The Twilight soundtrack quite literally changed my life. And I am completely okay with that. I am proud of my musical history.

The beginning

At the age of 11, I was completely obsessed with Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight Saga book series. I was an undeniable fangirl, and lapped up any sort of content related to the series.

Decode by Paramore was the first single released from The Twilight Soundtrack in October of 2008. I was in 6th grade and had never heard of Paramore, or any bands in general. I was listening to Hits For Kids CDs, JoJo and the Hannah Montana soundtracks. Decode was something very foreign to me – and I loved it.

I had no idea that downloading this song would essentially change the course of my life.

By 2009 I was a complete fangirl, enamoured by Paramore’s music. 2010 finally found me meeting other Paramore fans. They introduced me to bands like All Time Low, The Maine and Mayday Parade. I also began entering into online fan communities, and making friends that I’m still in contact with to this day (thanks tumblr!).

Everybody else

The further into the music community I got, the more cool stories I heard about how people discovered their favourite bands. It seemed everyone had been listening to Simple Plan and Blink-182 since they were 9. Or they found out about My Chemical Romance and The Used on MySpace. Or their cool older sibling gave them a Green Day CD and it changed their life. Etc, etc.

Then there was me, who discovered her favourite band through a compilation CD from a movie about sparkly vampires.

Twilight stopped being “cool” pretty early on, so I developed this weird feeling of shame about where I’d discovered Paramore. As I became more emo, and my hardcore friends started hating on pop music, I hid my enjoyment of it because I didn’t want to be uncool. I would change the pop artist names in my iTunes library, so if someone looked through, they wouldn’t see that I listened to Flo Rida or GaGa – only the ‘cool’ music was visible.

A new perspective

I wish my younger self had felt and acted differently about a lot of things, but especially my music taste. I wish I’d been able to not care, and realise that there shouldn’t be any sort of guilt associated with the music you love.

As I got older, I finally got over myself and grew out of the idea that “pop wasn’t real music” and I should be into more underground and cool stuff because pop was lame and real music had guitars and screams and wasn’t made by fake celebrities with electronic machines!!!!!!!!

Fuck. That.

We are all allowed to listen to and love whatever we want – that’s the beauty of personal taste! There is no reason to be ashamed of your current music taste, or how you got here. The important thing is that you’re enjoying the music and supporting the musicians you admire.

So be proud of your musical history – we all had to start somewhere.

The article was originally published on Don't Bore Us