How have your musical tastes changed as you've gotten older?

Grumpyrocker · September 2023

My taste has got narrower in some ways and wider in others.

In my youth I liked lots of pop, some electronic music (OMD, Jarre), and in my 20 country.

I've always loved rock.music. As the decades have rolled on I've listen to only rock. So the breadth has gone. But as I've got older I've explored the metal scene more, getting into heavier music, and some of the post black metal scene. In my youth it was Maiden Megadeath etc. Now I'm into all kinds of very different metal, that are as different as can be under such a broad umbrella.

slacker · September 2023

Child of the sixties so beatles stones elvis as a young child. Mud sweet slade as a Young teenager then purple zep sabbath motorhead as as got more obnoxious. Got into punk after it died. Then simple minds u2 Duran Duran. Big time into stevie wonder. Then blur. Then it went crazy electic. I like everything and nothing. I like Adele AND oasis.

OilCityPickups · September 2023

I'm lucky ... occasionally an artist/band comes along and wants to use my pickups and I get to help out and provide them with the tools to do what they do.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0z1MjExGDz8

It's educated me to a new form I hadn't listened to much before.

axisus · September 2023

At 56, a few years ago, I hit that higher level of consciousness where I can actually sit for long periods of time with Smooth Jazz playing in the background. It's my music of choice at work. Younger people can old take very short exposure to Smooth Jazz. One acclimatizes very slowly through their life by occasionally travelling in a posh lift.

thecolourbox · September 2023

I would say I'm a lot less tolerant of things I dislike now than I used to be, but a lot more obsessive over things I do like.

RaymondLin · September 2023

I gew up listening to Nirvana, Oasis, Green Day, now I listen to Taylor Swift.

thecolourbox · September 2023

RaymondLin said:

I gew up listening to Nirvana, Oasis, Green Day, now I listen to Taylor Swift.

Well I grew up listening to Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and Ring A Ring A Roses...

Philly_Q · September 2023

I still like nearly everything I liked in the 1970s and '80s - starting with the Top 40 from around 1976 to 1979, then I got into hard rock and metal (which mostly wouldn't be called metal nowadays) and that remains my favourite music. I did continue to listen to the charts in the '80s and very early '90s, and still like some of it.

I diversified a bit in the '90s and early 2000s - not intentionally, but for a while I did buy some main mainstream rock, blues, even a few jazz-fusion albums, as well as many flavours of rock and metal. I find that I don't connect at all with most of that stuff now, I think the music you like in your late teens and early 20s is what really "sticks".

Nowadays it's almost entirely hard rock and metal again, including a lot of music released by newer bands in the last 10 to 15 years (that may not be really "new", but time goes quicker now). I still love the stuff I liked 40 years ago, but I tend not to like new rock bands who try to sound like old ones.

Philly_Q · September 2023

axisus said:

At 56, a few years ago, I hit that higher level of consciousness where I can actually sit for long periods of time with Smooth Jazz playing in the background. It's my music of choice at work. Younger people can old take very short exposure to Smooth Jazz. One acclimatizes very slowly through their life by occasionally travelling in a posh lift.

Surely that's a lower level of consciousness...?

darthed1981 · September 2023

The stuff I like has expanded massively over the years, I used to be a bit of a musical fascist, so to speak, "this is good, this is bad, rarrrhhh!" - but I grew out of that.

The stuff I love, that's closest to my heart/soul etc - hasn't changed nearly as much - there is something about being in your teens that bonds the music from then to you like superglue.

Things do change (I never thought one of the best songs I heard this year would be by Paramore. now I'm quite into them).

What I do dislike, beyond basic competence, is the idea of an objective standard of "good" music, and especially the idea that the noodlier music gets the better it gets. It just gets noodlier, if that adds to the music, great, but it's not obligatory.

S56035 · September 2023

Marginally ess Death Metal and considerably less Gangsta Rap.

guitarjack66 · October 2023

Lestratcaster said:

Grew up listening to Oasis (which is why I started playing the guitar in the first place) and the usual indie/Britpop bands with guitar in it. Then it sorta went in punk with bands like Green Day coming in when I started playing powerchords, pop punk band like Blink-182 and Sum 41 etc. As I started playing in bands it got heavier with alot of metalcore bands, drop tuned chuggy stuff. Now I teach the guitar I've had to widen my genres to more styles like funk, soul and blues. I'm definitely more flexible now with tastes as I will listen to pretty much anything (by that I mean everything as I know when people say this they are referring to the stuff in the charts and rnb haha). I even like the classic stuff from the 60's. Roy Orbison, Beatles, etc etc. 80's was a great decade for guitar.

