Roots of Your Music

[Heroin 53]

I really don't know if there's a topic similar to this, but if there is, whatever.

Is there a time in your life that changed your view on music that made you want to explore more or that really took a turn on your music taste? (sounds to broad of a question, but meh). If not, then tell me what music you grew up with.

For me there was a time when music really hit me on how amazing sounds could be. I was a kid and I liked many radio songs and basically anything with a catchy tune, though I loved the Tony Hawk game soundtrack, but who didn't as a kid.

One day I stayed up late watching basic television. This show JBTV -an alternative music video show- showed up in which I took an interest of by its funny music videos. I stayed up at night the next day to watch it and it showed the song "Walking Shade" by Billy Corgan. I was like "damn this song is just to amazing"!! I just couldn't fathom why this song sounded so good.

Then every night I stayed up to see what JBTV had in store. I slowly started to dislike the radio, thinking that if it doesn't sound as good as Billy Corgain, it can go rot in the ground. as they did

Right now music is a big part of me, next with drawing and video games (:

[LIDL 692]

Right, my Father was playing Black Sabbath, Hendrix, Madonna and C-Pop

when i was growing up. And I watched lots of (now vintage) anime and tokusatsu shows too.

By my Youth I started to get into Urban, Britpop and Industrial Metal.

Circles of friends helped to developed this one.

So basically my music taste formed like that. 

Are liquid and ever changing, since I basically pretty open minded to new sounds.

[Heroin 53]

Just curious Candy Warhol (btw like that name). How is VK going for you?

[TheBistroButcher666 228]

I grew up in a house with proto-metal parents, by proto-metal I mean all that early classic rock that influenced modern day metal bands. So Deep Purple, Sabbath and etc. Some stoner rock too.

 

So I was pretty grounded in rock based music at that point. Even though I was too young for the grunge explosion in Seattle, that also solidified by taste in rock music since that was the cool thing the older kids are into. 

 

Got into punk because I wanted something more aggressive and badass, metal later because I wanted something EVEN MORE aggressive and badass. I was introduced to VK but I hated it at first. Typical VK fans who don't know what genres are showed me a poppy Malice Mizer song and told me that was Japanese metal and I laughed in their face. It was basically Gackt prancing around like a pussy and being the elitist metal/punk kid I was I couldn't take it seriously. Then eventually I saw the Bara no Seidou concert and thought it was the coolest thing ever. Did some internet digging, soul seek and that bullshit and found Aliene Ma'riage and Derp in herp and HERE I AM.

[sai 868]

At a very young age I already loved music and everything that came with it. Four year old me would often dance and sing in the living room to random songs on the radio whenever I wasn't at school. My mother tried to keep me away from it though, since my dad used to be in a band and was often gone from home because he and the band often played in small venues throughout the region. So I stopped being interested in music when I was around 7 years old.

 

When I turned 12 I got an mp3-player and I listened to most songs from the radio, some Dutch hip-hop and other things. When I was 13 I discovered YouTube and found an AMV with a Nightwish song. Even though I had never before been introduced to rock music nor symphonic metal, this instantly clicked with me. My mp3-player soon became a mix of techno, electro-pop and symphonic metal. The techno and electro-pop disappeared after a while and more symphonic metal and hard-rock took their places. Bands like Nightwish, Fall Out Boy, Paramore, After Forever and Evanescence was what I listened to the most back then.

 

Visual kei followed. A friend discovered An Cafe and became a big fan and tried to get me into them too. Before that I had already found out about NIGHTMARE, UVERworld, HIGH & MIGHTY COLOR and Gackt by myself (because I watched a little bit of anime at the time). I thought An Cafe were okay, but never fully got into them. I really got into abingdon boys school after that, and stayed closer to more darker bands (mid-2010, the time I discovered D) but after a while it turned into a mix of more serious pop-rock acts and some darker bands. Currently the amount of VK bands I listen to has sincerely decreased (pretty much limited to D, BUCK-TICK, Alice Nine and Kagrra,), but I'm currently still exploring the non-VK scene, so you can say my journey isn't quite over yet!

