In my first post I noted that I no longer actively listen to much modern pop music, or really a lot of modern music of any kind. When I was a teenager I vowed I would never be one of those people who tuned out of contemporary music. I wasn’t going to be like my dad, with whom I had to endure watching early 90’s MTV Video Music Awards while he made constant angry remarks about the smut on stage.
Fast forward thirty years, and I am pretty much my dad. If my daughters had any interest in watching the VMA’s, I am fairly certain I’d only be a little less cranky than my father and would be and only slightly more familiar with the music acts. (They still have music on the VMA’s, right? Wait, do they even have the VMA’s anymore?)
That’s not to say my musical taste hasn’t expanded in three decades (more on that in a bit), only that my interest in contemporary pop has dwindled.
So I thought it might be nice to stroll down memory lane and explain how my musical likes and dislikes evolved over time.
Thirty-five years ago this Christmas Eve my grandmother gave me as her gift to me a Walkman. That was the same Christmas I got an NES, so it might have flown under the radar were it not for the significance the Walkman and subsequent musical devices would have in my life.
Up until that point I was generally a passive music listener. I didn’t listen to the radio, nor did I generally go out looking to play music. But I had been introduced to rock n’ roll by my older brother - in particular The Rolling Stones and Bruce Springsteen. Since my father never listened to music, and my mother’s main interest was Julio Inglesias, that left my older siblings form my musical interests. So on top of the Stones and Bruce, I would listen to whatever they happened to have on any moment, but never paying particularly close attention.
So when I got that Walkman I decided to start tuning into local radio. And like any 11-year old boy, I clicked right over to the AM dial to hear WFAN sports talk radio. After a while I noticed there was also this FM band, and so in about January of 1989 I started listening to New York’s big pop stations: WPLJ, Hot 97, and Z-100.
And that’s when I heard her for the first time. Yes, I was Straight Up a Paul Abdul fan almost immediately. Along with Tone Loc, Bobby Brown, and whoever else caught my fancy at any given time.
It wasn’t long before I discovered America’s Top 40 with Shadow Stevens, running down the Billboard charts each week. Oddly, Casey Kasem had his own Top 40 show at the same time, and to this day I have no idea where his chart came from. Nonetheless, sometime in the winter of 1989, my musical curiosity intersected perfectly with my obsession with lists and charts. For years I would make sure I was home to catch both countdowns, and over time I even began my own “Top Ten” with weekly countdowns jotted for posterity. And if you don’t believe me just ask my wife, who has come across my journals littered with my weekly top tens and fifteens - and of course the annual Top 100 list.
The final decade of the 1980’s would thus be my entree into musical nerdery. And if you want a taste of it - well, here’s my public YouTube Music playlist from 1989.
So for four or five years I was listening to the radio, trying to record songs from the radio onto cassette, and building up a mighty decent playlist in doing so. I was also building up a musical library. My first cassette was Prince’s Batman Soundtrack. Yes, I listened to this song every day for about three months. That Christmas my library expanded with Billy Joel’s Stormfront, Fine Young Cannibals The Raw and the Cooked, and, ummm, some other album. Oh, yeah, New Kids on the Block’s Hangin’ Tough.
Within a year we added cable, so now I finally had access to MTV. And by the end of 1990 I had a CD player. So now I was fully integrated with access to Billy Joel, MC Hammer, Paula Abdul, George Michael, Guns N’ Roses and Aerosmith.
Ah yes, about those latter two. These were hard rock bands. Not metal. Paul Zummo was no metalhead, and he would never start listening to heavy metal. No, just hard rock for me.
Then one July 4 weekend - probably in 1992 - one of the local classic rock stations had their Firecracker 500 countdown.
Were you aware that I like lists? Well, I couldn’t avoid 500 song playlist, and so I listened to . . . most of it. I’m pretty sure Stairway was first - it usually was back in those days. I’m also sure Freebird and Satisfaction were up there as well. All I know was my pop listening was being crowded out by the two rock stations - K-Rock (which also had Stern) and WNEW, soon to be followed by a third: Q-104. Add to that the sports talk radio and my burgeoning appreciation for political talk radio, and well, there wasn’t a lot of time for pop music.