I can't accept that US stuff as 'Punk' myself. Nothing wrong with the music,some is excellent,but Punk?

Funkfingers · October 2023

Punk Rock is an American invention of the late Sixties and early Seventies. Malcolm McLaren co-opted some aspects of it for his own ends. The Nineties revivalists adopted some of the stances but there was no real menace about them.

Woodandwires · October 2023

I generally still listen to the same music I liked in the seventies, Thin Lizzy, UFO, Free, Led Zeppelin, Bad Company, Sabbath, Pat Travers, Marillion, early Genesis, Floyd etc. My wife says I still dress the same, jeans trainers and rugby shirts as I did back then. I do like other music, big Billy Bragg fan, especially the early stuff, XTC, Joni Mitchell is a genius as are early Springsteen and Neil Young. Now a days I like Public Services Broadcasting, Richard Ashcroft, Foo fighters, Kings of Leon.
For me I don’t think my musical tastes have changed dramatically, although I have recently watched some of the metal documentaries on Prime and the bands almost all American are such a cliche

horse · October 2023

I've become more curious as I've got older(!)

I'll turn 50 this year, and have found myself buying some Jethro Tull for the first time.

OilCityPickups · October 2023

horse said:

I've become more curious as I've got older(!)

I'll turn 50 this year, and have found myself buying some Jethro Tull for the first time.

Tull is fabulous ...

Fez · October 2023

Also born in 1959 so similarly I loved the seventies stuff Slade Trex, Geordie. Through Slade I got into Ten years after and Steppenwolf got introduced to Black Sabbath by a slightly older neighbour. I always liked variety so will happily listen to folk, jazz, blues, prog and even light stuff like the Carpenters. While I never saw Zeppelin I was fortunate enough to see Quo, Sabbath, Deep Purple, Uriah Heap, The Who, Return to Forever, Van der Graaf Generator, Yes and many others. I never really got punk particularly the pistols some of the other bands were ok like the Buzzcocks but generally spitting and crap sound wasn't for me. I like to think my tastes have broadened but I still listen to the records I loved in the seventies. I can listen to some country music I have two boys so I have heard a lot of death metal and its myriad kindred micro genres. I am not keen on drum and bass but there is electronic music that I like System 7 for instance and Rovo..

Perdix · October 2023

I have become much more open minded in my choice of music as I have aged. I now listen to both types, Country and Western.

Yorkie · October 2023

No change. Anything but the lovey dovey stuff.

Grumpyrocker · October 2023

Perdix said:

I have become much more open minded in my choice of music as I have aged. I now listen to both types, Country and Western.

I listen to both kinds of music, death and black metal.

GoFish · October 2023

Grumpyrocker said:

Perdix said:

I have become much more open minded in my choice of music as I have aged. I now listen to both types, Country and Western.

I listen to both kinds of music, death and black metal.

You need to broaden your horizons ... Speed & Doom will show you it's a cube, not a square.

Cookiemonster · October 2023

Started with 80s metal, it was hard to play all of those songs as a beginner, so started to learn sixties stuff, Day Tripper etc, quickly realised I liked that music more and I still prefer sixties and seventies style mod ish music, Small Faces will always be one of my favourites.

But when I was around 19 I got a bass and played James Brown, Soul songs, but of the early reggae Trojan music.

Before getting into the Jam, Oasis,stone roses etc

I never got to far into the heavy stuff but I do now like Doom Fuzz type music, as well as Clutch.

I think the blind spots I had were around Prog and I didn’t hate that music these days.

But I mostly listen to guitar riff based rock still and I like Rival Sons, Black Angels etc

the more acoustic side of my tastes, or the more Americana I guess would be Wilco, Cardinals, Bright Eyes etc. but all of those sound similar at points to classic bands from the past

mrkb · October 2023

Early stuff was introspective/angst/political stuff like billy bragg, Easter house, men they couldn’t hang, pogues now love 80/90s glam - Poison, Crue and Faster pussycat - have become more childish as I get older.

Philly_Q · October 2023

GoFish said:

Grumpyrocker said:

Perdix said:

I have become much more open minded in my choice of music as I have aged. I now listen to both types, Country and Western.

