who/what influenced your taste in music? Also, how has it evolved over time?

[Thunderhorse31]

Well all my favorite bands influenced me to play music but Chris Carrabba was basically the man who made me want to play!

(He's single ladies ;] )

I would slit this man's throat if given the opportunity, that's how much I hate Dashboard with a passion. It's just so... unbearably... awful. And whiny. But hey, everyone's entitled to their musical tastes

Anyway, as a kid I grew up on 80's music and punk/alternative (since that's what was popular in the early 90's) and then branched out into classic/progressive rock (Halen, Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, etc.) as I started to reach back to the time before I was born for more music. Shortly thereafter I discovered metal (like you, the Black Album started me down the rabbit hole, so to speak). Pretty soon my favorite bands were Iron Maiden and Megadeth, and I continued to progress into other genres and found even more favorites (Opeth, Dream Theater, Porcupine Tree, etc.).

Over the years I've continued to grow in my tastes by adding some rap, folk, pop, blues, and others and I'm at the point now were I can listen to almost any genre whatsoever - excluding country and Dashboard Confessional, of course - and enjoy it. But I'm still a metalhead at heart.

 

[rt052192]

Most of the artists you listen to make me very angry. Fucking "nu-metal" and shit.

Did you look at the master list of what I generally listen to now? And since we're on the subject of "nu-metal" what exactly is it and which bands are "nu-metal" because I generally feel the same way about nu-metal. I like some of it, but maybe if the name wasn't so lame.

Inside joke with my friends: Linkin Park is nu-metal i.e. Meteora and Hybrid Theory but new LP i.e. Minutes to Midnight and their new cd is nuuuu-metal. It's funny to me...

 

[Sightless Wisdom]

Most of the artists you listen to make me very angry. Fucking "nu-metal" and shit.

Did you look at the master list of what I generally listen to now? And since we're on the subject of "nu-metal" what exactly is it and which bands are "nu-metal" because I generally feel the same way about nu-metal. I like some of it, but maybe if the name wasn't so lame.

Inside joke with my friends: Linkin Park is nu-metal i.e. Meteora and Hybrid Theory but new LP i.e. Minutes to Midnight and their new cd is nuuuu-metal. It's funny to me...

Linkin Park is more or less nu-metal. Nu-metal is generally just a crappy blend of hip/hop elements with metal. Or sometimes just mainstream new crap like Avenged Sevenfold and Slipknot.

(Also, could someone not have picked a less retarded name?!)

 

[Eren Murtaugh]

My friends influenced my tastes for a while, than I just found bands I liked and stuck with them Some favorites are: Rise against, Filter, All that Remains, Brad Paisley, Shad, Skillet, Sum 41, Toby Keith, Cold, Darius Rucker(listen to So sad, come back song.), Trace Adkins, Alter Bridge, Meatloaf, Chicago, Air Supply, Bread, and a little Dragonforce here and there.

 

[Ryuo]

I grew up to Metallica, and still love their music.
Now as to how I found the rest of the genres I listen to...
Can't pin it down 100% but a partial factor is (i guess) a rather shallow
love of a catchy beat, rather than message, singer, instruments, or what have you. (Though sometimes a song's message sticks through to me.)
I care little of what others think about my music choices. I often say to people who ask
"what kind of music do you listen to?" with "I listen to all sorts, from Jewel to Metallica."

 

[rt052192]

Most of the artists you listen to make me very angry. Fucking "nu-metal" and shit.

Did you look at the master list of what I generally listen to now? And since we're on the subject of "nu-metal" what exactly is it and which bands are "nu-metal" because I generally feel the same way about nu-metal. I like some of it, but maybe if the name wasn't so lame.

Inside joke with my friends: Linkin Park is nu-metal i.e. Meteora and Hybrid Theory but new LP i.e. Minutes to Midnight and their new cd is nuuuu-metal. It's funny to me...

Linkin Park is more or less nu-metal. Nu-metal is generally just a crappy blend of hip/hop elements with metal. Or sometimes just mainstream new crap like Avenged Sevenfold and Slipknot.

(Also, could someone not have picked a less retarded name?!)

Yea I understand why fans of metal dislike Linkin Park and the mainstream like Avenged Sevenfold. Old Slipknot was pretty original and not so mainstream, it seems like they shifted towrds the mainstream with their last two cds. Had they not used the term metal and called it hip/hop rock or something maybe people's opinions would change becasue nu-metal certainly is not metal in the slightest.

