Over on Balloon Juice there is a post discussing what the emblematic music of various generations is. I am not all that interested in that, since I think “generations” are far too big to say anything about the people in them. I mean I am technically a baby boomer, but given that my parents were born during WWII, it really doesn’t make sense to lump me in with the glut of kids born right after WWII. And I am certainly not GenX either.

So what I am going to do, and I hope others will also, is pick music that is emblematic of my own coming of age. Not necessarily the music that I listened to the most but the stuff that dug into my psyche and changed me.

So, though I listened to way more Tom Petty and The Police, I am going to say David Bowie. I was a cishet teenager when he burst into my conciousness, but the message of mutable gender and sexuality, and the implications for being who you are instead of fitting in, changed me. I was super supportive of gay people from the beginning, and once I heard about transsexuals, and later other gender/sexuality/kink identities and preferences, I was right there too.

I think it eventually helped me understand race issues better as well (though I still need a ton of work on that). I was raised in a super white environment, so I had the white-liberal-neighborhood understanding of race - all the black people were exactly like us in terms of speech, clothes, education, jobs, houses - and so it was easy not to be racist. When I moved into a black neighborhood in Los Angeles I realized that it gets much harder when (1) you are outnumbered; and (2) the black people have their own culture instead of fitting into white-liberal-neighborhood’s. I wonder if people a bit younger than me who grew up litening to rap were better able to understand race from the beginning?

So, what do other people see as their coming of age, figuring out who you are, influence music?