I listen to both kinds of music, death and black metal.

You need to broaden your horizons ... Speed & Doom will show you it's a cube, not a square.

Let's be honest, it's more like a dodecahedron. At least.

GoFish · October 2023

I suppose once you add prog, glam and NWOBH it does start to add up ...

Let's simplify - True Metal + things that aren't?

Philly_Q · October 2023

GoFish said:

I suppose once you add prog, glam and NWOBH it does start to add up ...

Let's simplify - True Metal + things that aren't?

What, so that's Manowar, and then everything else?

ScreamingDave · October 2023

Definitely

My early musical taste was all rock music, heavy metal, as it was called back in those days, but probably what you’d call classic rock these days, but as I got more into playing guitar I decided to persecute myself by forcing myself to listen to all types of music from medieval to classical to, well, even U2 fer christ’s sake! (Luckily, Coldplay weren’t around then). All in the mistaken belief that hearing music I had to force myself to listen to would make me a better guitarist.

Then a housemate at uni asked me to teach him to play guitar, but he only wanted to learn one song: Nights in White Satin by The Moody Blues. He loved that song so much that he’d buy any compilation album that had it in, or an album by anyone who’d done a cover of it.

That kinda made me realise that it should be about playing what you love, not forcing yourself to be a “better guitarist”, whatever that means, by listening to stuff that left you cold.

So now I just listen to what I love, which has morphed into old style R’n’B, soul and a bit of reggae and still the rock. I love music with a brass section and I only realised at my dad’s funeral, when they said in his eulogy how much he loved brass bands that that’s where my love of a brass section probably comes from.

TTony · October 2023

OilCityPickups said:

Tmy real musical influence decade was the 70s. The singles I bought were pretty much all chart initially ... I loved Slade in my early teens ... and T Rex ... and then dropped by way of 'Pub Rock' into punk. I was voraciously consuming the Stranglers the Clash and the Vibrators ...

Similar age, era and musical journey for me.

Glam (from the radio) -> pub/punk but always with an undercurrent of - what's now deemed - classic rock. First singles were Quo & Deep Purple, first gig was Sabbath, but it was the punk ethos that got me into playing. I'd listen to John Peel most nights through the second half of the 70s which introduced all sorts!

I did some DJ'ing (radio & live) during my Uni years, so I had to stay reasonably current then, but my own shows tended to focus on pub/punk/r'n'b.

I'll still listen to old that old stuff, and newer stuff that's obviously been influenced by it, but I'll also happily listen to stuff that was definitely uncool back in my original day - lots of the cleverly written 60s tracks with "proper tunes" for example. The crap on R2 forced me to retune that dial a few years ago, and I ended up at ClassicFM for a while (until the ads and repetitive playlist got too much) which took me into some classical stuff (Einaudi has particularly stuck).

There are some artists who'd fall into the Jazz genre that I like, but I'd not call myself a Jazz fan more widely and it's certainly the least represented genre in my music collection. Apart from country of course, but that's because I'm not married to my cousin.

OilCityPickups · October 2023

Speaking of genres ...
My friend in Finland Atte (centre) in his band Grey State ... Finnish Hardcore Metal at its best :-)

Image: https://scontent.ffab1-2.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-6/365788800_878260857163137_9200861600324067103_n.jpg?_nc_cat=104&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=49d041&_nc_ohc=iK-w51KgiGIAX_xQomj&_nc_ht=scontent.ffab1-2.fna&oh=00_AfCYpZiXitYxizMcEAdqp8AkVtRyAhhp06L7LSU_m6gtUw&oe=651D9860

suspiciousminds · October 2023

Fair to say i’ve been an Elvis fan most of my life and even though hes been dead years there are constantly cds/vinyl etc being released at an enormous rate to keep me interested, a lot of outtakes, live recordings, whole recording sessions etc being released by the ftd elvis collectors label with Sony.
That said, in my teens, i got well into Joy Division, new wave etc, and now i have a bit more time on my hands i’m listening and collecting an awful lot of that stuff again.
But i’ll listen to most things, i’m particularly liking Stephen Sanchez at the moment.
Thats one thing i do appreciate these days is that you can listen to just about anything you like, whereas i can remember as a kid in school admitting that i was into Elvis and the Beatles i would often fall foul of a load of abuse.

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How have your musical tastes changed as you've gotten older?

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