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I think it's interesting how, regardless of all the great music a person may get exposed to, there's a tendency for people to revert back to certain types of sounds in terms of the music they actually prefer. It must be largely genetic. Throughout my life I've had a marked preference for R&B music. Pop music and Jazz are both distant seconds. I enjoy all other types of music as well, but on a much less frequent basis. I think bluegrass is the only genre that has zero positive effect on me. I don't know ... for me the sound of a banjo is like nails on the chalkboard ...
True story: one of my very first memories in life was watching a replay of Michael Jackson perform Billie Jean on the Motown 25 television special, where he performed the Moonwalk for the first time live and became the biggest musical star in the world. My mom had grown up as a fan watching him and his brothers perform as the Jackson 5, then as I was growing up during the 1980s his star power hit its peak and few people could really watch much television without seeing MJ on there.
Eventually his life turned into a sad spectacle. A friend and I once had a long debate about MJ's career trajectory, and he and I ultimately agreed MJ was never that cool, cutting-edge guy again after about 1985. But we still enjoyed his entertainment very much. It's a testament to how dominating an influence he was on music that he was arguably still one of the biggest stars in the world when he passed away nearly a quarter century later.
I was a kid when MTV and other similar networks still played music videos. Like everyone else my age, I watched a lot of videos. I also followed my much older brother around. Thumbing through his massive CD collection was a huge source of my musical education.
My brother was primarily into hip hop, but he liked a few other artists as well. He pretty much listened to hardcore Hip Hop 90% of the time and the other 10% of the time he listened to mostly Prince. Obviously this made me curious wth was so unique about Prince, so I took to listening to Prince as well. Predictably I became a fan.
I loved the era of R&B/Pop music that took off during maybe the late 1980s with acts like New Edition and Bobby Brown, and continued for about 20 years into the late 2000s or so, when artists like Usher and Justin Timberlake were winding down their primes. That type of music is no longer commercially viable or relevant, which took me a long time to accept and adjust to. Throughout that entire 20 year period Hip Hop was steadily growing, until it began to merge with R&B, and it eventually replaced "traditional" R&B altogether.
In the early 1990s the Death Row record label, with a roster that included Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, and eventually Tupac Shakur, helped West Coast Hip Hop explode onto the scene. I was in middle school at the time. I watched the West Coast thing blow up to unbelievable levels, then evolve into a gang-like coast vs coast feud with the East Coast Hip Hop community that ultimately claimed the lives of two of the eras most important artists: Tupac Shakur and Notorious BIG / Biggie Smalls. It was a senseless tragedy, but as a side-note Biggie's posthumously released double-album Life After Death is the best album of Hip Hop storytelling I've ever heard. In my opinion Biggie's Life After Death and Eminem's 2000 album The Marshall Mathers LP are the co-greatest Hip Hop albums I've ever heard. Jay-Z's 2001 album Blueprint is probably third, and Jay-Z's lyrical feud with another East Coast legend Nas is generally acknowledged to be the greatest hip hop "battle" of all time.
I don't remember when or where it happened, other than that I was in college at the time ... I heard the Jazz classic "Take Five" for the first time. I couldn't get it out of my head. I didn't know who performed it, but I was so insistent on finding out I resorted to cold-calling a music professor on campus and humming the tune to him to see if he could point me in the right direction. He recognized it immediately. With the name of the song in hand, I promptly went out and made my first purchase of jazz music, then another, then another ... I've been a fan ever since.
The groove is what I love most about Jazz music. It's as if the music demands a mellow setting, a smallish crowd of mature elegant people, dark wine, and live instruments handled by diligent musicians. If I were a musical genre, I'd be Jazz. It is the music, the style that is most essentially me.
Another true story: when I was expecting my first child I read that classical music can boost intellectual development in infants. I decided I wanted a smart baby, so when the kid arrived I played classical music in our house constantly. I had to stop before too long though because, even though I enjoyed a lot of the music, it always put me to sleep. Always. I haven't listened to much classical music at all since.
This was all around the time in my life when I went through a major detour in general, as I essentially disconnected from popular culture in order to grow myself spiritually. For several years I resisted listening to much of anything outside of Christian Pop music, some Gospel, and whatever generic Pop music happened to be playing on the radio at the time. A series of circumstances pushed me back towards embracing my first musical love, R&B. Unfortunately for me I came around right near the time when R&B's coffin was being nailed.
These days there are some quality musical artists out there whom I respect. I always tell myself I don't want to become the old guy lecturing about how things were better back in my day, so I won't do that. I'll just say I feel like the industry has moved away from highlighting or respecting vocals and instruments. When a person goes into a music studio these days, everything is so digitized that singers and players are completely secondary. In that sense, I feel like songs these days tend to sound more like tech projects than like music composed by people with expertise in, and passion for, the art. If I had to make a change, that would be it: bring vocalists and musicians back -- or at least make them more prominent -- so I get the sense that the people creating what I listen to are actually more talented than a typical teenager with a Mac.
