Ever think of how different your music taste could've been? - Music

LedZep

Skinny wrote:

A person's taste in popular media is inherently and irrevocably intertwined with and dependent upon their unique life experiences. Without getting too "butterfly effect" here, any change in a person's life, particularly during their formative years, would likely have a significant effect on the music that they enjoy. What a person's parents or friends did or didn't listen to will have an impact - be that positive or negative - on what said person listens to. All of us here would have a different taste in music if events in our respective lives had panned out differently.

100% agree. It's interesting how most people here think differently. I'm certain that if my best buddy hadn't introduced me to Madvillainy and Illmatic, I wouldn't be a hip hop fan now. Or at least my hip hop journey would've been very different. If I hadn't heard Blackwater Park while being deep into prog rock, it's possible that extreme metal would never become appealing to me. Numerous other examples too. Not to even mention that my dad had a huge impact on me when I was younger, there's no way I would've been as big of a music fan without him. He introduced me to all of the music that I started with, from classic and hard rock to folk to alternative to singer/songwriter to punk to a whole load of different 90s stuff.
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Finally updated the overall chart

2020s
90s

Spyglass
Resident Metalhead

Gender: Male
Location: The red dot on the map

Skinny wrote:

A person's taste in popular media is inherently and irrevocably intertwined with and dependent upon their unique life experiences. Without getting too "butterfly effect" here, any change in a person's life, particularly during their formative years, would likely have a significant effect on the music that they enjoy. What a person's parents or friends did or didn't listen to will have an impact - be that positive or negative - on what said person listens to. All of us here would have a different taste in music if events in our respective lives had panned out differently.

My dad loved punk and post-punk, reggae, soul and R'n'B, post-bop, and certain strands of the classic rock canon, but he also hated house and techno, hip-hop and grime, and metal. I take my love of Sade and Curtis Mayfield and Bob Dylan and Gregory Isaacs from the experiences I had listening to those artists growing up, but my dad also liked Oasis and The Jam and Joan Baez and Thin Lizzy, artists I have varying levels of respect or admiration for, but not artists I particularly care to listen to. My mom's taste in music was more limited, but I remember that car journeys with her involved Meat Loaf, Air Supply, and Andrew Lloyd Webber soundtracks, all things I can't stand, frankly. It doesn't mean that I don't look back on those car journeys fondly, but I'd have picked a very different soundtrack. The friends I made in school were into all sorts of things, but primarily contemporaneous indie rock, hip-hop and grime, and a little later dubstep and UK garage. At university, my housemate was super into doom and stoner rock. My fiancée enjoys country pop and turn-of-the-millennium R'n'B. One of best friends listens almost solely to New Order, Dave Berman, and Pavement. Another listens exclusively to reggae. My mate who I was out with last night is the only person I know who cares for Boosie or UGK or Kodak Black, despite both our misgivings, and so we often show one another our new rap discoveries. All of these people have affected my tastes, and (without sounding too arrogant) I would like to think my tastes have influenced theirs, for better or worse. But if my parents had never moved house when I was 11, or had picked one of the houses we looked at in a different neighbourhood, I likely would never have met these friends, and my tastes would have been impacted accordingly. I may not even be as passionate about music at all. If I hadn't taken that first pill at that UK garage rave when I was 15 or 16, I may never have developed the appreciation I have for electronic music. If I'd have missed the bus the day I sat next to another future friend and listened to Bad Brains on his CD Walkman, I wouldn't have gone home and researched American punk rock, which took me in all sorts of cool directions at a time in life when what I found was able to have a profound effect. If I hadn't visited Valhalla Records (now defunct) in Kilmarnock, on a whim because I was bored of my gran dragging me around charity shops, and subsequently picked up Wowee Zowee and It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back at an age where they were both electrifying to me, and then listened to them both on repeat whilst I sat and logged hours and hours on Need for Speed: Underground 2, who knows when I would've found them and if they'd have even mattered to me by then. If any of these events - some major and some minor - had turned out different, then of course my taste in music could and likely would be unrecognisable from what it is now. Nothing exists in a vacuum.

