Putting Prog aside for the moment (only if it's relevant to the question) how have your musical tastes changed over the years and more importantly, why?
Putting Prog aside for the moment (only if it's relevant to the question) how have your musical tastes changed over the years and more importantly, why?
To be or not to be? That is the point. - Harry Nilsson.
I prefer much more instrumental music as my tolerance for insipid lyrics has declined as I've aged.
I have grown to appreciate some country music and some classical. Listening to more of it as I get older. A newfound appreciation of old Merle haggards simple songs and stylings... 20 years ago I would have frisbee'd a haggard record and melted a stokowski into a hat.
Still alive and well...
Since 9/11, I've learned to love heavy metal of certain kinds. Not so much BWONHM but stoner and blues-oriented heavy music. I'm the only person I know who likes Metallica's "St. Anger". And one of my favorite bands, SCOTS, opened the door to country music. not so much modern top 40 but stuff I wouldn't have listened to before, like Legendary Shack Shakers, Reverend Peyton's Big Damn Band, the Dead Brothers, Pine Hill Haints etc.
Started out in my teens on hard rock & metal. Broadened into mainstream prog (Floyd, Yes, Oldfield, Tull) when I got the college, also started getting into jazz & blues. Discovered more avant stuff in my 40's and spread in more jazz, experimental, classical, minimalist, instrumental and across broader prog. Not sure why, just changes in taste.
Ian
Host of the Post-Avant Jazzcore Happy Hour on progrock.com
https://podcasts.progrock.com/post-a...re-happy-hour/
Gordon Haskell - "You've got to keep the groove in your head and play a load of bollocks instead"
I blame Wynton, what was the question?
There are only 10 types of people in the World, those who understand binary and those that don't.
As I get older, there is much more music I hate.
"And your little sister's immaculate virginity wings away on the bony shoulders of a young horse named George who stole surreptitiously into her geography revision."
Occasional musical musings on https://darkelffile.blogspot.com/
Back in the 60's I listened to bubblegum pop. The 70's were pretty much Prog trending towards more jazz ( esp. ECM ) in the early 80's. Then New wave, Electro-pop, RIO , No Wave, avant weird stuff. Then indy rock. A period of classical and cool jazz in the late 80's and early 90's and Bluegrass and alt-country. Then I got into the resurgent prog where I still am today. Add in Cuneiform jazz/avant bands and it is mix I really enjoy.
I haven't left anything behind ( except for the bubblegum pop of the 60's ). It all just layers and mixes and gives me the pleasure of enjoying music, almost anything ( in moderation)
My idea of hell is to be stuck listening to the same thing over and over.
This morning on my way to work I was musing that capital P progressive rock will someday be relegated to the same status as Big Band Jazz or Dixieland Jazz.
Perhaps it is because we have radio shows on late Saturday and Sunday night on public radio for old jazz with endless commentary and bits of music thrown in.
Which recording of which lineup was the most representative performance of.....ad infinitum.
"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."
-- Aristotle
Nostalgia, you know, ain't what it used to be. Furthermore, they tells me, it never was.
“A Man Who Does Not Read Has No Appreciable Advantage Over the Man Who Cannot Read” - Mark Twain
Sure have.
I went from loving Deep Purple, Sabbath, Uriah Heep, Zeppelin, 10 Years After, Sir Lord Baltimore, and the like. Until my discovery of prog in early '72 or so. At which time I pretty much lost interest in the above bands, except for a rare bit of nostalgia.
This lead to an endless (and ongoing) search for prog from all over the world, and new and old prog bands.
I also discovered fusion shortly after prog (probably through Phil Collins' association with Brand x). This added to my endless search for new fusion bands.
The discovery of RIO and avant-prog, lead me to explore the 20th century classical music they were influenced by.
And fusion lead me to non-fusion jazz (late 50's to the present).
All my listening is comprised of prog (most sub-genres, including: symph, RIO, Canterbury, prog-metal), classical (only 20th and 21st century) and jazz (fusion, ECM, avant-garde). I have little to no interest in pop, rock, blues, rap, country, etc.
