Do the Bump - the Reminiscence Bump
March 30, 2018 9:31 AM   Subscribe

Why the music we loved as teenagers stays with us for life. Neuropsychologist Dr Catherine Loveday asked her friends for their ten favourite tunes and why they mattered. Unsurprisingly, everyone - including adventurous listeners - included music from their teenage years. She asked herself how this happens, and has teamed up with BBC Radio 3 to conduct an experiment to find out if the phenomenon occurs with classical music too.
posted by Devonian (90 comments total) 34 users marked this as a favorite
 
This scenario rings hollow for me, since I really just don't enjoy overly familiar music. If I've heard it so many times I can just hear it in my head, then it's like I can't actually hear it any more. It just fades into the background. I mean yes, I know all those songs, but I can't include any of them as my favourites as I've listened to them too many times to get any enjoyment out of them any longer. I actually have to be really careful how many times I listen to new favourites lest they become worn out too quickly and I can't enjoy them any longer.

Sometimes I really hate my brain. Why can't I just enjoy Ayumi Hamasaki's Fairyland forever? But it too will fade into obscurity like everything by Tesla, the Brandenburg Concertos, Al Stewart's big albums...
posted by seanmpuckett at 9:37 AM on March 30, 2018 [16 favorites]


Interesting, seanmpuckett, I may be the exact opposite. I don't really get a song until I've listened to it half a dozen times. This was true as a teenager, and it's true now. I basically listen to like 500 songs tops over and over again. For a while Pandora helped me discover new stuff, then I added all the new stuff I got from Pandora to a Spotify playlist and listen to that a ton.
posted by peacheater at 9:42 AM on March 30, 2018 [9 favorites]


There's also something to be said of being well and properly ashamed of the trash you listened to when you were a teen because it was the 90s and dear lord popular music of that era features a lot to be ashamed of.
posted by Ferreous at 9:43 AM on March 30, 2018 [10 favorites]


Or maybe it's just empirically true that Electriclarryland represents the pinnacle of both The Butthole Surfers' oeuvre and the last 500 years of music.
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 9:51 AM on March 30, 2018 [45 favorites]


Your favorite band still sucks, though.
posted by slater at 9:56 AM on March 30, 2018 [14 favorites]


Or maybe it's just empirically true that Electriclarryland represents the pinnacle of both The Butthole Surfers' oeuvre and the last 500 years of music.
Nope.
Moving to Florida, Something, Gary Floyd, Mexican Caravan are all the best tunes and Independent Worm Saloon is the best overall album.


Howeva! I was at a bachelor party with friends a few weeks ago and the Soundgarden/Pearl Jam album by Temple of the Dog was in heavy rotation, and it only had one or two worthwhile songs then, much less now, so I'm just saying based on anecdotal evidence that this is totally true for large percentages of the population.
posted by The_Vegetables at 9:57 AM on March 30, 2018 [4 favorites]


I discovered my favorite music after I was a teenager, mostly, because a lot of pop music was denied me due to a fundamentalist Christian upbringing. Oddly, as absolutely fantastic as a lot of black gospel was in the 70s/80s, there is nary a Crouch, or Clark Sister or Hawkins (nope, neither Walter, Edwin, or even Tremaine) on the Faves list.

That said, R.E.M.'s Can't Get There From Here is definitely one of my faves, and partially because I first heard it/saw the video while sneaking over to a pal's to watch MTV, and it must have been the "Indie College Weirdo Rock Hour". And that probably ties in to the reason: I felt very strongly that this was my music. Mine. As we try to individuate ourselves at this point in our lives, all our choices take on oversized importance.
posted by droplet at 10:00 AM on March 30, 2018 [10 favorites]


I'm with Seanmpuckett.... I still like the cure and joy division and black flag and all that, but I don't listen to it any more. Everything I listen to was made in the last 10 years or so, and it's mostly hip hop/rap, which I didn't listen to at all in the 80s and 90s. I think I tend to listen to whatever I think is innovative at the time, which right now is rap imo. I'm a 48 year old guy.
posted by Huck500 at 10:00 AM on March 30, 2018 [9 favorites]


I couldn't find it on initial search, but I remember a This American Life episode several years ago on this same subject. Same conclusion, that we imprint on the music we listen to from ages 14-21 or something like that. Its subject was a professor who was annoyed by an intern who listened to a different genre of music every day in the office, while he played the same Bob Marley CD over and over. It then went into the subject of radio station programming, claiming that commercial stations aim at a demographic and age along with them with that idea in mind, what was popular when they were teens.
posted by sapere aude at 10:01 AM on March 30, 2018 [4 favorites]


It was the 1980s, and I pretty much only listened to organ music and opera, such was my dislike for the music of that time. I don't listen to much organ music or opera these days though.

