We’re two friends who once upon a time (in our tweenhood, to be exact) found ourselves and each other in the same music, somehow apart, somehow alone, from our peers. Music that was, ironically but also very fittingly, synonymous with the tweenages.
Blink-182. Linkin Park. My Chemical Romance. Fall Out Boy. You know what I mean.
As if to prove that this common ground was the product of our tweendom and nothing more, our tastes diverged radically as we matured, driving both of us deep into new niches where we can feel comfortably alone, one in the dreamland of synthwave, one in the headbanger’s paradise of heavy metal and punk rock.
It continues to puzzle us, as it did at the tender age of twelve, how this music, our music, my music, can be so overlooked, cast aside, altogether ignored, by the vast majority of listeners.
We liked real music, we said. And we still do. But how can this feeling be so common? How can the definition of real be so polymorphic? Is everyone isolated on their own genre-island? Is all music real, then, if we all feel equally defined by our particular preference, and equally vexed by those of others?
Why then, do we like the music we like?
TL;DR
Music’s great. Let’s talk about it.
Out the Other 