Musically Challenged

Today’s Daily Prompt:

What sort of music was played in your house when you were growing up? What effect, (if any) did it have on your musical tastes?

My parents didn’t play music when I was growing up. I had a record player:  

But we didn’t have a radio in the house until my mom married my stepdad when I was eleven, and we didn’t have a car with an FM radio until I was twelve. We also didn’t have MTV until I was twelve, but by then, I had a radio in my room and was working on my cassette tape collection, which grew to an umanageable volume by the time I graduated high school and moved out.

It’s hard to say what effect the lack of music at home had on my taste in music, as it’s one of those things that you don’t know you’re missing because you’ve never known it. 

I did eventually notice the lack, when all of my friends’ homes had fancy sound systems. But we had hundreds of books, and no one else had that many. I think that had a bigger effect on me; it’s still hard to trust someone who doesn’t own books. I mean, books.

It may have affected my current appreciation for music; I do love to listen to Pandora while I’m cooking or writing or folding laundry, but mostly EDM or Fleetwood Mac, neither of which were incredibly popular in my teens.