[bonsaijodelfisch 328]

pretty cool topic actually, very interesting read!

 

so here is me:

i pretty much started off (and stayed for a veryvery long time) with my dads vinyl-collection which was mostly mid 60's to early 70 blue/rock (Hendrix, Cream, ledZep, RollingStones, Yardbirds) aswell as some Jazz, bigband, soul and ragtime stuff (Ramsey Lewis, Jimmy Smith, Chris Barber, Otis Redding etc..)

 

only in very late high-school times, when indie rock was the big thing i adapted that aswell, because it was basically the same (white stripes, mando diao, qotsa...)

after that (now college, studying classical music) i pretty much went with the flow as indie became more electronic and dance-oriented bands like that went to my book too (justice, boys noize, the presets, digitalism, doesitoffendyouyeah)

while at the same time trying to find some heavier stuff like monster magnet and danko jones, while still trying to avoid the actual "metal" corner, which had this very cheesy and pretty stupid image (especially in the classical world) but probably being secretly pretty fascinated by that stuff.

 

as a kind of metal starting point i guess i have to embarrasingly mention apocalyptica, which where kind of accepted to listen to (cellos'n shit)

then something pretty important happend (i was about 20/21 i guess), a german eekly newspaper published an article about highschool bands and how they helped sort of "troubled" poor/immigrant youth to get past race-issues and whatnot and giving sense and direction and blabla, inspirational stuff i guess, but there was one small band (on the cover actually) that already looked kinda cool

http://www.bandnet.de/files/fotos/2919/banner%5B1%5D.jpg

and i looked them up online and also pretty much liked the stuff they did aswell (sort of numetal, gothic-hardrock probably)

which led to the realisation that i pretty much envied them, some northern schoolkids can actually do cool stuff, while i'm stuck studying crappy classical saxophone, that can't be right.

in the article it said they were listening to d'espairsray, DirEnGrey and Girugämesh...

 

the next day i decided to quit saxophone (actually i still finished it, since i was already 7th semester, so that would've been quite a waste), bought a guitar and started writing music i actually like (and registered at tainted-world at the time)

starting with the more popular stuff deg, despa, giru, mucc and gazette (alongside of finally listening to pantera, slayer etc) i later switched to a bit more underground stuff (thanks to zess, jigsaw and cat i guess, also that comes with studying audio-engineering pretty much) with one major discovery that was boris, which is one reason why i'm probably for the main part in the post-/stoner-/doom-metal/grunge and heavy rock area nowadays.

 

that beeing said over the past one or two years i've pretty much opend up towards every musical genre there is, may it be ambient drone, noisecore, glitch, or on the other side of things kpop, singer-songwriter, touhou and similarly vntrve and cheesy stuff and everything inbetween, i try to find good things in every piece of music that i encounter, may it either be something interesting and new (or a fresh combination of things), or something well known, but very well executed. there's nearly always something worth appreciating to find.

 

 

long post is long

[Number Girl 48]

Lol. . . my past is starting to look really sad. . .

 

I didn't care much for music up until I entered high school. Before, the only artists I really loved were Coldplay, Eminem, and various country, hip-hop, and contemporary Christian songs (pretty much the staple diet of the average Southern teenager with access to a radio). Both my parents were casually into your standard 70's and 80's pop and rock music (Journey, Styx, REO Speedwagon, etc.) so I think that's where my interest in that kind of music came from, but for the most part my father doesn't care all that much about music anymore and my mother only listens to Christian pop. 

 

When I discovered the internet and started playing video games and watching anime, I started liking the theme songs and that's what lead me to J-Rock. For a couple years I just listened to whatever band had the prettiest members or whatever was the most catchy and melodic artist, like Gackt and other visual kei. I'm pretty sure it was Luna Sea and Number Girl that officially altered my perspective on music forever. They really opened up my mind to other types of rock music and made me more appreciative of it. Now I listen to shit I never imagined I would be listening to. It's funny because my interest in Japanese rock has now caused me to become re-interested in English speaking music and not the other way around, haha. 

