Re: What type of music do you listen to?
It's amazing to me how close Dark and I are on so many subjects, from music to philosophy, and yet we live on opposite sides of the pond; maybe I'm secretly from somewhere in the UK and I was sold for some reason
Anyway, like Dark, I hated most traditional everything you hear on the radio, having been born in the 80's and growing up mostly in the 90's bracket. There was like, one or two Michael Jackson songs, mainly "Will You Be There" comes to mind, and I was a fan of Color Me Bad's "The Earth, The Sun and the Rain," but beyond that as I reflect upon what it was I was listening to on my own, I find that most of it from the moment I picked up the radio to when I entered highschool was classical/orchestral in some sense or another. I loved Beethoven, Mahler, Bach, Tchaikovsky, Chopin, Vivaldi, and on and on I could go. for the things I generally tended to favor, however, and this may be to my overall nature, I'd say pieces that stuck in my mind as being epic/phenomenally important to me personally would have to include Carl Orf's O Fortuna from Carmena Burana, Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, Edvard Grieg's In the Hall of the Mountain King, and perhaps Modest Mussorgsky's Baba Yaga from from Pictures at an Exhibition. Beyond that obviously I was a huge fan of everything made by John Williams and Hans Zimmer and a bunch of other greats who scored awesome soundtracks through the years.
and then a couple of things happened. First, I fell head over heals for a girl at school most guys would have targeted because she seemed like easy sex, where as I wanted to dig deeper and find/learn more about her personality. Through her I discovered rejection; she prefered the shallow things and physical attention. Actually, in some ways I feel like it was worse than rejection, since when I asked her out she wouldn't give me a definite yes or no, and that's how our school year ended... I never saw her again.
Second, I had been making fairly good money for a teen as a musician after school hours... I stopped because I wanted to focus on my education. When the money stopped flowing, my friendships went out the door. Everyone left me... I was a nobody in highschool with no reason to believe true friends existed.
So, how did that affect me musically? I didn't feel much like a happy kid anymore; as far as I was concerned my innocence was gone and the childhood would never return. My dad was out drinking and being a womanizer and my mom was a miserable mess raising three kids. My brother was into the rap scene and had dropped out of highschool, partying and doing drugs. My sister was far too young for me to talk to, and her friends all saw me as just some stupid blind punk who couldn't possibly know anything about anything. I began to grow a festering dislike for humanity. the only place, I felt, where music honestly related to me anymore, was the metal scene.
Sometime around 99 I discovered Metallica and noticed that everyone who was a rocker/so-called metalhead was listening to them. the thing is, I didn't want to be cool... I wanted to be bad. I wanted to let my anger flow. Musically I found the Mighty Met alright, and their album S&M resonated with me and left a lasting impression that classical and metal truly did share a lot. the cool kids went after them, then later Linkin Park, Korn and Slipknot... I found most of the US scene displeasing. The core subgenre was slowly but surely taking over the Sirius and XM rebbles... I wanted more. I couldn't honestly relate to American Headcharge, Hatebreed, God Forbid or Killswitch Engaged. System of a Down was metal comedy and Mudvayne sounded like a harder version of every Emo band I just wanted to avoid.
The year 2002 saw me gravitating toward older material by bands such as Cradle of Filth, Dimmu Borgir and Emperor. Through them I would discover Anorexia nervosa, Samael, Bathory, Darkthrone, Celtic Frost and others. I still felt like I was only scratching the surface and so many other bands were not being properly distributed by record labels, resulting in the falling apart of the band or a shift in the band's style to something that appealed to the mainstream people I honestly felt didn't deserve them. About the only cool thing from the US as far as I was concerned was a band called A Dark Halo which only released one album. I was more hooked by Germany's Betray my Secrets and SpiRitual, both made by more or less the same people, Deadlock, also a German band, Finish bands Noumena and Ajattara, Sweden's Opeth, french metal band Yyrkoon, the Czech Republic's Silent Stream of Godless Elegy, and when my thoughts needed a little extra relaxation from the complexity but wanted to revisit the classical and operatic, I gravitated toward Epica and Nightwish, who were doing alright for a fair amount of time. After Forever could sometimes fit the ticket but I could never figure out what it was vocalist Floor Jansen was honestly after... Interestingly enough I can't believe she's actually leading NIghtwish now.
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