 

[Gildan Bladeborn]

I like to think that nobody has really influenced my taste in music - facilitated it and fed it perhaps, but not influenced necessarily, as I really only have one criteria when it comes to what I will listen to: Whether or not I like it. My father listening to mainly classical and folk music growing up merely clued me in that I liked classical (folk... not so much, not in general anyways), it didn't forcibly instill the love I have for what is by all accounts bloody superb music.

No, what's influenced my listening habits the most is the machinations of Pandora introducing me to things I'd never heard of before that I ended up liking, and all the various chains of musical causation I've followed from there - chains of causation that have led to some folks here describing me as a resident expert on obscure Metal (for which I've developed a particular fondness).

While I've come to realize that a lot of people I know either already listen to things I happen to enjoy or, when introduced to them by me, enjoy those bands (often enough to go and buy various albums, whee music evangelism!), I never hear about bands from someone who liked them prior to my independent determination of the same (not in meatspace anyways, and I don't actually know the semi-random strangers making recommendations online); my eclectic taste in music is entirely my own doing. Or so I like to think.

 

[Dango]

My biggest influence is anime. Ever since I started loving anime I've started listening to tons and tons of Japanese music (I'm listening to some right now). I do also listen to quite a bit of video game music, as I love video games as well. I've gone through so many different phases of music loving. When I was around 4, I loved boy bands like The Backstreet Boys, and then around 8 I started listening to rap and hip-hop. After that I just stopped listening to music for quite a while, then eventually, after buying FIFA and listening to lots of its music, I got into modern rock. After that I got into classic rock, and after that electronic, and after that metal, and after that video game music, and now here I am listening to "Bouken Desho Desho?" from the Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya soundtrack.

 

[zen5887]

First off my Dad. He is really into 70s Punk and some of my earliest musical memories are listening to London Calling by The Clash when I visited him in the holidays. I was around 9 or 10 at the time so I didn't really understand what I was listening too, and was more attracted to the simple pop stuff (I think I still have my Five and Nsync albums somewhere..), but it introduced me to some good music and "planted the seeds" if you will. Later in life I would go "Hey, what was that band Dad always listened too?"

In my preteens/early teens I saw Linkin Park on the TV. I pretty much fell in love right there. I was an angry geeky kid who didn't really fit in with anyone and Linkin Park were also angry. I got their debut album and played it over and over again, then I got their 2nd album and played that over and over again. In the meantime I heard some bands that I thought sounded like LP (as in, loud and angry bands) and searched around for awhile, eventually I was right into Slipknot, Cradle of Filth, System of a down and Disturbed. Alas, I was a 14 year old metal head who thought drawing pentagrams in the back of his English book was cool. 8 years ago I was everything I hate today...

In my later years of Highschool I started playing Bass, and thus, started noticing Bass in music a lot more. All of a sudden all of this music came at me like a giant brick of enlightenment. Funk, Jazz, Reggae, Punk. Even Pop and Hip Hop started to make sense. When I got to uni I dived into the more Technical side of music, finding bands such as Dream Theater, Tool, Opeth and Porcupine Tree. I would later go on to join a Prog band, we rock.

My friends also had a similar musical explosion. Once such friend introduced me to a Canadian gentlemen by the name of Buck 65. At first I dismissed it as Hip Hop junk (tasty ignorance) but eventually realised the goodness he had to offer. I credit this one moment to be the most influential moment in my musical life. I gained a new appreciation for Hip Hop and after searching for artists Buck has worked with I discovered Sage Fancis, Feist (who introduced to me Broken Social Scene and other Indie bands), Boom Bip (who introduced me to Electronica as a genre) Greetings from Tuskan, DJ Shadow and more.

Actually, as I write this I realise how futial it is to list how I gained my musical taste.

So lets just say I kept an open mind and discovered a shit load of amazing artists.

 

[Tanis]

I started off listening to Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen and...some slap me...'Mid/Late 1990's pop music'.

Then there was anime music I 'discovered', Yoko Kanno, and started listening to a lot of videogame/anime music.

But it was after I went to a CHRISTIAN school that I was introduced to Ozzy, Black Sabbath, and all those other rock singers/bands.
Never really gone back to 'pop' music.