[ronluna 17]

i heard my first favorite pop music when i was a first grade, 1997 when we danced during our field demonstration in a soccer field and when i rode the school bus jeepney. my dad likes old rock music and my mom likes what she hears from tv or from her friends. when the first time watching anime on cable tv with opening and ending themes, i recorded some of rave master, gto, rurouni kenshin and other anime theme songs from animax and axn. in 2005, i explored more on contemporary music by listening and watching to western music and original pinoy music (opm) before i focused myself listening to more japanese music from anime in 2007 onwards deleting some of my recorded 20 second samples of mp3 and music video of contemporary music, anime theme songs, japanese music and opm in LG KU250 mobile phone. i received a newer phone in 2011 a Nokia C3-00, adding more western, japanese and opm music with voice samples of voice actors from internet, celebrities and politicians that i heard on radio and some 70 MB+ java games. i changed my taste in western music retaining only one pop group Backstreet Boys, one nu-metal changed to alternative-electronic rock band LINKIN PARK focusing more on 80's rock and heavy metal. in terms of opm i retain only two bands Eraserheads and Urbandub with the most percentage of it is japanese rock, heavy metal and pop due to my mobile phone only having 8 GIG memory external storage.

[Zeus 7997]

I grew up in a house with proto-metal parents, by proto-metal I mean all that early classic rock that influenced modern day metal bands. So Deep Purple, Sabbath and etc. Some stoner rock too.

This goes as well for me. My mother was all about the classic rock. You could say that I grew up on Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, LLed Zeppelin, Metallica, Megadeth, Nirvana and Jimi Hendrix. My father was on the other side of the spectrum and he focused a lot on funk and Motown. So on his side, I got introduced to Michael Jackson, Kool & The Gang, etc. My grandmother was also different and loves soul and R&B, so things like Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, etc. were commonly playing when I was in her house.

However, both mom and pops listened to a few artists in common that all leaned toward the rock side of the spectrum. So things like Metallica's Black Album and Led Zeppelin's Physical Graffiti were common in my upbringing. I can't count how many times I've heard Kashmir, haha. This is probably why I favor rock and metal so much.

A big problem with finding my own identity was two-fold: one, most of their music was on cassettes. Two, neither one of them listened to anything from the current music scene that I liked. My mom tried to remain relevant, listening to things like Epica, Pray for the Soul of Betty, and Evanescence but I didn't particularly like any of these bands. My dad and grandmother just hated all new music and won't follow anything at all, so they were no help either. When I tried turning on the radio or the TV, I was pretty much restricted to all things Disney-related because everyone was deathly afraid of my impressionable seven-year-old mind being warped by the "gangsta rap" trend that was booming in NYC. It didn't really help though because due to the neighborhood we lived in, it was omnipresent. I didn't have to watch TV to recognize the newest Biggie song, or to feel somewhat sad when 2pac got shot on my birthday (check it, he did!). So you can actually say that I listened to almost everything!

So one day when I was seven, I went into the cafeteria for breakfast and ran into one of my friend's older sisters. She was currently on her "all Japanese music is superior!!!11!1one" kick and shoved Dir en grey into my ears. It was love at first listen!

...

HAHA OK forget that bullshit. I laughed my ass off and asked who those faggy looking Japanese dudes were. She wasn't very happy at my remark but what I heard was so different than anything I'd ever seen before. When I finally got a computer to search for them, I found a few tracks from their Gauze album. That's when  my exposure to VK began.

