My wife and I complimented each other quite nicely…that’s how I like to think about it. She is about a year and a half older than I am, so we basically grew up with the same popular music, and it seems where we retained any affinity for the kinds of music on the top 40, we tended to be into mostly the same things, which of course by and large were the same things that were popular with just about anyone. Regarding music that came before our era, namely the classic rock and oldies (or what was called oldies at the time), we certainly seem to appricate the same things, the only real difference is that my wife was exposed to a lot of the classic rock, the 70s hard rock and such, not that long after it came out…she grew up with adult role models who listened to that kind of music. I didn’t start discovering bands like Zeppelin, The Who, Skynyrd, etc. until I was about 15, because my mom listened to oldies and country exclusively…I wasn’t really into the country, but I liked the oldies, and it wasn’t until the early 80s when I was 11 or 12 years old before I first checked out FM radio and found out about top 40 via Michael Jackson, Prince, Madonna, etc., and it wasn’t until 3 or so years later that the one classic rock station about 85 miles from my house boosted its signal enough so I could receive it up in the boondocks. Once I did, I got turned on to the stuff she’d known about for some time. Now our classic rock station would play some artists who bordered on college/alternative music, people like the Smithereens or the Church or INXS, whom I would have found out about anyway a couple years later when Kick came out. But most of what I had exposure to was what was really popular in the late 80s…hair metal. Now I liked some of it, my wife never got into it, she actually lived in a big city, had MTV and watched 120 minutes…she knew about all this great music I was missing out on because there were no radio stations where I lived that played it, there was no internet, and I lived too far out of town to get cable. So, in the early 90s when I transferred out of my 2 year college at home and went to a 4 year school, that was when Nirvana, the Seattle scene and Grunge came along….we both loved it. Because of the popularity of Nirvana, a lot of music that had been considered alternative/college rock, started to get more mainstream airplay, I had access to cable TV, and I started learning about that. When I met my wife in 1994, we were into pretty much the same modern music, we were both huge Nirvana fans, and I was just learning a lot of the stuff she’d been listening to. But whereas I had been following a hard rock/heavy metal path, she was follwoing the alternative path, so she was able to introduce me to some things like The The, Screaming Trees, Afghan Whigs, I introduced her to artists like Pantera and White Zombie. Our musical tastes have by and large stayed in synch with each other, she does at times tend to latch onto things I have very little interest in because they just lack any sort of punch to my ear…stuff like Coldplay or Fleet Foxes, but then there is plenty of met she might not care as much about like the Sword or Mastodon. There are very few things that one of us is way into that the other doesn’t care much about….she was a big Smashing Pumpkins fan, I found them to be very hit and miss (though they put on a great live show), and one of my favorite bands is a holdover from the glam era called Enuff Z’uff, who basically had a couple hit singles at the height of glam in ‘89, but were never really a glam band, but because that’s how they were marketed, they were written off by everyone when glam died…but 20 years and 16 albums later they are making for my money some of the best melodic hard rock since the Beatles (she thinks the singer sounds too nasally, which is funny because she likes Billy Corgan?) But yes, new things come out, if they slap one of us upside the head the probably do the same ot the other. We both immediately loved the White Stripes and pretty much everything Jack White has done. I guess the only place we really don’t synch up always is what phases we go through. For a while she would pretty much exclusively have the classic rock station on in her car, and I was of the opinion that I like classic rock, but I’d rather hear the alternative station and find new things. For a while she was really into the AOR station (kind of like lighter, more adult contemporary rock), and I was into having the hard rock station on. Now she pretty much exclusively listens to a public radio station which has no format and plays mostly college rock, whereas I either like to listen to my Zune or talk radio. But I’d say 95 times out of 100, if one of us likes it, we both like it…4 of the other 5 times are opportunities for us to introduce each other to something new, and that 1 time out of 100 we disagree.
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