“New music categorically sucks.”
“Classic Rock was the pinnacle of music.”
“I have no need to further my listening breadth.”
As an aside, recovering disc jockey Jim Quinn (of Quinn and Rose fame) hosted a conservative syndicated morning radio show out of Pittsburgh until this past November. He's a terrific conservative voice - and he'll undoubtedly be back on the radio after a 6 month no-compete clause plays itself out.
But as a former disc jockey, his music knowledge and tastes are really wide. And one day on his show, he postulated something I wholeheartedly agreed with.
People's music tastes are formed and solidified based on the era of the popular music that was dominant at the time they last went to school. He posited that this would be true even if you're only a high school grad, or college grad, or if you went to school late in life.
His theory was that your final years in school were the last time in life where you had time to sit around and listen to music in a social setting or even if you listened to music in the background as you crammed for tests or did hours of homework.
Once you leave school, the music you listened to becomes set or ingrained as your preferable music.
So my question to the FReepers on this thread, are your music tastes tied to the last years of your educational experience?
I went back to school right around the turn of the 21st century and I will admit, my musical preferences seemed to update from classic rock to newer, alternative rock. Instead of Pink Floyd, The Who, The Cars, The Eagles, and so on and so on, I became a fan of bands like Blink 182, OK GO, Good Charlotte, Sugarcult, Bare Naked Ladies, and so on. I became very bored with the classic rock as it seemed no stations played what used to be album-oriented music to just the same 50 rock rotation. As an example, Dire Straits is an awesome band. But the stations only ever played Sultans of Swing. Great tune, but if I am going to go digging for deeper cuts (which I did), then I was going to dig for other music variations as well.
Sort of yes and and sort of no. Part of it is a matter of timing because I put a couple of years wallowing in fastfood inbetween high school and college so I’ve got two “last year”s. My musical taste is very broad, but I can trace everything I listen to really to Jr High, I can make that chain of: listening to this band left me open to this band, to this band, to this band, to desperately hoping Nick Cave swings into Arizona on his west coast tour this year.
Part of it is because I’ve always been very referential in my entertainment. If I hear the director of a movie I like was heavily influenced by this other movie I MUST watch the other movie, and then if I get a list of other movies influenced by it I’ll watch them too. I’m that way in music and books too. Which is part of why I’m always listening to new stuff, what I grew up on is influencing artists today, and I want to hear what they’re doing with it. This of course is why I can always draw that chain. It helps that I’ve always had (and tried to be) friends that say “well if you like that you should check this out”. That was the great part about exchanging tapes back in the day, we’d record the requested album but then we’d fill the empty space with something else, conceptually related by not tightly tied. I also get a lot of musical taste from soundtrack albums, I get it for one or two songs and then other bands on there draw my interest, The Sopranos soundtracks gave me a LOT of music.