Last edited by simon moon; 03-09-2016 at 09:41 PM.
And if there were a god, I think it very unlikely that he would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt His existence - Russell
I guess it has been the case with me.... Though I started with the classic prog albums in 74 (age 11), all I knew before was Beatles, Stones, and the stuff my parents fed (classical swing jazz, French music hall ... and Tull's Bourée).
Ok, I did get into the Hard Rock trilogy (Sab, Zep and Purple) and the 2nd British blue boom (TYA, FM, Chicken Shack, Savoy Brown) and latyer into later 70's metal (Rainbow, Priest, etc...) and even some punk (Police, mid-period Clash, Stranglers, etc.)
By the 80's; I really started disliking the pop stuff pushed to us via radio that I started looking or something else around 82/3 (even Marillion was a disappointment pas their debut album). Although I already owned Santana's first three album, I fell onto Caravanserai and it clicked immediately, and I fell in JR/F heavily... and then jazz (Coltrane Mingus, etc..), which was kind of strange, since I had rejected my dad's jazz as part of my teen rebellion ...
As the 80's rock-pop world got worse and worse, I never thought I would return to it, until Ragged Glory, RHCP, and the Seattle scene. Then I discovered the Swedish prog scene more or less as it developed, then the Italian one (lesser interest)... Around the same time, for some reasons, those RIO albums also started clicking with me.
Sooooo, it's been an interesting trip so far...
Then
my music collection increased tenfolds when I switched from drug-addicts to complete nutcases.
I think if anything over the years my tastes have become "rockier", though have never liked heavy metal or any of its various sub-genres.
I think in my teenage years my tastes were shaped by two things: my father's love of classical music, and my dislike of 50's rock 'n' roll, which is the earliest music I remember coming over the radio. I got turned off pop music until quite some time later, about 1965-ish, when by a process of osmosis I started getting exposed to the folk-rock that was soming into vogue, and that was my first love.
Later on I realised that was I disliked about rock 'n' roll was not the fact that it was loud and heavy - it was the banality of most of the tunes, along with the predictability of the rhythm.
Ian
Host of the Post-Avant Jazzcore Happy Hour on progrock.com
https://podcasts.progrock.com/post-a...re-happy-hour/
Gordon Haskell - "You've got to keep the groove in your head and play a load of bollocks instead"
I blame Wynton, what was the question?
There are only 10 types of people in the World, those who understand binary and those that don't.
Yes and no.
I still love to hear most of the hard rock/metal stuff I grew up on in my early teens. I got into the Big "whatever's" of Prog around the age of 15 (and still enjoy). My tastes expanded from there to include more Avant, Electronic, Zeuhl, etc...
Over the past few years I've delved deep into Rockabilly. Can't get enough of old Sun-label guys like Sonny Burgess, Carl Mann, and Billy Riley and contemporary countryish/rockabilly like Southern Culture on the Skids. Really enjoying surf instrumental bands, too, like Los Straitjackets, the Boss Martians, and Man or Astroman.
Lou
Looking forward to my day in court.
Still alive and well...
I ebb and flow musically. Curiosity and a somewhat open mind have lead me down many musical paths. Some I just visited briefly while others I settled in for longer. For a while I was convinced that for music to be "good" it had to be this cerebral, complex, difficult-to-grasp-at-once form of art. I honestly tired of most of that stuff; tired of the effort needed just to sit through an entire disc and convince myself that this is good and I like it. Seems to me there was a lot of that going on about 15 years ago, when prog websites first starting cropping up.
I have never been overly nostalgic so I can't listen to the same stuff I was listening to 40 years ago. That being said, I do like to find new and fresh acts re-inventing certain sounds and styles of my youth. I do a lot of exploring and purchasing on Bandcamp and my favorite way to do so is by "tags". In an effort to always maintain a balanced collection I try to purchase music in more than one style at any given time. I may get caught up in a subgenre for a while, but just like eating the same meal over and over again, no matter how good it is ,I tire of it. I'll go through phases of listening to really heavy stuff, then phases of stripped down acoustic stuff.