As I say often, finding VK music back in the 90's was hard. Yeah, you could run into the big bands like Malice Mizer and Dir en grey if you searched for a little bit. But my Internet-fu wasn't very good and I couldn't find much more. My short stint with VK ran into an abrupt end when my old Micron computer pooped from having too many viruses (wasn't Windows 95 SO FUN?) so I was out of the loop for about six years. In that time, I tried to get into rap and failed miserably. Attempting to discover more rock music got me ridiculed from people who would insist that anything that wasn't made by black people "wasn't black music". Combine that with pressure to fit in, Nickelback, Napster shutting down, and an inability to find more classic rock bands (didn't realize the whole "trend" was over) or any localized tunes I heard out of anime shows and I ended up cutting myself off from music entirely until high school.

In high school, I met up with a few people that loved Japanese music. Don't quite remember how that happened; I just know that one day we got to talking about it. Then I was introduced to VK again. That's when I went crazy. I had six years worth of music to catch up on, and the people I were around were indie-heads. So for about two to three years all I listened to was VK and I was proud of it. I borrowed CD's, was introduced to Limewire (which was pretty much Napster 2.0 at the time) and googled around about basically visual kei. Found a lot of bands that way, but nowhere near as many as I found here. I think I found Batsu once, clicked on two topics and saw how badly organized the site was and ran away. I didn't come across TW until late 2007 and early 2008. Signed up and was initially a lurker. What ended up making me a permanent part of the whole website was some dickweed named Brandon. It was around the time Jasmine You died and he said something along the lines of "well he died of nigger flu".

Needless to say I verbally shoved a foot up his ass. The people of TW supported me. I kinda felt bad because I made Ito delete six pages full of drama (sorry about that <.<;;;  ) but after that happened I was all "FUCK YEAH TW" and I became a permanent fixture here.

And then THE CAT5 came along one day and was like "hey, you seem like a pretty open-minded fellow. Let's trade music!". And then the era of musical expansion began. He sent me tons of bands I'd never heard of before that were all Japanese. I had a HOLY FUCK moment. I always knew there was stuff outside of the visual kei scene but it wasn't like TW was a good place to find it. I devoured his mixtapes and then was hungry for more. The explosion was further fueled by Wind's uploads, who was responsible for introducing me to Touhou. I'll never understand to this day how I scrobbled 412 plays of Electric Red in one week.

And then I thought to myself: "Is there more music like this abroad?". That's really when I began exploring every single genre from every country I could think of.

And then about four years later (it's been four years already v____v) you have the eclectic mess that is Zess.

[Champ213 1858]

When I was very small I would stay with my grandparents a lot. I would sleep in my aunt's room who was still a teen, only 10 years older than me, and she would always put on a CD when we went to bed. These are probably the earliest musical memories I have. She listened to stuff like Paul Simon, Peter Gabriel and U2. (Hey, we are talking about late 80s/early 90s here!). I would copy her stuff to cassettes, so this was the music I listened to through kindergarten and primary school.

 

 

Somehow I lost interest in music after I entered secondary school (which happens around age 10/11 here). All of my class mates were listening to fancy charts music and I would have none of it. At first anyway. I eventually started to tape off music from the radio, so I basically was listening to whatever was on the radio. I didn't have any favourite bands, at best I had favourite songs. I also started to buy CDs, but never albums, only singles, because I didn't care for any bands, I just wanted that particular song in good quality.

 

On the bright side: this also saved me from falling into boy-band fandom. Imagine that, I was a teenage girl in the 90s, and I didn't have a single boy-band poster on my walls.

 

 

I think I was 14 when I started to develope my own taste. This song was quite a game-changer for me, because it was the very first time I liked something that was "heavier". Well, heavier compared to what I listened before.

 

 

I think it was also the first time that a song would touch me emotionally since years when I was listening in awe to U2's "One" in my aunt's bedroom.

 

 

Anyway, to shorten things, after that I began to explore music more - wich actually wasn't that easy in an age before Youtube and mp3 downloading, lol. I somehow managed by taping music off from friends and relatives and buying music magazines to read reviews and listen to sample CDs. But yeah, the internet (which I only really started to use at age 20) obviously opened up a whole new world of music for me.

