Everybody loves music, don’t they?  I certainly do and I’ve always thought of my musical taste as being eclectic and fairly wide.  Looking at my iTunes library it turns out this isn’t the case at all.  I’ve often wondered what it is that causes people to have different musical tastes but I suppose it’s the same as anything else.  Just because I can’t understand why talentless puppets like Girls Aloud or Westlife enjoy huge success doesn’t mean they’re not worthy of it.  Does it?  Can many millions of people really be wrong?  Well, I think they must be but then I can’t abide manufactured pop.  However, I am fairly certain most of the world is peopled with morons so…

From a young age I’ve loved rock music.  Proper, heavy rock music with all drums and guitars and stuff.  Not bands like Status Quo, though, because although they tout themselves as “rock” I see them more as “cheese”.  And are they really still alive or are they all kept going with animatronics like the Queen Mother was for years?  No, I mean bands like Queens of the Stone Age, Soundgarden, Faith No More and the like (yes, I am aware that 2 of those bands are from the past, although FNM have reformed it seems.  I wonder if they’ll be the same?).

I’ve often wondered why it is that I liked this particular kind of music because when I was growing up my parents didn’t listen to anything like it.  Their taste is far more folky and I remember being subjected to the delights of Joan Baez (uuurgh), The Fureys (bleurgh) and Roger Whittaker (gah).  They did redeem themselves a bit with Cat Stevens and Simon and Garfunkel but I can’t help but think that damage had been done with the other…fustier artists.  I REALLY hated Joan Baez’s voice.

When I was very young I liked a fair amount of chart music, bought a few singles and listened to my older sister’s “Now That’s What I Call Music” LPs.  She had them right from number 1 back in the early 80s.  Check out the track listing!  God, that’s rubbish, isn’t it?!  You can tell they were struggling if they put in 2 Kajagoogoo songs AND a solo effort by Limahl!  I think I must have listened to volume 2 more.  Hmmmm, maybe not looking at that one’s tracks.  The very first album I bought was by Terence Trent D’Arby in 1987 when I was 11 and I remember liking Soft Cell and Michael Jackson around then as well.

So when exactly did the transition in my musical taste happen?  It’s strange but I can remember exactly how it happened.  One minute my childhood best friend and I were listening to pop music (she liked Fuzzbox! Pink Sunshine, remember that?), then Aerosmith released the album Pump and I was hooked.  Around the same time my friend found a tape in the car her family had hired while on holiday in America, Shout at the Devil by Mötley Crüe; she brought it home and we loved it.  So we bought Dr Feelgood as well.  And The Real Thing by Faith No More.  I actually remember vividly the day she bought that album and played it for the first time, I’d never even heard of them but it was possibly the only time I’ve played an album and loved every song on first listen.  And that was that, pop music was more or less a thing of the past for me.

Anyway, I won’t bore you with any more of that.  But it kind of changed our lives.  Music is unusual in that, at least when you’re young, it can dictate a great deal to you.  How you dress, which pub you go to and consequently who your friends are.  In our teens music was the be-all and end-all to us.  We were pasty visions in black clothes.  We wore band t-shirts.  We liked tie-dye.  I had REALLY bad hair and didn’t smile much.  I didn’t have much to smile about because I had really bad hair.

Yikes

See?  It was pube-like.  Horrendous.

Most people grow out of the dressing according to musical taste thing, or at the very least tone it down a bit as they get older.  According to some of my friends I dress a bit like a hippy sometimes but I wholeheartedly refute that, I just like long skirts.

For a few people, however, this isn’t the case.  There is something of a worrying trend amongst some people I used to know of living in the past.  They continue to dress the same way, they still go to the same bars, their circle of friends has never evolved, it’s the same people still doing the same things week in week out.  As far as they’re concerned the mid to late 90s, its music, its fashion, everything, was the place and time to be and they cling to it with every ounce of their being.  That seems odd to me.  Sure, that was a good time in my life but an awful lot has happened since then, some really good, some unbelievably bad.  I’d like to think that acknowledging all that has happened and accepting that time moves on and that things change makes me the hopefully well-adjusted person that I am today.

So, yes, I still listen to music, old and new, and I try not to limit myself to one particular genre although that is a struggle when you’re compelled to avoid certain radio stations in case you accidentally hear Girls Aloud.  But music no longer the holds importance it did to me when I was young.  I don’t wear as much black anymore, I definitely don’t wear tie-dye and my hair is MUCH better.  I no longer use music to define me.  That’s not to say I haven’t inflicted my taste onto my children because I have, even the baby, and also I do tend to dictate what we listen to in the car. Old habits die hard, what can I say?