Chula Vista

What year were you born?

How did you get to your current musical tastes.

Where you going from here?

__________________

“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well,
on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away
and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”

innerspaceboy

1. I was born in June of 1981. My earliest musical memories were my Dad's Beatles LPs and nationally-syndicated oldies on FM radio which, in that era played late 50s and early 60s rock-n-roll and "oldie" Billboard pop tunes.

By age 15 contemporary pop radio was a vapid cesspool of musical garbage. 98PXY - "Your #1 Hit Music Station!" played absolutely wretched R&B-rap-step dance tracks 24 hours a day. I'm taking about atrocities like:

Haddaway - "What Is Love"
Corona - "Rhythm of the Night"
Real McCoy - "Another Night"
La Bouche - "Be my Lover"
Alice DJ - "Better Off Alone"


So I did what any young suburbanite would do with absolutely no cultural chops - I started a Bush cover band. And, like all garage bands of the 90s, we called ourselves, "Spork."

Still, I began to cut my teeth on prog rock staples like Jethro Tull and Gentle Giant in 10th grade. Their wild time signatures and cadences were a refreshing alternative to the crap on the FM dial.



Crate digging for prog tunes (and my father bestowing upon me his record collection) really determined the next decade of my musical life. Tull was a gateway drug into heavier and more experimental music. In a year, I was mainlining German electronic music and 20th century minimalist works.

3. These days....

I'm a published music journalist with 200,000 readers and over 100,000 tracks in my catalog. This has opened musical doors to some fantastic non-commercial content. Artists send me promo copies of their work and I have a large library of live and demo material from many of my favorite artists and composers.

The loudness war really has had no effect on me as the majority of the works I enjoy were recorded ~45 years ago. Thankfully, many of these titles are finding new life with audiophile remasters and greater distribution through a highly-refined network of file sharing. I can't think of a better time for a music lover to be alive than right now.

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Exo

I didn't realize I'm five years older than Frownland. Weird.

I was born in 1989. My first album was a cassette of The Wallflowers - Bringing Down the Horse. I still like the album. From there my musical journey gets strange. I went through the backstreet boy/N'Sync thing for a few months before graduating to whatever was playing on TRL at the time. I'd watch that **** every single day when I got home from school. I knew all the hits and one hit wonders. It stayed mostly like that until I was about 13 where I started to get into more pop punk and emo type stuff. Bands that I listen too included...

New Found Glory
Coheed and Cambria
The Used
Taking Back Sunday
Midtown
All American Rejects
Alkaline Trio

Alkaline Trio was my sh*t when I was 15. I'd listen to From Here to Infirmary every day when I rode my bike to work for a whole summer. Then I started to get into emo/hardcore bands like...

As I Lay Dying
From First To Last
The Bled
Blood Brothers
Circa Survive
Fall of Troy

Then something magical happened. I blind bought a copy of The Mars Volta's Deloused in the Comatorium cause I liked the album cover. I listened to it in awe like 8 times in a row that night. The album opened my eyes to what music could sound like and make me feel.

After that it's just been a sh*tshow after another. I like where my taste is at now. Diverse. Deep. Superior.

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LastFM

SUPREME POO BAH MODERATOR EXTRAORDINAIRE

Chula Vista

I discovered early Genesis and King Crimson the same way.

__________________

“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well,
on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away
and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”

Ol’ Qwerty Bastard

I was born in 1997, and had my first musical exposure thanks to my father's massive CD collection. Early on, some of my favorites consisted of Nirvana, AC/DC, Def Leppard, artists of that sort. Until about 2005 or so at least, when I started getting into artists on my own. I started listening to a lot of stuff that I had considered to be "different" at the time, like Linkin Park, Billy Talent, and even Limp Bitzkit (yeah, I was one of those kids) for awhile. Eventually, I got out of that phase thanks to the release of Kanye West's Graduation, which led me on a pretty long hip-hop phase where I listened to every rap album I could get my hands on.

Through hip-hop, in large part due to it's dependence on the internet now because of mixtape downloads and things like that, I learned how easy it was to find music and began discovering new genres. I discovered a love for a lot of metal music, some good some not so much, (I still listen to Slipknot, oh well,) emo, indie folk, and tons of other awesome stuff. Some of my favorite musicians now are Sufjan Stevens, Kanye West, Kendrick Lamar, Death Grips, Killer Mike, El-P, Mastadon, Dillinger Escape Plan, and Radiohead.

I still have quite a few bands that I discovered when I was younger that I still listen to, despite being dubbed ****ty mainstream stuff by lots of people, bands like Killswitch Engage, Billy Talent, RHCP, Deftones, and stuff like that.