Sometimes what we most enjoy is what we least expect

I used to be kind of a music snob. The type of music I was snobby about, however, ebbed and flowed over the years, moving with my changing tastes.In high school, I was at first a classic rock snob. It was the mid-1980s, and I saw The Beatles' "Let It Be" at camp and fell in love. Fortunately, among my friends in the drama club, there were plenty of huge fans of the big names of classic rock - The Eagles, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, and so on. And, yes, Jethro Tull. Big fans of Tull. It wasn't hard to find classic rock on the radio in New York at the time. I became a huge Led Zeppelin fan and there was a period of time when I could turn to nearly any station and find a Zep song. My friend Alison called that my superpower.I think they just played a lot of Led Zeppelin on New York City's AOR (album-oriented rock) stations.Toward the end of high school, I'd started spending summers working at a camp in Connecticut (ever so very suburban New York, I know), and became exposed to a lot more music. While I could still get my fill of AOR, I was drawn more toward music other friends had introduced me to (my parents pretty much only listened to classical music and I was a late bloomer when it came to music).My friend Dan convinced me to go see the movie "Sid & Nancy" when it came out, and the music electrified me. It's possible he already had introduced me to similar music - he was one of my music sherpas in high school and I know I got into Black Flag and The Minutemen because of him. By senior year, I chose to do my Public Speaking class project on punk rock and immersed myself in the genre. The friends I spent that year with were all about as punk as you can get in the suburbs.One of the things I liked about punk was that people didn't expect it from me. I was relatively quiet, and dressed "normal," whatever that is. I wasn't a trendsetter, but neither did I deck myself out in ripped jeans (which weren't as common then) and leather jackets, or popped collars on Polo shirts. I just dressed in regular, everyday clothing, like a regular, everyday girl. To see the looks on people's faces when they asked what I was listening to and I would respond that I was listening to the Sex Pistols or Siouxsie and the Banshees or the Circle Jerks - well, that was delightful.My CD collection by the time I was in my late 20s was firmly punk, post-punk, new wave, alternative, female songwriter, and, surprisingly, standards. Loved them. Listened to anything Ella Fitzgerald belted out and had several versions of the Cole Porter songbook.Then I found myself on the 1996 MTV Music Video Awards, though I hadn't watched MTV much since high school (except for The Real World, I'll confess).A band called the Fugees took the stage and Lauryn Hill started singing a song I recognized from the 1970s: Roberta Flack's "Killing Me Softly." I was aware of the song, but that was probably the only song I knew from Roberta Flack. And she joined Lauryn on stage, but I didn't even remember that fact until I looked up the video to figure out what awards show they performed it at.Lauryn Hill's voice was crystalline. It soared, glided, landed and took off again. I saw transfixed and knew this band was a huge, gaping hole in my musical knowledge.Her solo album, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, came out the next year and we have it in our car (yes, we still have a CD player in our car, don't judge me) and play it often. It holds up as beautifully as the day it came out. You can't say that for all music.I don't know if anyone would have expected me to be a Fugees fan, based on my previous musical taste. I didn't. But it's kind of cool to find something you love where you least expect it - least of all on the MTV Video Music Awards.Photo by Kane Reinholdtsen via Unsplash.