One important lesson I have learned though is that you never know when a genre you thought you were completely burned on may come back into your ears years later sounding fresh again. I made the mistake, in the mid 80s, of getting rid of all my vinyl (see: NOT NOSTALGIC). I also made the mistake in the early/mid 90s of getting rid of a lot of the 80s pop/alternative stuff I owned because I briefly became a born-again progger. These mistakes I will not make again. I tend to hold on to stuff in all genres now.
The last change for me has been to go completely digital. I haven't bought a physical CD in years. I don't miss them. The older I get, the more ephemeral my musical tastes have become, the less time I spend listening to music, the less involved I am in the music as I listen to it. I still love music but I don't get what Pirsig described as the "Dynamic Quality" of it anymore. I buy stuff,spin it once or twice as a whole, throw it in playlists, then the songs come up randomly. The excitement about a new album, reading the lyrics, playing it repeatedly in the first few days are in my past.My life is about other things. More importantly my life is about finding a balance in all things. Being too obsessed with one aspect of it just doesn't appeal to me.
"Corn Flakes pissed in. You ranted. Mission accomplished. Thread closed."
-Cozy 3:16-
When I was young I liked music that was direct, simple, powerful, one dimensional. Music with a single through line, a single melody, a consistent beat. Music that I could hum in my head after one hearing.
As I've gotten older (and wiser?) I've come to appreciate music which is subtler, which is more multi-dimensional and not so easily summarized. Music that takes a few listens to unravel what the composer is doing, music that seems, on the surface, to be slightly DISorganized perhaps.
I find my taste for Brand X, UK, King Crimson, Tchaikovsky, hard bop, and bluegrass have largely evaporated.
When I was younger my tastes were as limited as my overall exposure. As my exposure to new music/bands/genres increased, so have my tastes. I am sometimes astonished at how much new music is being created, and that the majority of what I've found is at enjoyable.
And, I try to keep that in mind whenever I'm invited to hear something new: even if in the moment it doesn't engage me, there's every possibility that in time that could change.
If you're actually reading this then chances are you already have my last album but if NOT and you're curious:
https://battema.bandcamp.com/
Also, Ephemeral Sun: it's a thing and we like making things that might be your thing: https://ephemeralsun.bandcamp.com
Started out interested in everything, focused on prog for awhile, got sick of it, back to being interested in everything.
Ian Beabout
Mixing and mastering engineer. See ya at ProgDay !
https://cuneiformrecords.bandcamp.co...m/bakers-dozen
https://cuneiformrecords.bandcamp.co...-and-holland-3
colouratura.bandcamp.com
In the late 80s and through the 90s, I was a "Headbanger." In the 2000s, I loved prog metal. Now I don't really care for metal at all, not even prog metal. I get bored by the constant thump-thump-thump.
I also listen to more classical now than ever before.
Well, maybe not all that much. I've been into prog for around thirty years(since I was a teen). However, back then heavy metal was really popular but I wasn't much of a fan. Over the past ten years or so I've come to appreciate it and part of that is due to just being exposed to more kinds of prog and music in general. It's more about having an eclectic taste than deliberately trying to be a metal head(or a prog head for that matter). In the eighties the only metal album I had was "paranoid" by Black Sabbath on vinyl. Other than that only RUSH and Led Zeppelin came close. Then in the early 90's I heard Queensryche on the radio and what I heard sounded like Pink Floyd to me so I bought "Empire"(maybe not really knowing they were a metal band at the time). Then I got into the grunge thing and admired bands like Soundgarden and Pearl Jam etc. So it was a gradual process. Eventually I checked out Dream Theater(I guess in the late 90's)and still like them to some degree. I've also gotten more into Jazz and classical.
Last edited by Digital_Man; 03-10-2016 at 07:13 PM.
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