I'm in between not liking something until I've heard it a dozen times or so, and not liking it if I've heard it hundreds of times. Which means that typically I only listen to stuff from the last couple of years. I have a loft full of boxes of CDs I collected over 20 years or so that I've no desire ever to open.
posted by pipeski at 10:02 AM on March 30, 2018 [1 favorite]


But then again, if this is true, then why are the popular albums of the day so featured in used CD returns and why does like 50% of the population say "the music I used to listen to is so embarassing!".

And I have theories! The people who are embarrassed by their past musical tastes don't really like music that much, and see it as more akin to fashion - something to be worn and discarded, which is also a big percentage of the population.

So both are simultaneously true. One big group holds on to music as a youthful cultural marker and one big group discards for the latest fad. The rest are in the much smaller middle. Able to enjoy music from their youth but also discover new music and add it to their personal 'best list'.
posted by The_Vegetables at 10:03 AM on March 30, 2018 [10 favorites]


So interesting: not just people like different music but how people differently like music. A decade ago I ripped all of my hundreds of CDs that I was not listening to onto MP3s and then continued to never listen to them, and it was only just last year that I gave all the CDs to a choir for their big charity media sale. (We also gave them a minivan literally full of books.) These days it's mostly stumbling around in Apple Music, listing to random stuff and if I hear something I like I'll create a stream based on it.
posted by seanmpuckett at 10:12 AM on March 30, 2018


Who has time to listen to new music? There are still novelty artists from the 1930s I've never even heard of!
posted by Faint of Butt at 10:12 AM on March 30, 2018 [17 favorites]


I agree that it comes down to different ways of liking music - I still like the music I started listening to in my early teen years, and wouldn't for a minute say it's embarrassing. On the other hand, I don't really listen to much of it at all, these days, since most of my listening time is spent either seeking out or revisiting recent stuff.

If you're keeping up with new releases in any kind of dedicated way, there's always more amazing, new music out there, and it's no fun to miss out on that.
posted by sagc at 10:18 AM on March 30, 2018 [5 favorites]


I remember years ago reading an interview with Kyle MacLachlan where it came up that he was a big Jethro Tull. "What can I say? You never really get over the stuff you loved when you were fifteen."

To which I say, yeah, more or less. Fifteen's probably the last of your pre-sophistication years. You love what you love, you're incapable of really grasping how anybody could let any other factor get in the way. At least, that's how it was for me. I've been up and down and across the universe any number of times with my musical loves and likes and preferences and biases ... but one thing I keep coming back to is the stuff* that filled me up when I was 13-14-15-16.

* the exception being those songs/albums/artists to which I've been overexposed to the point of violent allergy. Dark Side of the Moon and Stairway to Heaven come quickly to mind.
posted by philip-random at 10:19 AM on March 30, 2018 [3 favorites]


And I should say that I agree with Faint of Butt - if you're looking for stuff that's new to you, then your teenage tastes can start to feel pretty limiting.
posted by sagc at 10:19 AM on March 30, 2018 [2 favorites]


...why does like 50% of the population say "the music I used to listen to is so embarassing!".

It was the 1980s, and I listened to New Kids on the Block, Duran Duran, Wham!/George Michael, Madonna, The Go-Gos, Tiffany, Debbie Gibson, and you get the point.

People who have more fucks to give than I do would either not post their teenage music list at all or post it with the "so embarrassing!" disclaimer.
posted by kimberussell at 10:21 AM on March 30, 2018 [5 favorites]


This is why I have enjoyed continually upgrading my audio system, the old music keeps sounding new.
posted by StickyCarpet at 10:21 AM on March 30, 2018 [1 favorite]


Anecdatum: Not a close follower of pop music, lifelong fan of orchestral music...

While I do discover and enjoy new pieces in my adulthood, it is the pieces I loved as a teenager that remain fully patterned in my memory. New discoveries aren’t things I can play back mentally measure for measure, and I doubt I ever could without a focused memorization effort.