Excellent post. You had a cool dad. Too bad he didn't enjoy hip hop and metal.
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Do it yourself and let me play my music: https://www.besteveralbums.com/thechart.php?c=61802

BozoTyrannus

Gender: Male
Age: 32

The only other way my music taste could have gone is less varied. I still like all the stuff I ever liked. My taste never "matured". I learned to play guitar by listening to Green Day and All American Rejects, and I still listen to them, albeit now mixed in with Ali Farke Toure, Frederic Chopin, Lianne La Havas, and etc.
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I wanna take Sean Penn
And take Sean Bean
Put 'em in a blender
And make Sean Pean

craola
crayon master

Location: pdx

My first deep connection with music came when I was three years old. We lived in a double cup-de-sac. Not too many cars would come through, and there were kids in all of the houses on our side of the dead end, so we were always outside playing. One afternoon, I heard some music coming from a house in the other cul-de-sac, so I ventured that way and camped out on the porch. An older woman was in her living room playing a grand piano quite beautifully. I sat down, apparently out-of-sight from the neighbors, closed my eyes, and lost myself in the music. After some time, I heard voices - lots of voices - calling my name. Evidently, no one knew where I was, and there was a panic about me being kidnapped or something.

It wasn’t another two or three years before I heard a recording of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto no. 1 for the first time and convinced my parents to sign me up for violin lessons. Those sweeping strings... I couldn’t get enough of them. There’s actually more to this part of the story that involves sibling humiliation or taunting of some sort or another, but that’s another story for another time. Long story short, my parents found a teacher for me and got that ball rolling.

For most of my childhood, it was all classical music. I grew up without a grandfather on either side, so Mr. Piazza, my violin teacher, filled that role for me. He was a lovely man, and I was quite fond of him. He had terrible Parkinson’s, but all traces of it used to vanish the moment the violin was under his chin. Music, it seems, had medicinal properties for him. He rented a studio in downtown Portland, and the studio next to his was rented out by his childhood friend Mary-Anne. She taught harp, but she called me into her office after every one of my lessons to offer me an Andes mint. Mr. Piazza died on my twelfth birthday. I abandoned birthday parties and classical music for a long time after that.

LedZep

craola wrote:

My first deep connection with music came when I was three years old. We lived in a double cup-de-sac. Not too many cars would come through, and there were kids in all of the houses on our side of the dead end, so we were always outside playing. One afternoon, I heard some music coming from a house in the other cul-de-sac, so I ventured that way and camped out on the porch. An older woman was in her living room playing a grand piano quite beautifully. I sat down, apparently out-of-sight from the neighbors, closed my eyes, and lost myself in the music. After some time, I heard voices - lots of voices - calling my name. Evidently, no one knew where I was, and there was a panic about me being kidnapped or something.

It wasn’t another two or three years before I heard a recording of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto no. 1 for the first time and convinced my parents to sign me up for violin lessons. Those sweeping strings... I couldn’t get enough of them. There’s actually more to this part of the story that involves sibling humiliation or taunting of some sort or another, but that’s another story for another time. Long story short, my parents found a teacher for me and got that ball rolling.

For most of my childhood, it was all classical music. I grew up without a grandfather on either side, so Mr. Piazza, my violin teacher, filled that role for me. He was a lovely man, and I was quite fond of him. He had terrible Parkinson’s, but all traces of it used to vanish the moment the violin was under his chin. Music, it seems, had medicinal properties for him. He rented a studio in downtown Portland, and the studio next to his was rented out by his childhood friend Mary-Anne. She taught harp, but she called me into her office after every one of my lessons to offer me an Andes mint. Mr. Piazza died on my twelfth birthday. I abandoned birthday parties and classical music for a long time after that.

That's a great story, and I'm really sorry about Mr. Piazza.
_________________
Finally updated the overall chart

2020s
90s