As the youngest of three children, my musical taste was greatly influenced by my (much) older sister. She was 22, I was 11, and we loved Belinda Carlisle. We loved Kylie Minogue. We loved Michael Jackson.
But as the mid 90s crept up on me and I entered highschool, everything changed. My new friends were listening to Pearl Jam, Nirvana, and The Smashing Pumpkins. They were wearing flannel, the boys were growing their hair long, and the girls embraced the “heroin chic” look. Grunge was at it’s peak even though the king Cobain himself had died just a year earlier. I remember one kid who turned to me in the very first class of Year 7, and said to me dead seriously, “the world is a vampire“, as if it were some sort of code. If I had been down with the right tunes I would have replied in similar form, “set to drai-ai-ain“, and been initiated into the halls of coolness for the next six years. But no locomotion or moondance could have prepared me for that.
