Hey former teenagers, do you remember when you were totally into music? I do. It feels like my chest is full of hot burning coals of shame when I think back on those days, but I can’t stop the remembering.

Junior high is when people started asking what kind of music I liked. I said I didn’t know, which was the Wrong Answer. The right answer would have been either “rap” or “rock”, a sign of a cultural sore point that had developed in the face of hip-hop’s rise to the forefront of the popular consciousness. What could I say? I liked Weird Al, and all the stuff they played on America’s Top 40. I was twelve, for god’s sake.

That experience might have had something to do with my approach to music later in life, because I grew to hate the question. I hated the way it reduced the world to two broad categories. I hated the fact that it was not a question about taste, but a demand that one produce one’s cultural bona fides. I hated the racial implications of the question, couching it as an irreconcilable opposition.

A year later though, I started getting into a couple of metal bands, and I figured that was as good a genre as any to admit to enjoying. I was feeling beaten down, and I was willing to settle into an easy answer that I could give people. Then came that one magical detention, when the teacher I was stuck with decided to play Yaz’s Upstairs at Eric’s on his shitty little boombox.

Well, that was it. I learned it really is okay to pick and choose, that allegiance to categories is an obstacle to happiness. (Or deep depression – I got into The Smiths, at some point.) Unfortunately I got a bit carried away, enjoying the obscure chiefly for its unpopularity, the esoteric mostly for its inaccessibility.

I’ve gotten over that, thankfully. I’m beyond my irrational fear of the quotidian, which is good, but I’ve also lost much of my passion, which is probably not. I do remain mostly unapologetic about the music I like, a sometimes useful hold-over from the old snobby days.

That said, I’d be quite embarrassed if somebody were ever to get a hold of my iPod. If you clicked on the video at the top of this post, you might have an inkling as to why.