Got up this morning, put on some Enya. It’s been a while.
What was my path into electronic music? That’s a storied past, the result of a chain of personal connections. Started with an 8-track of Kraftwerk’s “Autobahn” that circulated among my uncles; later a buddy handed me “The Man Machine”; Emerson, Lake, and Palmer “Lucky Man” on the radio; Peter Gabriel’s “Big Time”; new wave. Those all primed me. But the one that really broke the dam and released the flood was Enya. She was my gateway into electronic music, and into admitting — in the land of hard rock — that I like electronica.
But someone walked me to the levee.
Like my peers in our small town in the late 80’s, I was an on-fire-for-God Jesus-fish Christian. Didn’t know much about the world, but what I did, I was certain of it because someone told me. At that end of the decade, the Baptists were on this holy crusade against New Age culture (yeah, you read that right). They said New Age was just regular old Satan worship in disguise, using its seductive messaging to lure people into its velvet traps with Eastern mysticism. Because of these lessons, and being a thumb-headed teenager myself, I was hyper-vigilant about its presence in the world. I wanted to find this New Age stuff and destroy it.
11th grade, math class. My classmate Samir was an avowed atheist but a good guy who liked to shake things up a bit by challenging true believers by Just Asking Questions. Being 2nd generation Indian immigrant in a small town, he was on the edge of classroom society and was frequently chatty to make up for it. Finding common interests in music, he loaned me his tape of “Watermark” by Enya. I was hesitant, but I took it home. Liked it. Made a copy on my church’s dual-deck while running sound for Sunday service.
Spent weeks listening, trying to discern if Enya was New Age. Given the provenance of the tape — with me holding so many stupid stereotypes about Samir, who was Desi but squarely atheist — I kept getting the wrong ideas and constantly asked myself questions about her. Later at academic summer camp, my friend Gary and I also asked those questions as we shared headphones on long bus trips. We talked about faith often; it’s why we meshed so well. Ultimately, we couldn’t discern if Enya was New Age or not, but agreed that it was OK to like her anyway.
At that moment, a ripple formed in my mind and I was finally able to let out the slack for a bit and just enjoy something for what it was instead of judging everything so seriously all the time.
Fast forward a bit, I leave my small town and run off to a smaller town with a bigger school filled with people from a bigger world. Of course I grew up, gained more of those ripples, and my own struggle of faith just couldn’t hold up to all this new information. Of course Enya isn’t New Age; she’s Irish, for Christ’s sake, a prodigy from a family of musical prodigies. I released my grip on the bad assumptions I previously crafted from the limited information I had at the time and let them fall into the river.
I understand Samir’s contribution better. We connected in class, and through that he helped me step toward a tangential path to becoming something different. Butterfly effect. I ran into him a few years after I had left the church; he confessed with wide smiles that he had joined the church. He found his own connections. Again, butterfly effect.
People change in surprising ways, but not without precedent and priming. We are the result of our decisions and the decisions of those we share our time with. Connections form our culture. My choice in music here seems like something so vapid and minor, but it’s a watermark of those connections. See here: this is how high the flood waters reached at the turn of the decade.
I like what I like because of the people I like, who also like what they like.
That’s culture.