[octoral 6]

Interesting! I think I've never really told anyone about it.

 

Animu played a huge part for my entry to asian music. In this country, they've shown really old anime that had memorable themes that stuck to me (even as early as kindergarten). I also had piano lessons with various teachers (who I hated lol) but there was one who was my favorite. She loved japanese compositions and I'd play those stuff as recital pieces. I forgot about them and only recalled now actually. So apart from classical music, I was also familiar with japanese piano pieces whose titles escaped me. I can still remember their sound though. I was probably too young to memorize name that time. My teacher's in another country now.

 

And remember the era of song request/song rotation sites? LOL I owned one blog like it. I remember uploading like 5 songs every Saturday and reviewing them, same time getting feedback from my site's visitors. It's where I got into Jpop outside anime, eventually to korean and taiwanese. During HS, I had a jap close friend and we exchanged burned cds that had our favorite songs. He was the one who got me into VK, and I started searching for bands of my own then. 

 

The time came that I finally gotten a hold of a paypal account and discovered the wonders of online shopping. I started buying cds of artists I like, the least I can do to support them. I'm fairly new to broadening my music, I think. I almost stopped updating my playllst during college 'cause it was toxic that I hardly had time for internet. But everything's changed now. I'm trying to listen to artists that gets my attention by searching in last.fm! 

 

I think I have no solid definition for my music taste. As long as an artist gets my attention, I guess?

[LIDL 692]

Just curious Candy Warhol (btw like that name). How is VK going for you?

All I can say is, Thank God For Myspace!

If not cos this site, I will never know more bands than Malice Mizer, X Japan, PLC and Luna sea.

[Heroin 53]

Many interesting backgrounds, hence thinking everyone in this forum are from the U.S :'p also wow, very detailed stories. I like

All I can say is, Thank God For Myspace!

If not cos this site, I will never know more bands than Malice Mizer, X Japan, PLC and Luna sea.

Dude same here, freakin Myspace hah For me was Girugamesh, Dir en Grey and X Japan

[bukimi_heishi 62]

For me growing up I just listened to whatever my parents listened to, which was mostly country and christian music. When  I was 10 or so me and my best friend spent a lot of time watching the Disney channel and back then they would play music videos and it was at that time I started getting into the likes of Nsync, 98 degrees, aaron carter, and the pokemon soundtracks. I don't remember what music I listened to from the ages 10 to 14 but at the age of 15 I met a guy in my math class and on his binder he had pictures of Slipknot, Korn, and Mudvayne so that caught my interest and I started to listening to the radio a lot more and I feel in love with all sorts of radio friendly rock music and I discovered bands such as Alice in chains, Pink floyd, Guns N' Roses, Staind, Metallica, Breaking benjamin, Tool, Incubus,etc With the "Heavier" bands being my favorite like Slipknot, Mudvayne and Killswtich Engage.

 

A year or so later I finally got access to a computer (our family had one but I was never allowed on it ><) and it was right around this time that I was in a store and say L'arc~en~Ciel on some magazine and a thought occurred to me "Japanese Rock? Wonder what that is like" and through the use of myspace,wikipedia, and batsu I discovered the world of Vk.

 

Ever since then my music taste have continued to expand and grow 

[Sakura Seven 593]

My parents weren't big music fans. My dad listened mainly to classic rock. My mom liked whatever was on the radio that wasn't too offensive or weird. As a kid, I really didn't have much interest in music AT ALL. That kinda changed when the Spice Girls / Britney Spears came around. I was a Destiny's Child fan. 

 

I first got exposed to Japanese music through GameFAQs. I talked to someone who sent me a few Ayumi Hamasaki songs (RIP shitty file-sending service) and told me to check out Gackt. I looked him up on KaZaa and found the Beast of Blood video instead. I was ruined.

