Self Improvement For Your Listening Experience

[Kiki]

Are you getting all you can from music? Do you feel you can improve your own attitudes to music?

What is the difference, if any, between a novice music listener and a more experienced one? Do you feel some music is aimed at people with less expanded music tastes than others?

I'm having ideas. I want to probe people's attitudes to listening to music further.

[Defago]

Story time.

My first serious contact with music was starting high school (14, 15 years old?) when I was a hardcore fan of everything pop-punk. Blink182, Green Day, My Chemical Romance, Good Charlotte, Simple Plan. I only listened to these genres and felt all other genres were either too complicated or sell-outs. Silly me. I progressively began getting bored by the same sounds which a few months before I loved, up to the point on which I didn't enjoy these bands. I'd grown out of it, and had experienced all it could offer me.

A friend of mine recommended I listen to Guns n' Roses, at which point I became crazy with the band for a few months. I praised Slash as the god of music, best guitarist ever obviously. This led me to discover classic rock, and I was for a couple of years, what many on this site would describe as a dadrocker. The WHo, The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd. If Rolling Stone loves it, then be sure I liked it. I also became a little arrogant brat, because "all new music sucks". Yes, I'm ashamed of it now and couldn't disagree more. But back then, being a 15-16 year old kid who thought he was better than everyone else for listening to music everybody else didn't, I felt good about the music I liked. I felt proud and arrogant, because my music was cooler than the rest. Whenever I'd meet another rockist, we'd just sneer and talk about how lousy all the music we didn't listen to was. I was a repellent and abhorrent music aficionado. This lasted until I was about 17 years old.

At that point I started hanging out with a friend who listened to more modern, but still similar, music. Wilco, Black Keys, The Strokes, Muse, etc. I kept exactly the same trend as before, but now instead of "all new music sucks" it was "all music which isn't rock-ish sucks". Same thing but instead of just old classic rock, I included all kinds of rock, as long as it was "rockist" enough.

I turned 18, I came to college. I was growing sick of the same old rocky sound, but I kept on listening because I was an imbecile. I started hanging out with another friend, with whom I had endless debates about whether music (or art) is objectively good or not. Yes, I admit it. I defended objectivity in art. His ideas, however, started to filter into my way of thought, and little by little I started changing my ways. A while afterwards, I acknowledged all music as subjective, and while I still listened only to rock, I accepted other genres as equally valid. I started thinking more as I do now - music is completely subjective. I still listened only to "classic rock", however.

Little by little I started breaching out, adding new rock subdivisions to my repertoire. I started listening to alternative and indie, some progressive, etc. One day I found Scaruffi's History Of Rock book, and read it all (and downloaded a huge amount of albums). I listened to all of them in about one month, and realized how stupid I had been all the time before. I started delving into experimental rock. I left classic rock behind, for the most part. Then I started listening to some hip hop, some blues, some jazz, some *gasp* electronic music. With time and over the course of a couple of years, my music taste became gradually what it is now, which while by all means isn't anything remarkable, it is definitely more varied and deep than it used to be. My whole attitude towards music (and everything, really) has changed radically.

Except being an arrogant ass. I still think my tastes make me a better person than all of you. You plebs.

[Cymro2011]

[Kiki]

How marvelous! You feel you have improved and it is a great thing to hear!

I believe some people do get into music through peer groups at school. This would influence the initial course. They may feel some music should be left untouched and it is great to see people throw such notions!

[Jasonconfused]

[Norman Bates]

[drakonium]

[Dingerbell]

For a year, I didn't discover any new music at all. All I did was listen to shuffle on my iPod on a mixture of classic and fairly modern bands. And you have no idea how great it was. I listened to everything on my iPod so many times, but never knew what the songs were called, that I knew many of them off by heart. Then, when I listened a random album, I would know every song on it, and would then decide how much I liked the album from those songs. I helped, especially, for the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix, and I love them both now after hearing their songs hundreds of times. It was always nice never having to decide what to listen to, and just listening to everything- I forced myself never to skip. It was only at the start of the year when I decided to branch out again, and listen to some more music.

However, choosing to go back to trying to discover music was another great idea, and it's really changed my taste in music around again. I've listened to around 200-250 new albums this year, and it's completely changed the rankings of my chart. Just to compare, before this year, there would only have been 37 albums that are on my chart now, there.

[Cymro2011]

[Defago]