Though, I do like Robbie Williams and a few other 'pop, but not 'n-sync, pop' musicians/groups.

 

[Betancore]

I used to listen to the radio, until I got tired of all that 'mainstream' stuff and started listening to emo bands. Oh, the shame. When I was 13, I was a regular on a forum where a lot of people were really into with Pink Floyd. After a bit of convincing, I went on to listen to every Pink Floyd album in existence, and got caught up on Nick Mason's one liner in One of These Days.

The 'death growling' that Nick Mason did in that song (his drum stick also flew out of his hand when he performed it at Pompeii and he managed to keep the beat while getting another; I was mesmerised) grew on me, and finally I asked for suggestions for what I should listen to next. They suggested bands like Deep Purple, Black Sabbath and Led Zep.

That was sort of the transition to metal that I was looking for. After listening to those bands to death, I discovered Metallica after my friend sent me 'Sad But True,' a song which I am still obsessed with to this day. Another friend of mine saw me listening to it on MSN, and said that he had three 'Ms' of metal; Maiden, Megadeth and Metallica. He later annotated that and added 'Manowar' after he saw me listening to Pleasure Slave. Since that, I've branched out and tried some Viking metal, some death metal, that kind of thing. I'm pretty open to most bands, now. I would've considered Meshuggah too noisy and chaotic a few years ago, but now I can appreciate it.

So yeah, the internet. That's mainly what influenced my taste in music.

 

[-Samurai-]

My musical influences were mostly my friends. My family members never really cared to listen to much music. In the 2nd grade I went to a new(and current. Long live long friendships!) friends house and his dad had cassettes of bands like Kiss, Metallica, Pantera, and Motley Crue. I really liked how they sounded and got my heart pumping(except for Kiss. never could get into them).

From that point on, I started listening to just about everything I could get my hands on that had awesome guitar work until I got to where I am today.

Today, my favorite band(Coheed and Cambria) are in the "progressive rock" category. I never really eased into it. I went from bands like Bullet for my Valentine and Metallica and Iron Maiden, straight into Coheed. I still listen to all my old favorites, though. So I didn't really evolve my taste, it just made a sudden change as I could more easily identify with what Coheed is about.

 

[ICantBelieveItGoesBoom]

I think the biggest change to my taste in music came when I stopped just listening to "that one song" that a band did like I used to.

For the last 6 months if I like one song from a band I look up the entire back catalogue and listen to all of their music, I really have few so many gems this way.

Also I occasionally just listen to a band that I had heard about but never heard the music of, this has brought me bands like Primus, Porcupine Tree, The Drums, The Mars Volta and many more.

As for genre boundaries, does music need to be classified? All it serves to do lead to elitism, can't we just listen to music that's similar if we want more to listen to? Or better yet, music on the complete other side of the spectrum of music!

 

[iLikeHippos]

I can't remember. But I know I got stuck to Metal and Rock at some point.

Probably when I moved in with a split-up family with my own split-up family. They were heavily influenced by rock, and so became I... Probably.

 

[Imbechile]

Prince of Persia Warrior within introduced me to metal and rock

 

[MetalPhoenix]

There was a period when I didn't listen to anything. I thought everything was crap. Mostly because my friends were all listening to eiter hardcore (the repetitive electronic crap...not the metal-kind) or pop music.
Then a friend of mine asked "what do you think of this?" and he put "One" on by Metallica (The S&M version). From that point on I was hooked on metal. I started with Metallica, Nightwish, Rammtein but now it has evolved into me listening a lot to heavy and power metal. (Oldschool stuff like Maiden, Saxon, Priest, Annihilator, Metallica, Sabbath, Dio etc.).
One, to this day, is still one of my all-time favorite songs

\m/

 

[TheRightToArmBears]

Well when I were a lad I found my dad's vynil collection and spent my childhood listening to 'zep. ZZ Top, Hawkwind, Black Sabbath, The Who etc. I took it from there really, and listen to metal and rock and all that jazz (well not so much jazz, but it's a figure of speech).

My mum listens to lot of stuff, it's her fault I listen to stuff like Bob Marley, Paul Simon and The Police.

I guess that aside from metal and rock my other big love is third wave ska, and I that came from being a bassist and the skill involved in it's bass playing, so that got me interested. I love it for one of the same reasons I love Anthrax: It never takes itself too seriously.