picturing everyone wearing black and dancing to industrial and goth music and I think that’s pretty darn close.

Elise eventually fulfilled her destiny and moved to the city in the late 80s, and we had less and less contact. 

I remained firmly rooted in the suburbs and delved full-on into my faith, whereas she had decidedly pulled away from both of those. I would come to her apartment to get my hair cut (no one has ever gotten my hair like she did), but it was as if we were from different worlds and had nothing in common.

Music was a dead end.

When I tried to talk to her about anything, I made no attempt to gain any perspective on where she was coming from, and only saw things from my point of view, which was very rigid at the time. I undoubtedly came off as preachy and judgmental, which could only serve to drive us further apart.

Once again, music stepped in, and it was Elise making the overture.

Sometime in the very early 90s, she began giving me mixtapes of some of the music she was currently into, such as house, acid-house, ambient, trip hop, neo-funk and Latin jazz. I loved pretty much all of it and played some of those tapes for years afterward.

As I was starting to expand past my CCM (Christian Contemporary Music) leanings, those tapes helped me forge ahead into new sonic territory and formed a good chunk of my musical taste in that chapter of my life.

As the years progressed, Elise and I both went through personal growth and change, and gradually became closer.

Music has remained a key part of that bond. Though our tastes have sometimes diverged, we always find our way back to that shared love of music that goes back to jumping up and down on our beds to those 45s.

At any time:  

That’s a pretty cool thing to have.

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