My Musical DNA

 In this blog I’m going to be outlining the history of my engagement with recorded music. That is, I’m going to be writing a bit about the artists and albums that I believe had the greatest impact on my taste throughout my life. I feel like I’m reaching the end of my big youthful musical exploration journey and have settled into my taste a bit, so it’s a ripe time for some retrospection. My thoughts on listening to new music are nicely summarized in this tweet. 

I’ve always wanted an excuse to organize this for my own benefit, and a personal blog seems like the place. I’m not sure what value others will get out of this, but I hope that it illuminates some of my personality and maybe gives you ideas on how to expand your taste.

My first exposure to music came from two sources: piano lessons and my dad’s collection. My parents started me on piano lessons at a very early age, which I continued until I was around 12. I can still play a bit, but the most important thing I got from this was an ability to read sheet music and an appreciation of the difficulty in playing anything that sounds good. My dad had an extensive CD and vinyl collection, and was getting into Napster right as I was starting to become conscious. He introduced me to your standard dadrock and 60’s pop, but the central song was always Hotel California by The Eagles. This is the first song that I declared “the best song ever made”, although the number of songs I had heard by this point was obviously quite limited.

In 2001, when I was five years old, my family lived in the Baltic town of Warnemünde, Germany for 6 months. This is where I was first introduced to electronic music, as my brother and I spent a lot of the day watching music videos on TV. Although Americans will remember artists like Daft Punk from this era, the two CDs that got the most play for us were L’Amour Toujours by Gigi D’Agostino and Episode II by Safri Duo. Gigi D’Agostino is more popular today, probably most famous among people my age for his appearance in the credits song of Uncut Gems. Safri Duo is likely more influential to my taste though. The members were two classically trained percussionists who decided to add acoustic percussion to EDM. Their biggest hit was a song called Played-A-Live, and I still think Episode II is an excellent album. This began for me a lifelong love of percussion and rhythm. Their music inspired me to become a mallet percussionist, and I played xylophone and marimba for the New York Area All-State band in high school.

As I got to middle school it became time to rebel against dadrock. Thus I started down the well-trod path of grunge and thrash metal that so many young boys take. Of their respective canons, my favorites were Slayer’s Reign in Blood and Soundgarden’s Superunknown. It was also at this time that I started getting really into System Of A Down, who hold the honor of being the first band whose discography I illegally downloaded. I didn’t feel too bad about this, since they even had an album that told me to steal it. SOAD also got me over the hump of harsh vocals, as their song P.L.U.C.K. is the first with that vocal style that I enjoyed. The other thing that really expanded my taste around this time was the Rock Band and Guitar Hero games, which had fantastic tracklists. I played drums in those games of course.

Then came the moment which irreparably damaged my music taste and alienated me from everyone I knew. I watched a video game montage set to Szamar Madar by Venetian Snares, and my mind was thoroughly blown. I had never heard anything remotely like it before and I was obsessed. This was breakcore music, drum’n’bass composed at a breakneck speed with aggressive and disorienting cuts in the drum samples. Venetian Snares primarily worked in the 7/4 time signature, so the act of listening is an active process of counting and keeping up. Luckily, Mr. Snares was a ridiculously prolific producer and I had a lot of material to go on, but I wanted more. This led to my discovery of IDM, and I started consuming Squarepusher, Aphex Twin, Autechre, and Boards of Canada albums ravenously. No one else I knew liked any of it. Thus, my music taste became sourced more and more from the internet and I started to become a heavy user of 4chan’s /mu/ board and RateYourMusic. 

These sources proved their worth to me by introducing me to Spiderland by Slint. This was an album so good that it was better than I thought music could even be. If that makes sense. The first time I heard Spiderland, the experience of hearing the final climax of Good Morning, Captain felt life altering. I had never felt such ecstasy and had a high to chase. I had been listening to so much electronic music I was neglecting rock, but listening to Spiderland made me realize that there are incredible moments to be found everywhere in music. This experience, plus the disappointment of not being able to find a breakcore artist I liked as much as Venetian Snares, changed my approach for finding new music. I realized that you don’t want to look for things similar to what you already like. You want to look for things that are completely outside of what you already like, since that’s where the true discoveries happen.

Dadrock had one last surprise for me. I was nearing the end of high school and my dad recommended that I listen to Fragile by Yes and In The Court of the Crimson King. Those albums kick ass and reminded me that there was still good music to be found in the pre-punk world. My dad’s influence also worked negatively though, as he had a distaste for hip hop music that I copied. This wasn’t too big an issue for me since I had plenty of rock and electronic to get through. It feels pretty embarrassing to say, but the first hip hop act that I liked was Death Grips, who I started listening to in 2012. It was the production that did it for me, plus MC Ride’s unorthodox style gave me a good back door into the genre. I realized the level of artistry that could be achieved in the genre, and so was able to enjoy more traditional artists eventually.

Fast forward to the end of college, and I had trained myself to enjoy just about every genre. Whether it was jazz, classical, country, hip hop, metal, punk, or ambient, there was at least one album in the style that I could say that I liked. The exception was pop. Of course I liked music with pop elements, but I had long considered myself above the type of stuff that was played on top 40 radio. Once again, there was a back door: PC Music. I was introduced to the label by the late, great publication TinyMixTapes, which I read daily when it was active. Helpfully, the movement could initially be read as making fun of pop music. This allowed me to listen without guilt, and then when it became obvious they were making weirdo pop because they loved pop, I was already in. SOPHIE asserted that making the loudest, brightest, most immediate and gratifying tunes possible was in fact a viable form of art. And while PC Music taught me that sincere pop music can still be sonically daring, Carly Rae Jepsen taught me that pop music can be genuinely moving and E•MO•TIONal.

I still listen to music, but my appetite for novelty is greatly diminished. I just think that there’s not much room for novelty to my ears, given how much I’ve heard. Most recently I’ve been working on building an appreciation for classical music, and am enjoying the works of Bach, Rachmaninoff, and Shostakovich. My interests are drifting away from music though, but I’ll always have a deep well to return to whenever I desire. Obviously, there are tons more artists I was listening to than mentioned here, and if you're interested in my takes on them just ask or check out my RYM.