It’s not simply a matter of repetition, because some new discoveries I listen to over and over, while some lodged in my memory since adolescence were only heard a handful of times.
posted by Construction Concern at 10:24 AM on March 30, 2018 [2 favorites]


This all seems like as good a reason as any to pin on my current thought to queue up One Night in Bangkok by Murray Head for another listen.
posted by meinvt at 10:24 AM on March 30, 2018 [8 favorites]


There's also something to be said of being well and properly ashamed of the trash you listened to when you were a teen because it was the 90s and dear lord popular music of that era features a lot to be ashamed of.

PARKLIFE
posted by betweenthebars at 10:31 AM on March 30, 2018 [20 favorites]


I've noticed that I get much more into my teenage music when I'm a few drinks in, including stuff that I wouldn't particularly listen to otherwise. That could just be maudlin drunken nostalgia, though, although why that's a thing is also interesting. Other times I go much deeper into the things I was listening to back then is when I've got new speakers or headphones and am listening with much more analytical concentration. There's usually some new details, and it is inherently interesting listening to something you used to know very well but haven't relistened to for ages.

I'm one of those people who loves new music that doesn't fall into existing genres or is in some other way audibly innovative. The time I started forming those tastes - or discovering them - coincided with cheap synthesisers mixing it up with the arse end of punk, which fitted the bill admirably, and of course that dragged me backwards to krautrock, early Eno et al, and it was chocks away. There's a lot of good old obscure music once you learn how to track its spoor, and always good new music if you put the work in. There has never been a fallow period, only those times when I've been too lazy or distracted to go looking.

In the same way that half the world doesn't understand the pleasures of the other, I just don't know what it would be like to not have that drive, to take or leave music, or see it as pleasant aural wallpaper or a simple narcotic. Half my friends know better than to leave me alone near Spotify at a party.
posted by Devonian at 10:34 AM on March 30, 2018


The large majority of the music I listen to is Japanese, one of my previous AskMes being a case in point*. My current working theory is that it's because my tastes were heavily influenced by anime and video game music growing up. I am able to tell pretty reliably when a melody is written by a Japanese composer, so there may be something to this theory.

*In case you're wondering, my solution to the problem was that I stopped caring.
posted by J.K. Seazer at 10:34 AM on March 30, 2018


This mostly isn’t true for me - I would have a hard time putting down just 10 “favorite” songs (but there are so many!) and I don’t really like a huge chunk of the music I did in my teens. Most would probably be in the last couple years. But I did have two interesting observations: the first, after the Queensryche post the other day, I listened to a couple old albums. I hadn’t in years; hell I hadn’t thought of them in years, and even though I don’t think I like that style of music, my brain latched on to it and I kept listening. My first reaction was to turn it off, but nostalgia got the best of me. Repeatedly I went to turn it off, because operatic heavy metal just is not my jam any more. But that kept being overruled by the part of me that wanted to remember.

Point two, I would probably pick a number of songs from the last few years. And that is largely due to having a hugely turmultuous, painful couple of years and a lot of growing and changing. All the while, falling in love with music again; after a period of 4 or 5 years with virtually no music. The part of the article where they talk about music being linked with emotional times absolutely rings true to me.

I also don’t have a neurotypical brain, I have adhd, which might explain both my inability to narrow down favorites, and just generally how I catalog favorite things as new. I do have a lifelong history of shifting favorites in most everything. Not that I haven’t imprinted in things from my past, but I have noticed at least so far in my early 40s, the Next Best Thing still excites me. I can’t even pick a favorite color! Right now it’s orange. Mostly. Except clothing. But that will change too. I remember the first time I was asked my favorite color having to decide what it was (because I thought I had to because everyone else had one.)
posted by [insert clever name here] at 10:37 AM on March 30, 2018


Seanmpuckett, I’m actually the same. And not just with music but also movies, tv, games, etc. I have to wait long enough to ‘forget’ something to be able to go back to it, but often by that time I’ve changed too much to enjoy it in the same way.

I can still think to the time when I *was* into an artist and say “oh yeah, I love Vanessa Mae, Green Day, Gackt, etc” but haven’t actually listened to their stuff in over a decade.