Which is funny, because the early 90’s were not a bad time for pop. There was still a nice combo of styles on the charts: Whitney, Poison, Guns’ N Roses (both totally not metal), Motley Crue, Mariah Carey, and the developing Seattle/grunge groups, which sometimes made its way onto the pop stations. Sure, there was schlock and oh man did I really listen to this - why? What was wrong with our society? How did this make the top ten? This couldn’t possibly get worse OH NO WHY?
Okay. Okay. It’s safe again - OH PLEASE MAKE IT STOP!
Ummm, where was I? Oh, that’s right. While I was actually expanding my musical taste I was also setting the stage to contract a bit. And if there’s a moment where that process began, it was when this video started being placed in heavy rotation.
I was already a little familiar with Metallica. I had seen One on MTV before I even had MTV, and I loved it. It was the only heavy metal song I allowed myself to listen to. But Enter Sandman didn’t grab me, at least not right away. But after about two weeks of constant airplay, I realized - this wasn’t bad.
Then The Unforgiven came out. And I was once again nonplussed - for about two weeks, until I once again acquiesced to the constant bombardment.
Rinse repeat with Nothing Else Matters and Wherever I May Roam. Finally, by the time Sad But True was released, I had abandoned all pretense.
But I still wouldn’t listen to heavy metal. Nope not me.
But I really liked that song One, and I didn’t have a good audio copy of it, so I had to get the album it was on. And my friends said Master of Puppets was pretty dope, so I had to get that as well. And wouldn’t you know, my 17th birthday is right around the corner, and there’s only two more albums to get.
But I wasn’t going to go any further. No, heavy metal was not for me. All I had to see was this album cover and I knew I’d never get into some satanic band like Slayer.
But then I heard this song, and the rest of the album, and the rest of their albums, and well, let’s just say when I started college in the Fall of 1995 I was wearing pretty only black clothing, including a very nice Slayer tee-shirt.
At this point can I really listen to No Diggity after hearing Chemical Warfare?
Actually, I kinda can. And I did. I never was one to completely dismiss one genre because I generally preferred another. But I was also no longer listening to American Top 40 on a regular basis, nor really any pop station for that matter. Before I left New York, I had basically stopped listening to any of the stations I mentioned earlier, and then in Atlanta it was some combination of sports radio, whatever station had Rush (not the band), and the rock stations. I was of course familiar with the bigger songs which got lots of airplay, but I was no longer listening around the clock to new music.
Unless of course it was Radiohead. There’s really nothing to brighten the day of a young, lonely college freshman shelving books in the library quite like The Bends. But they were the next logical step in my musical revolution.
For about 20 years I had a pretty firm rock preference. On top of the groups I just mentioned, Pink Floyd, Zeppelin, Tool, and U2 would become the regular groups on my cassette and CD players.
A couple of developments in the past decade have helped to re-broaden my horizons. Sirius-XM has helped introduce me to some more modern metal and rock acts. And of course the availability of streaming platforms now gives us all access to pretty much anything we want at any given time. I was no longer restricted in my musical library to the things frugal old me wanted to buy.
I should also note the Political Beats podcast as a huge influence. Not only has this podcast helped introduce me to groups I had either never heard of or at least hadn’t given much thought to, but it has forced me to dive deeper into the catalogs of a number of groups I already thought I knew pretty well. Five years ago I don’t think I had ever heard a Peter Gabriel-sung Genesis song - now they are near the top of my favorite groups. And who knew I would ever listen to a three hour podcast about Joe Jackson - the musician, not the shoeless baseball player?
So while I may now be an old fogy like my dad, I haven’t completely gone to the other side, to the point where I will willingly listen to Taylor Swift.
Average as she is.