With all that said, the following is a list of my favorite musical artists throughout life, in order of roughly when they first became famous: Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson, Prince, George Michael, R. Kelly, Usher, Justin Timberlake, Miguel, Frank Ocean.
Mid 1950's to early to mid 1970's. After that I slowly lost interest. The older songs told stories and the lines rhymed like poetry. Music at some point turned into noise.
My musical taste evolved with age. When I was a kid, my parents and grandparents were into old-school soul music & R&B, plus throwback blues music. They would ask me "What you know about this? This music is for grown folks" Once I got older, I got into hip-hop with southern artists like Trick Daddy, JT Money, Project Pat & 3-6 Mafia. Around the early/mid-90s, Houston hip-hop was relatively underground with Screwed Up Click dominating the city's rap scene. I could relate to many of the rhymes in the SUC's music about the struggle, losing loved ones to violence and so on. When SUC was dominating Houston rap, a Northside/Southside Houston war kicked off, so I had to listen to Screw & SUC on the low. Back then, someone from the Northside Of Houston couldn't jam DJ Screw because of the animosity between the Northside & Southside of Houston. Once I hit my 20's and 30's, I started getting into jazz & blues and that's what I've been jamming to ever since.
My brother mostly. He is 6 years older than I am, and when I was 5 and he was 11, we slept in the same room, and he used to have posters from music magazines all over our bedroom walls. This was late 80’s. I remember waking up to go to school and seeing posters from Rush’s Neil Peart, Depeche Mode, Night Ranger, REM, GTR, The Smiths, etc....the first 2 records I bought were Rush Chronicles and The Cure Disintegration in September 1990. I was 10. I still listen to both bands religiously and they both shaped the type of music that I like (hard rock and post punk). I also listen to hip hop a lot but that came up later in life when I was in college and I met these 2 guys who used to create beats and sing in local parties, and they would invite me to play drums. That’s how I got into Gang Starr, Nas, Digable Planets, The Roots, etc. I am that rare breed that can have both Rush “Limelight” and Kendrick Lamar’s “DNA” in the same playlist.
I think it's interesting how, regardless of all the great music a person may get exposed to, there's a tendency for people to revert back to certain types of sounds in terms of the music they actually prefer. It must be largely genetic.
Interesting observation, and I somewhat agree with you. But only in the sense that I think that the origins of various music styles and genres are genetic... but mostly after that, I believe that musical preference is the result of culture and environment. But getting back to the origins of various styles and genres of music, I believe that genetics form and give birth to these styles of music because it seems as if you can 'hear' a distinct type of sound from various types of cultures, which seems indigenous to that culture.
And take for example Asian music. It has a distinct sound to it that seems to have come about from the Asian culture:
The Far East [Easy Listening, World, Asian, Chinese Japanese, Buddha, Chill Out Music]
But what I've found about music is that you can take a child(and this applies more so starting at a young age) from one culture or ethnicity, and place him in another culture or ethnicity, and if young enough, this child will adopt and conform to the music of the new culture that he is placed in. Also, I've never seen or heard of a child who is placed in this situation who has a natural genetic proclivity to seek out the music that is common to his culture, ethnicity, or race, etc.
Also, I've seen black kids who either went to predominately white schools or who grew up having mostly white friends who learned to prefer Rock music over R&B music, which most black people prefer. Plus, as time moved on and Hip Hop became popular, I started to see more vice versa situations where white kids who were exposed to mostly black kids and black culture, preferred Hip Hop and R&B music.
But the interesting thing that I've noticed about various styles and genres of music is that human beings seem to be wired in a way that once a young child is brought in a culture that enjoys a particular type of music, the difference in other styles or genres of music are basically unappealing to most people, and which is why most people prefer the sound of the type of music that they know and that they grew up with.
1. Because of the music that was being played on the radio between the years that I was aged 13-18.
2. Because there was an excellent record shop in town where I was able to buy a couple of LPs a month once I started full-time work, sometimes of my own choice, and sometimes because the owner got to know the sort of music I liked and would play albums he thought would interest me.
I know I'm late to this party as well. But so are some of the other more recent posters! so here is my two cents.
I actually dove really headfirst into the heaviest of metals: thrash, death, other stuff like that. Or to others: the wall of noise.
The main reason is as a teenager, I lived in walking distance of a music store that had a large rooms dedicated to different styles of music. One of those rooms was for metal. Rows and rows of cassette tapes and lp's adorned with demonic artwork and crazy names. the walls were covered with posters ranging from Iron Maiden, to Venom, Slayer, and Helloween. It was like walking through the horror section of the video rental store in the mid 80's. The sonic possibilities were limitless, and the slightly forbidden and evil sensation it brought was exciting.
Now as I have gotten much older, my taste in music has widened to the point to where I listen to almost everything now. But deep down, there was, is, and probably always will be a special place in my heart for extreme metal.
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My Musical Life