[Cupcakes 55]

Hmmm... When I grew up we either listened to 70's/80's music on the radio (my parents both like it)

My mom mainly likes Dutch singers (Marco Borsato) and bands (De Dijk, Blof), but I've never really shared this interest.

My dad is into bands like Rammstein, Iron Maiden and Within Temptation.

 

As a good young girl from the 90's in the Benelux I was a big fan of K3. Even saw them live, though my first actual concert my parents took me to was Venice. I was 9 then.

I also enjoyed Britney Spears for a few albums, there was something in her voice that got my attention.

 

When I was 12 I started liking a guy who was all into music like Ferry Corsten and Armin van Buuren.

Some time later I started listening Tokio Hotel. Got a girl I was friends with into it too and we even went to see them live.

On the Dutch Tokio Hotel fan-forum there was a girl with an interesting signature of a band. When I asked her which band it was she send me a videoclip along with the message: "This is the GazettE, a Japanese band". We've reached the first of september, 2007 at this point.

 

I started looking up more bands on youtube and via google I met Byouto. He introduced me to the Tainted-World forum.

I saw a lot of different genres coming by here, and moved along when the split came and the forum turned into Monochrome-Heaven.

 

But. After a while. I got so tired of the people on the forum. It became too draining. So I searched for something... different. A girl in my class introduced me to Big Bang, a kpop group.

 

The rest is history, I guess?

 

I'm slowly listening to some Japanese rock again, but being active on the forum is an idea that honestly scares me.

[hyura 465]

This is an interesting thread!

 

Well. I grew up with classical music and although my friends in school loved boybands and the like (I grew up in the 90s) thats pretty much what I stuck with until I was about 11,12 years old. At that time I started to be interested in bands like HIM and the 69 eyes and later Marilyn Manson. Even though that style was actually popular at that time nobody I knew liked it and I didn't have many friends anyway.

However, when I changed schools there were some 'dark' looking people who were all older than me and who I thought were super duper cool. When I started talking to them I found out they liked visual kei and so I had to like it, too.

There weren't many overseas fans back then, every song was rare and the internet was slow and full of rumors. (Of course there was no youtube either.) The most popular bands were Dir en grey and Malice Mizer.

When I first listened to Dir en grey I thought they were horrible but I quickly fell in love with Malice Mizer and from there I tried out every band I could find and found lots of favorites in the indies sector like La'Mule, Due le Quartz, Phobia and Madeth Gray'll.
 (By then I also got used to Dir en grey)

 

A little later Neo Tokyo did a collaboration with Under Code in my country and a Vidoll Sampler as well an omnibus Album were released. Vidoll were also on the cover of cure magazine around then and I became A huge Under Code fan. I loved Vidoll, 12012, Mar'derayla and Karen. In the same year I saw my first Visual Kei band live, it was D'espairsray and I was very impressed. (I remember seeing blood even before but I didn't like them.)

And that's how I became a Maniac.

However. 2 or 3 years later around 2006 it really dropped. It was around then that I first had more contact to the 'other side' of visual kei. I hung around with people in japan and met some people I once admired and everything was very desillusionating. (is that even a word?) The internet wasn't that full of gossip back then and teenage girl that I was I somehow thought everybody wasn't such an asshole.

On top of that 12012, Vidoll and Phantasmagoria also left undercode and there were almost no new bands that caught my interest anymore. Oh and suddenly a huge 'VK' trend happened in my country and while old fans disappeared a whole new generation of fans with totally different mindset appeared. My obsession cooled down somewhat, even though I still followed some bands.

I started to listen to mainly disbanded Groups again and when I went to japan the main reason was second hand shops and.. well. That didn't change much until today.

I'm almost ashamed that my music taste is so limited.

