How have your music tastes evolved over time?

Post Reply New Topic

AMB, I know I'm going off topic here for a second but have you read Jerusalem yet?

It's a book by Alan Moore.

Ah, right. I remember hearing about it when it was published last year. I'll see if I can get round to reading it at some point.

Well i Started with metal and steadily build on from there. Before I got into metal i was not really into music and through metal i eventually discovered all sorts of great (generally) more underground music ranging from all sorts of hardcore punk to minimal techno to central asian folk. While I think most of the things I listen to today i'd like too if i was aware of it as a teen I have also actually pushed the horizons in some ways regarding stuff like techno or 80s not quite mainstream music. Always liked stuff like drum n bass but just was too busy getting into other styles when i was 16 however so it wasnt a case of needing to learn to appreciate electronic music in general for example.

I used to like girly pop music. Now I like rock.

I used to resist the idea of liking any music. (Though I didn’t hate music either, and I was fine with other people liking it.) Recently, though, I decided that liking music wasn’t so bad. I’ve started to enjoy listening to some of Richard Wagner’s works.

As an early child I didn't like most music or had much of a taste. Until I got to about the 5th that is when I started developing a taste for music. All the music I liked was the soundtracks to cartoons primarily the openings and closings and videogames. I would start up some games on my Wii, Nintendo DS, gamecube or playstation 2 just so I could hear the music, I did it for games like Super Smash Bros, Ratchet & Clank, Jak & Daxter, Marvel Vs Capcom 2, Mario Kart, Dragon Ball Z Budokai Tenkaichi 3, Devil May Cry, Kirby Super Star and Sonic Mega Collection. I also had an Elite Beat Agent game and I liked some of the songs they had like Earth Wind and Fire - September and Good Charlotte - The Anthem. I'd have the game play a ghost run just so I could listen to the songs without playing as if my DS was an mp4 player. I was also really into playing flash/web browser games so I would play those games for their soundtracks and then I eventually made my way to Newgrounds and would listen to soundtracks people posted there.

Around 2006/2007 when Youtube really started to take off and people would upload all sorts of things, I would look up the soundtracks to videogames I've never played or heard of. AMVs were really popular at the time so I discovered bands like Linkin Park, Evanescence, Fallout Boy, and even Gorillaz. But my taste didn't really expand out of the few songs I commonly heard from them. I was still mostly into videogame soundtracks and whatever I found on Newgrounds.

There was a cartoon called Megas XLR that I really loved it had a mostly metal and hard rock soundtrack.

Eventually when I started watching anime my taste started to shift towards Japanese music and anime soundtracks. I had an obsession with Bruce Falconer's soundtrack for Dragon Ball Z and Naruto's 5th opening song for at least 2 years.

In my late middle school and early high school years I had an obsession with two MMO games named Mabinogi and Mabinogi Heroes/Vindictus. They have some of the best soundtracks I've ever heard in a game and it was just icing on the cake because despite being MMOs they had pretty engaging stories and the combat for both the games were pretty unique. Mabinogi was mostly a fantasy life type of game with mostly 8bit/chiptune and other types of electronic music soundtracks while Vindictus was more like a God Of War type of game with score soundtracks.

My musical taste and library stagnated for a while since I hadn't been playing as many games or watching new cartoons/animes to get my fix on new songs. I never really liked pop music or basically anything that wasn't used in or from a videogame or cartoon/anime. I never watched channels like MTV or even looked at the music videos Disney Channel would play. Since I grew up and live in an urban area just about every young person around me likes hip hop, rap, trap, R&B and pop songs and always has them on blast which I ended up despising for a while because a lot of the artist promoted superficial self destructive life styles through their songs and I couldn't really escape the music since it was being played everywhere. There was a dubstep craze in high school but it luckily only lasted for a year.

I don't count Weird Al Yankovic as music because I see him as comedy first and mainly listen for his music videos.

I'd say only in recent years do I believe my music taste have evolved to be considered somewhat normal. I can proudly say to someone that the song I'm listening to is not from a videogame or anime . I've become more familiar with "traditional" music that people listen to. I never owned a CD player, portable radio, MP3 player, smartphone or even a clamshell phone with music playback capabilities for most throughout my entire school life and even into college. So for years if I didn't have access to a computer with internet access or the music files downloaded I would just play the song in my head and since I was in school most of the time I did this a lot. It has allowed me to tune out surroundings if they aren't too loud and entertain myself if things get too boring.

Around 2012/2013 I discovered Archive which is the first band that I actually liked nearly all the songs that came from them since I was also pretty picky with other bands and artist only like a few songs at most from them and usually ranging from 1-2 songs. They kickstarted my love for trip hop and dark sounding electronic music. I also usually preferred instrumentals and would tune out the singers voice/lyrics if I could but now I've come to appreciate vocalist and have started to pay more attention to lyrics which are making songs more enjoyable for me now. So I started to discover other trip hop bands like Unkle, Tricky, Massive Attack, Portishead and etc which made me really appreciate female vocalist and slow paced atmospheric like beats. Trip hop currently easily makes up at least 70% of my music library and a lot of the songs that aren't trip hop are still very similar to it. Trip hop made me appreciate rap more when listening to the few trip hop songs that have rap on them I was able to find something that wasn't like mainstream rap but not like underground rap either it is almost like it's own thing.

As a trickle down effect I started listening to more instrumental hip hop and Japanese hip hop from artist such as Nujabes, DJ Krush, Deltron 3030 and Tokimonsta.

I've also started listening to a lot more metal, specifically progressive metal, trance metal, djent, gothic metal, melodic death metal and symphonic metal. Most Heavy metal bands and songs just don't do it for me. A lot of metalheads act like you need to like Metallica or Megadeath if you want to be considered a metalhead but I've listened to the most common classic metal bands like Metallica, Slayer, Megadeath, Guns N Roses, Motorhead and they just don't do it for me, most of their songs are too simple or dated for me to get into them even their more modern ones. I do like some Iron Maiden though.

I was on a glitch hop craze before I got really into trip hop. From time to time I look up EDM channels on youtube to find some new glitch hop songs. I especially like glitch hop songs that incorporate jazz/funk. I also like a lot of electric swing/electro funk music.

I also like a lot of electronic music from Japanese artist, their style stands out a lot and gains my attention especially Japanese house and disco.

I've also built up my score library a bit and even have some score hybrids like electronic, rock, and metal.

Currently my taste is in drum n bass and drum n bass/trip hop hybrids such as Etro Anime, Baxter, Amon Tobin and Kosheen. I'm so happy that besides Youtube, sites like Last.FM allows me to easily find bands and songs similar to ones I like. I've been looking into other types of music that sound similar to trip hop or mix with it like hip hop, industrial, darkwave, breakbeat, dub, house, art pop, indie pop, trance and etc.