Today’s victory in getting my mom into tøp
I became a fan last year in October and dove into to their entire discography and the lore. Told my mom I was getting into their music over FaceTime from my dorm room. In February I was in town for my birthday and asked if we could see their movie, and she humored me. I played some of Blurryface while we where driving around doing other errands to try to give her a bit of an introduction and when Stressed Out came on she was like “ohh it’s this band” lol. Saw the movie and said she liked “some” of the songs (and said others were pretty weird) and was asking me some stuff about the band, like where the name came from. She seemed to be impressed that the name was actually very meaningful. I was home again for spring break and had SAI playing while we drove together cuz I figured their poppiest album would be the most palatable for her, and when that went fairly well I got a bit too cocky and queued up Vessel (my favorite album) to play next. Anddd she thought all of the songs were weird and asked me to change it four songs in😭. I’ve also been getting into other alt/rock artists and my mom was fairly amused with some of my other “90’s anger rock” and “in my feelings college music” so she was telling me some of the songs she listened to in college to try out. She had the idea to start a shared playlist for when we drive together, and we tried to add songs the other would also like. From tøp, I included Navigating, Ride, and Mulberry Street cuz I figured those were good driving songs and she wouldn’t mind the way they sounded. I’m home for the summer and we’ve been driving around a lot recently. Today when we reached the end of the playlist I said I could queue up my favorite tøp song (ode to sleep) to play next. I told her I knew all the words including the raps, but I didn’t think she’d like it. She said to go ahead and queue it and turned up the volume. I sang along to all of it and she said “I liked that, put it on the playlist!” at the end. I joked that I just had to warm her up with a bunch of other alt music first to get her to like that song since she hadn’t liked it the last time I played it. She didn’t remember not liking it when I played Vessel over spring break, but she said she liked now. So, victory!
If you read all of this, you’re a saint. I’d love hear other people’s stories of trying to get family members into tøp or anything songs you think I should play for her :)