Miyako (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} gokugirl) wrote,@ 2009-05-21 18:31:00 |
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My taste in music
I feel like speculating about my current taste in music. I grew up listening to whatever my mother happened to be listening to, which was usually R&B and rap. She will also listen to jazz or classical but only if she's tired of her usual radio station. As I fell prey to "herd mentality" in elementary and middle school, I continued to listen to R&B and rap on my own. This continued until eighth grade when I stopped truly listening to music altogether (eighth grade is also when my interest in pop culture died completely, but that's another story). I had a brief interest in the Spice Girls in middle school due to a performance we put on in drama class, but I was teased about it because "only white people listen to that." On Sundays my grandmother listened to gospel music without fail at a volume that would wake the dead and, as a consequence, I now consider choral music to be annoying.
When my interest in anime became full-fledged, I started collecting video game and anime music. This was when Napster was still free and copyright law was nonexistent when it concerned the Internet. When I received my very first MP3 player for Christmas (age 14), I loaded it up with J-Pop (Japanese popular music). As it only had about 32MB of memory on a card plus the internal 16MB that was about ten songs. I spent a lot of time memorizing the songs from animelyrics.com so I could sing along. (My interest in the Japanese language sprang from this.) This was the only thing I listened to consistently until Grand Theft Auto: Vice City came out. Unlike previous GTA games, the radio station music included popular songs from the time period the game took place in (the 80s). I spent a lot of time listening to V-Rock and realized that this rock-n-roll stuff wasn't half bad (one song that I can remember is Ozzy Osbourne's Bark at the Moon).
My interest in rock further developed thanks to GTA: San Andreas and I started listening to the Comcast rock music channel and writing down the title and band of the songs I liked. When my mother got a free year of Napster from AT&T, I used the subscription to download all the songs I had become interested in. There's nothing on my MP3 player now but rock and J-Pop. I said something to my mother about downloading some of Beyoncé's songs but I never got around to it. I download what sounds good to me and whose lyrics have some kind of meaning behind it. Most of the songs played on the popular local radio station Club 93.7 are (in my opinion) not worth bothering with, but my mother keeps the radio on the station because the one she used to listen to mostly plays "old school" now. I despise Kanye West and Lil Wayne's songs but that's just about all they play (along with Eminem).
Currently, my favorite band is Chevelle. I like the music and I like the fact that the lyrics have multiple meanings (and they don't usually rhyme). It reminds me of J-Pop. I have a feeling that the vocalist writes poetry because his words have depth. Second is probably Breaking Benjamin, whose vocalist says that the band wants to give off "positive feelings" despite doing the opposite. Three's vocalist has an accent I can't identify and it makes the songs sound different from most others. The Killswitch Engage songs I like are full of anguish (The End of Heartbreak, The Arms of Sorrow). While most of the songs I have are hard rock, some are more mellow (Foo Fighters, Three Doors Down) and some could be classified as metal (Bullet for My Valentine, Poison the Well). My mother calls most of it "noise," of course. I just dislike fluffy, unrealistic songs that describe the world as a nice place to live.
- Quote from Chevelle's "Closure" from Wonder What's Next (2002): "Your rebirth can't hurt / Branch out behind the pain"
- Quote from Chevelle's "Vitamin R (Leading Us Along)" from This Type of Thinking (Could Do Us In) (2004): "Well, if you're making it / And you're pushing it / Then you're leading us along / Like a cancer caused all the screaming fits / And the panic makes remorse"
- Quote from Chevelle's "Well Enough Alone" from Vena Sera (2007): "And like before, makes no sense / Never coming, always leaving right before / Hooked or substance, dig in deeper / Can't reveal..."
I feel like speculating about my current taste in music. I grew up listening to whatever my mother happened to be listening to, which was usually R&B and rap. She will also listen to jazz or classical but only if she's tired of her usual radio station. As I fell prey to "herd mentality" in elementary and middle school, I continued to listen to R&B and rap on my own. This continued until eighth grade when I stopped truly listening to music altogether (eighth grade is also when my interest in pop culture died completely, but that's another story). I had a brief interest in the Spice Girls in middle school due to a performance we put on in drama class, but I was teased about it because "only white people listen to that." On Sundays my grandmother listened to gospel music without fail at a volume that would wake the dead and, as a consequence, I now consider choral music to be annoying.
When my interest in anime became full-fledged, I started collecting video game and anime music. This was when Napster was still free and copyright law was nonexistent when it concerned the Internet. When I received my very first MP3 player for Christmas (age 14), I loaded it up with J-Pop (Japanese popular music). As it only had about 32MB of memory on a card plus the internal 16MB that was about ten songs. I spent a lot of time memorizing the songs from animelyrics.com so I could sing along. (My interest in the Japanese language sprang from this.) This was the only thing I listened to consistently until Grand Theft Auto: Vice City came out. Unlike previous GTA games, the radio station music included popular songs from the time period the game took place in (the 80s). I spent a lot of time listening to V-Rock and realized that this rock-n-roll stuff wasn't half bad (one song that I can remember is Ozzy Osbourne's Bark at the Moon).
My interest in rock further developed thanks to GTA: San Andreas and I started listening to the Comcast rock music channel and writing down the title and band of the songs I liked. When my mother got a free year of Napster from AT&T, I used the subscription to download all the songs I had become interested in. There's nothing on my MP3 player now but rock and J-Pop. I said something to my mother about downloading some of Beyoncé's songs but I never got around to it. I download what sounds good to me and whose lyrics have some kind of meaning behind it. Most of the songs played on the popular local radio station Club 93.7 are (in my opinion) not worth bothering with, but my mother keeps the radio on the station because the one she used to listen to mostly plays "old school" now. I despise Kanye West and Lil Wayne's songs but that's just about all they play (along with Eminem).
Currently, my favorite band is Chevelle. I like the music and I like the fact that the lyrics have multiple meanings (and they don't usually rhyme). It reminds me of J-Pop. I have a feeling that the vocalist writes poetry because his words have depth. Second is probably Breaking Benjamin, whose vocalist says that the band wants to give off "positive feelings" despite doing the opposite. Three's vocalist has an accent I can't identify and it makes the songs sound different from most others. The Killswitch Engage songs I like are full of anguish (The End of Heartbreak, The Arms of Sorrow). While most of the songs I have are hard rock, some are more mellow (Foo Fighters, Three Doors Down) and some could be classified as metal (Bullet for My Valentine, Poison the Well). My mother calls most of it "noise," of course. I just dislike fluffy, unrealistic songs that describe the world as a nice place to live.
- Quote from Chevelle's "Closure" from Wonder What's Next (2002): "Your rebirth can't hurt / Branch out behind the pain"
- Quote from Chevelle's "Vitamin R (Leading Us Along)" from This Type of Thinking (Could Do Us In) (2004): "Well, if you're making it / And you're pushing it / Then you're leading us along / Like a cancer caused all the screaming fits / And the panic makes remorse"
- Quote from Chevelle's "Well Enough Alone" from Vena Sera (2007): "And like before, makes no sense / Never coming, always leaving right before / Hooked or substance, dig in deeper / Can't reveal..."