I wonder if it’s related to how, as a child, I never watched the same video over and over the way (apparently) most children do.
posted by picklenickle at 10:39 AM on March 30, 2018


Much like droplet said, pop music was banned by my conservative Christian parents in the mid-80s, so I still have a deep fondness for stuff from that era. Especially alternative and synth-y stuff and that didn't get played on our small-town southern radio. Even as recently as last night, I explored the new TV provider I just switched to and was THRILLED to find a Classic Alternative music channel. That stuff is still fresh and new to me in many ways!
posted by jhope71 at 10:40 AM on March 30, 2018


I was a weird kid. I listened to classical, jazz and New Age stuff on purpose in the 80s, and rock and pop were more secondhand exposure.

I will say that 80s pop is better than any pop since, and almost anything after about 1993 is just annoying. But I favor industrial, dark ambient, abstract electronica, and the like.
posted by Foosnark at 10:41 AM on March 30, 2018 [1 favorite]


I don't think that finding your teenage tastes embarrassing is at all mutually exclusive with still enjoying some of those things. Nostalgia doesn't necessarily come with a critical eye, and the concept of "guilty pleasure" is nothing if not well known.
posted by inconstant at 10:44 AM on March 30, 2018


I still enjoy 80s era metal and I'm not at all ashamed of it. In the last 6 months or so I've attended concerts by Tom Keifer (Cinderella lead singer), Tesla, and Anthrax.
posted by COD at 10:51 AM on March 30, 2018 [2 favorites]


Foosnark we are music twins. Also, getting older I've come to realize that the 1980s was a very good time for jazz. All sorts of experimental stuff going on, and it was easy to find successful local groups that could put out some awesome music.

I still hardly ever listen to rock, even though I enjoy it – it's nice to have it come on as a surprise.
posted by fraula at 10:54 AM on March 30, 2018 [1 favorite]


I have noticed one interesting phenomenon- songs of my youth that I didn’t like, but had a lot to exposure to, I now totally dig for the most part. This includes songs I hated with a passion. Maybe some exceptions and the enjoyment isn’t the same as loved music from my youth. But it there. Anyone else?
posted by [insert clever name here] at 10:58 AM on March 30, 2018 [7 favorites]


Ugh. You guys listen to them now? They've clearly sold out.
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 11:04 AM on March 30, 2018 [2 favorites]


music is an audio narrative that flows around and lives within us.

I think it's important to our continual growth and development to challenge the solidification of our nostalgia that re-treads those same synaptic pathways back to when we were more "open" and music just hit us so easily. I think when we challenge those neurological pathways in our heads, fight the nostalgia, we are fighting to stay in a growth and adaptability mode which keeps us open to further inspiration and growth and learning and passions, etc.

So yeah, music as a tool to fight entropy or something.
posted by Annika Cicada at 11:04 AM on March 30, 2018 [2 favorites]


While my musical tastes are eclectic, rock and roll from the 70s is my first love. OTOH the original Rollerball movie was released in 1975. I bought the soundtrack purely for Toccatta and Fugue in D Minor by Bach. Which led to a lifelong love of Bach in particular and classical music in general.
posted by Splunge at 11:09 AM on March 30, 2018 [1 favorite]


[insert clever name here] yeah, I get this. Maybe not totally dig, but enjoy. There's still a few songs I can't stand (I'm just never going to like Shine by Collective Soul) but mostly I guess it's just because it reminds me of the time they came out. Case in point, I was never an R&B fan in the 90's, but now have an album of it which is fun to listen to occasionally.
There's a thing going around my friends on Facebook asking people to post 10 albums that had an impact, and most people are posting stuff from high school/uni days or that they grew up with. Thinking about what albums I'd post, I think the only one that was released in the last decade would be an Arctic Monkeys album. Most would be what I listened to in high school, particularly from when my taste changed from pop to rock/grunge.
posted by Kris10_b at 11:14 AM on March 30, 2018 [2 favorites]


You survived that time. That's the driving force of nostalgia. The music functions as a soundtrack. Whatever may happen from here on out, that time is a wrap; it may have involved a lot of loss and suffering, but it's free from the influence of random future events, and it's rich in remembered sensations and impressions. The memories may evolve with the passage of time, but what actually happened is pretty much written in stone all these years later.

At least that's always how I've made sense of these things. I might be overlooking something, though.
posted by metagnathous at 11:14 AM on March 30, 2018 [3 favorites]


I would also suggest that the above applies just as much to those things that you actively disliked at the time as to those that you loved. Can't really have one without the other, dark/light and all that jazz.
posted by metagnathous at 11:18 AM on March 30, 2018


why does like 50% of the population say "the music I used to listen to is so embarassing!"