[RoseOfHizaki 131]

Well as a child I grew up listening to a radio station that played all the classic oldies - pop/rock songs from the 80s and stuff like that, artists like Elvis, the beatles, the kinks, T-Rex (british classics of course since Im from the UK)

 

I ended up being introduced to Queen/Freddie Mercury through my father who knew I loved Queen and used to get a friend from work to copy me his entire collection and I was stuck on listening to nothing but Queen for many years and Brian May in particular was one of my greatest inspirations for picking up the guitar.

 

As I got older my tastes shifted to heavier sounds, and i got interested in Manic Street Preachers - their early material was quite heavy, heavier then queen at least! and Manics became my next obession until I started getting into techno, trance, dance &  DnB. I was using my pocket money and buying all these mix tapes and compilation albums.

 

I was into techno music for a long long tme until a friend forced me to listen to iron maiden. I didnt like it much, Carried onto listening to techno until i eventually got bored of it. It was around this time when i started picking up heavier music again. I cant remember which bands I listened to but I think thats where my journey into progressive metal began and generally from then on my tastes grew and grew and expanded into other genres like melo-death metal and metalcore, deathcore.

 

There are very few genres that I wont listen to and I think part of my taste and associations with certain genres developed because Im also a multi-instrumentalist, I play bass, guitar, drums and a little piano. having some knowledge in how to play these instruments really made me respect musicianship and there are many musicians out there that inspire me.

 

 

-----

 

Well, I think that about covers almost everything, there are a few gaps here and there but its 3.20am and my brain is too tired to think so far back 

[jduv86 224]

Well I started off...as every black kid usually does...just listening to rap and RnB music....but then I guess it sophmore year of high school, I heard "Pardon Me" by Incubus and that song alone changed my views on music! I was like "holy f*ck! a DJ in this rock group! This song kicks total a**" ...not that they were the first to do it. Just the first that actually did it the way I liked it at the time. From then on, I just dived hugely into different types of rock genres...

 

Then, my musical style changed again when I went to Otakon 04' and saw L' arc en Ciel. I was like "I have no idea what he's saying, BUT this music is just speaking to me!" I finally started getting a sense of music outside of 'Merica! So those are my two biggest changing points musically.

[Biopanda 2675]

One day I was listening to Linkin Park and the next thing I knew, I was knee-deep in Japanese trannies.

[orangetarts 249]

One day I was listening to Linkin Park and the next thing I knew, I was knee-deep in Japanese trannies.

T B H. this is basically how it happened for me, too.

I was so so in love with evanescence as a kid and then....i think Moi Dix Mois happened? I heard shadows temple x and just lost my shit. and from there i got into LJ and found out a bunch of bands (KuRT <3) and met a bunch of assholes etc tec

and then Kpop happened....and yeah.

I dont wanna type a long paragraph.

[Heroin 53]

I enjoyed reading peoples backstory of their music taste. So I'm bumping it up again. Im curious to see more of peoples history with music. Shows a lot to where youre coming from. A lot of love

 

I would like to add on more to my experiences with music.

When it comes to my parents I kinda despised whatever they liked, which was a lot of the spanish radio. Oh boy it drove me nuts listening to their music in the car! Though some songs I do remember listening to really hit me, but I never knew who were the artists. But man they were great nostalgic songs. So that really didnt lead anywhere with my taste in music except exclude cliche mexican bands/artist lol 

 

As I mention before, Billy Corgan changed a certain view on music, which is, I got bored with poppy sounding music. As a child I remember liking different things than other children, so I was like hey! Why not like different sounds? Basically thats how it went down : p

 

My way with music at a young age was always trying to find something different. Being different was my whole being.

 

I grew on a lot of punk and metal. Anything that gave aggression, and I thank the Tony Hawk games. Really my only source of listening to new music. (btw I got all Tony Hawk games heheh)

 

edit: also I like to thank the people that shared.

[Lestat 2167]

Growing up in a household where one would typically hear an arsenal of native Dutch music, I hadn't had much of an impression of what rock was. Sure, I might have stumbled upon a few certain names on music channels (the period where MTV was actually a music channel), but other than that I suppose I was too young to allow any music stick to me for a longer period of time. My Dad did have some Deep Purple records, but he wouldn't ever play them out loud and generally sat in a corner with his headphones on, listening to his vinyls as my Mom didn't appreciate this all that much.

