Listen to Cool Music: Letters to a Teenage Girl

Seriously, listen to anything except the Top 40 stuff your friends are listening to. I’m not telling you to never listen to it, but you should cultivate a taste for other kinds of music for lots of good reasons you probably wouldn’t think.

My musical taste varied wildly as a teenager. I grew up in the ‘90s, and about halfway through that decade, some of the best music of all time was made. But only for a period of a couple of years, and then music on the radio sucked again. I didn’t know then that there was a such thing as independent music (i.e., music not played on mainstream radio), so I went backwards in time looking for music I liked.

My search led me initially to classic rock, mostly of the Southern rock persuasion, thanks to my childhood and my parents’ tastes. In my early teen years, I discovered jazz thanks to the iconic teenage movie Clueless, in which one of the characters references Billie Holiday. I started listening to her, which led me to Ella Fitzgerald, who in turn led to Louie Armstrong, and on to Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie and through most of the iconic jazz musicians and singers.

At some point in high school, the cool people I had become friends with (thanks to my taste in jazz) introduced me to independent music, like Belle & Sebastian and Braid.

Music might seem like a trivial thing for me to be giving you advice on, but music has been a huge part of my life. It’s soothed me when I was sad, calmed me when I was near the edge, propelled me through long nights of studying as well as countless miles of road, and lifted my spirits when I felt the most alone. Your taste in music is critical to your growth as a person.

Older People Will Respect You

My taste in jazz had an interesting side effect: When adults found out I listened to jazz music voluntarily and that I actually enjoyed it, they looked at me in a different light. Simply by branching out into a different kind of music, it was implied that I wasn’t like other teenagers, that I was somehow more mature. It was as if it hadn’t dawned on them that a teenager could like the same kind of music that they did. They started swapping CDs with me and recommending new artists for me to check out. It was pretty cool to have conversations with people older than me and to feel like I was telling them new things.

You Become More Interesting

Having a varied taste in music gives you a layer of complexity that your friends who only listen to the popular stuff on the radio won’t have. And that complexity makes you more interested to other people. “Oh, you listen to _______? I’ve never heard of them. What are they like?” Knowing about things that other people don’t know about makes you more interesting also.

It Gives You Something in Common With Other Cool, Interesting People

If someone else does listen to the same music you do, it’s like instant friendship. The more esoteric the music, the more instant the friendship. Even being interested in learning more about different kinds of music will draw you into a new circle of friends. The people from my teenage years who were most influential in molding me as a person, were people who either shared a common love of music or introduced me to a new band or type of music.

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