I am a music snob. I can do nothing about it. I prefer music that tries to be unconventional, “un-trendy,” different and is not aimed primarily at profit or notoriety. I have always wondered where this came from.

My parents are not musical. My dad has quite a good collection of “classical” music at this point, but it didn’t exist when I was young. And my mom is content to listen to what she finds tuneful. When I was young I listened to the Nylons – the fucking Nylons. So how I became this massive music snob is a bit of a mystery.

There are two main parts to this snobbery.

The first is historical: I like to know how things happen. I have always had this interest. When I was a child, it was purely an interest in military history, as befits a boy. Now, it is part of my worldview: history is contingent and therefore everything is contextual. We need to context to understand most art. So I try to listen to the contexts of things as much as the things themselves. And I try hear what came before so I know why something that doesn’t sound radical to me could have been radical when it was released.

The other part is a little harder to understand. I have an interest in anything avant-garde. Sometimes I don’t like what I hear but usually I am fascinated. Where did this come from? How did someone brought up on the Nylons and his parents’ ’60s and ’70s records (including Christmas carols) become a fan of free jazz?

Sometimes I trace it back to a Christmas in High School – I think it was December 1997 – when my dad bought me as wide a variety of music as I had yet been exposed to, including everything from alternative rock to romantic – but I know it goes back before that. Something had to prepare me to want to listen to this stuff.

Along with the Nylons, I listened to a lot of oldies. 1050 CHUM, 1150 whatever-it-was-called, and the like. They didn’t play anything too daring. But through the oldies stations I got into the Beatles. I started out with the Red and Blue albums, the traditional Best Of records. Those give you a sense of how the Beatles changed music, but they are far from the whole story. Yes, there is a wide range on there, but nothing compared to the albums. Hearing “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “I Am the Walrus” on the same tape no doubt changed my idea of what was acceptable in music, but I don’t think that was it.

Instead I decided that my interest in wide-ranging forms of music was cemented when I got a copy of The Beatles aka the White Album. Sometime in my late tweens to early teens my mom or someone bought it for me on tape. I listened to it exhaustively. As you know, it contains a sampling of much of what passed for music in the world in 1968. It has as many genres as songs. It is quite the boundary-smasher. This seemed like a satisfying explanation: exposure to the White Album at a reasonably impressionable age turned me into the music snob I am today. But now I’m not sure that’s the case.

The other day I was in my former room at my father’s house. I was rooting around for a gift card that I had misplaced. I stumbled upon two tapes in a drawer: Simon and Garfunkel’s Collection and Weird Al Yankovic and Wendy (formerly Walter) Carlos’ collaboration on a bastardized, humourous version of Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, backed with a similar version of Saint-Saens’ Carnival of the Animals. So I listened to them, to the latter for the first time since I was a child.

Suddenly everything made sense. Though it is a children’s tape, the Weird Al / Carlos performance is not your everyday kid’s music. It is a post modern take on two pieces that, as recently as 50 years earlier in the case of Prokofiev, were considered avant-garde music. And it is obvious to my partially trained ears now how radical these things were, even though they both were obviously inspired by Mussorsky’s Pictures at an Exhibiton. (Incidentally, the first “classical” piece I thought I ever owned a copy of; life is funny like that.) Though presented as stories for kids, both are radical departures from anything I would have been exposed to in my parents’ house(s). And in the form of silly humour they were unquestionable despite their radicalism. The picture was suddenly clear.

So yeah, I think it is safe to say that without an odd little Weird Al tape that my dad just happened to buy decades ago, I doubt I would be the snob I am today.