 

It wasn't until my parents separated (me at the mere age of eight) that I was introduced to hard rock. Both my step-parents (they were a couple as well, my parents basically partner-switched with them) were fond of bands like Aerosmith, Guns N' Roses, AC/DC, Scorpions, etc., and it quickly became obvious that I had found my musical taste due to their influence. While I was still a young teen, I did usually prefer the more obvious groups in the realm of Green Day and My Chemical Romance as it seemed more modern to this age, but progressively I delved deeper and deeper into whatever 80's formations I could find. I've spent a lot of years on glam-and sleaze rock forums and soon I believed I had completed discographies of the most underground of underground of glam rock bands. 

 

Of course, there were times where I strayed from this path. Thrash metal, death metal, black metal, you name it and I've probably had phases where I couldn't stop listening to any of these. I've been to a bulk load of festivals and gigs, very often partying right along with fairly big names during afterparties and whatsoever. 

 

Phases have certainly been a big part of my musical taste. There was a time where I didn't listen to anything but metalcore and deathcore either, but this has slinked down to a very few select favourites.

 

A reintroduction to X JAPAN was likely where my love for Visual Kei emerged. I had known of them since years because they'd simply fit into the glam rock scene and I never even had an idea of what the term "Visual Kei" meant until I've befriended someone during highschool who was in over her head on Versailles and explained me that X JAPAN has an entirely different status in the music world as well. My first 'real' Visual Kei favourites were D and Versailles. I fell in love with the aesthetics and storylines in their music and that's supposedly where this root of my tastes has sprouted.

[Heroin 53]

That's great dude! When I was young I always envy people that had parents listening to metal. I always thought extreme music was the coolest! Also nice on X JAPAN, its a great way to go, though yeah it probably exposed more to metal than the Jrock scene. It gave me that impression for sure.

[enyx 903]

My (much older) brother was a big fan of a lot of rock and grunge bands such as Nirvana and The Wildhearts when I was a little kid. Most of my earliest memories are of me holding my ear up to my bedroom wall so I could listen to the songs he was playing in his room. Funnily enough, my Mom would often yell at him for playing his music too loud while I supposed to be sleeping, and then I'd yell back at her because I was trying to listen xD. So yeah, that's what got me into rock music. My first album was of my own was Linkin Park's Hybrid Theory. When I was in school, the group of kids that I wanted to hang out with started getting into metal/metalcore bands such as Trivium, Chimaera, Children of Bodom, etc, so I followed suit. The ironic thing is that most of them moved on to whatever the new 'cool' thing was after a year or so, but I kept listening to that type of music for quite a while. Eventually I started getting more into progressive stuff - Dream Theater and the like - around 2007 or so. I also started playing bass around that time; I went through a 'Cliff Burton is god' phase that served as my introduction to Metallica. 

 

I didn't start listening to Japanese music until late 2008/early 2009 when I stumbled across DIR EN GREY purely by chance, and basically fell in love pretty much immediately. This was around the time that UROBOROS was still new and its mix of progressive elements along with their heavier/darker sound was pretty much perfect for me at the time. It took me a while to warm up to their earlier releases, but I slowly started developing an interest in Visual Kei in general and started checking out bands like the GazettE and D'espairsRay. I'm not entirely sure what prompted my sudden foray into indie and IDM. I think I just got tired of what I perceived to be a lot of repetitiveness in the VK scene and wanted to try out new things in the Japanese scene. I stumbled across bands like 凛として時雨, school food punishment and toe as well as producers like Ametsub and haven't really looked back since.

 

Looking back on it now, it's really interesting how my brother playing his music loudly in his room while I was supposed to be sleeping ended up shaping my music taste in a way that's still somewhat apparent today.