Because stuff that appealed to you when you were a hormone-ridden, emotionally addled, immature teenager is likely to seem naive and simplistic, overly direct and straightforward, and crassly manipulative of emotion when you've actually grown up? And because, at the time, you were adult enough to insist on its timeless importance and have Deep Important Conversations with people about it in a way that you *didn't* do about Raffi songs when you were 4?
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 11:20 AM on March 30, 2018 [1 favorite]


This is definitely true for me. If you asked for my favorite songs, a big chunk of them would be from the punk and new wave that came out when I was 14 to 20 or so.
posted by octothorpe at 11:21 AM on March 30, 2018


I think the age range should be stretched out to the early 30s, but I once I hit 40, very very little new music appealed to me at all.

Theory, as we get older, deafness starts to creep in, so oldies are more appealing, because our memories can fill in the musical notes we can no longer hear.
posted by Beholder at 11:23 AM on March 30, 2018 [2 favorites]


Top 10, in chronological order:

James Taylor - Slap Leather (1991)
Johnny Clegg & Savuka - These Days (1993)
Orbital - You Lot (2004)
Harvey Danger - What You Live By (2005)
Burial - Forgive (2006)
Royksopp - Vision One (2009)
Conjure One - Like Ice (2010)
Metric - Artificial Nocturne (2012)
Ramona Falls - Sqworm (2012)
EL VY - Paul Is Alive (2015)

Median: Mid 2007

Evidently, my teenage years took place in my late 20s.
posted by belarius at 11:27 AM on March 30, 2018 [3 favorites]


As a teenager, I tended to actively avoid pop music as much as I could. None of it appealed to me. I gravitated, instead, first to the 70s classic rock my Dad raised me on, and then later towards 80s Post-Punk, New Wave and Synthpop. As a 34-year-old adult, I've largely ditched the 70s Classic Rock stuff, but I've dug deeper into the 80s stuff, as well as a lot of newer bands that work in that same style. There was a _very_ brief period around 2013 where there was some stuff in the pop charts that I would hear in stores and on the radio that I liked, but it came and went in a blip.
posted by SansPoint at 11:36 AM on March 30, 2018


Note that the article says the imprinting can happen between ages 10 and 30, so it's not just your teen years. I've always been a soundtrack junky and I still am, but I find a lot of more recent soundtracks largely less interesting than, say, golden-age John Williams, so clearly my tastes were formed around Star Wars and Indiana Jones. I still like to listen to lots of new music and have discovered a bunch of stuff in the last ten years; likewise, there are some things from when I was a kid/teen that I do think are terrible now, like Spyro Gyra. I saw them in concert, even. Now I cringe. Oh well.
posted by dellsolace at 11:41 AM on March 30, 2018 [2 favorites]


Speaking of current stuff, Recite Remorse by waxahatchie just floors my ass so hard. So. Hard. Like, in the same way hearing pictures of you, age of consent, or pretty much the entire early to mid 90’s yo la tengo catalog did to me.

I love when a new song stops me in my tracks and drops me off the ledge into emotional musical oblivion, leaving me gasping afterwards trying to make sense of the world suddenly made brand new again.
posted by Annika Cicada at 11:44 AM on March 30, 2018 [2 favorites]


I haven't found the music I liked in my teens to have a particularly strong hold on my likes or current playlists.

The thing that really pissed me off as a teen was that music, for almost everyone I knew, was far more about identity, and a means to project that identity. Fuck that shit. Perhaps one reason some people get imprinted their era. It's connected with who or how they view themselves.
posted by 2N2222 at 11:48 AM on March 30, 2018 [5 favorites]


What strikes me as weird is that they limit this effect to music. Seems like it would apply to all forms of popular culture—movies, literature, comics, magazines. "The golden age of science fiction is twelve." Or at least starts at twelve, along with all those other golden ages.
posted by Flexagon at 11:52 AM on March 30, 2018 [2 favorites]


I've always liked early, baroque and classical orchestral music in about that order, and still do, but that includes new performances or recordings of stuff I've loved for decades. I like reworkings of pop songs too -- I expect any good tune to have its time in a [sonata|dance set|soundtrack|Youtube study mixlist]. It takes hundreds of years of leafmold and dead grass to build good soil.

metagnathous' take is also true for me -- sometimes listening to a pop song I hated in youth, e.g. one played on the school bus, I get a huge euphoric hit of anti-nostalgia: I survived that, I am off that bus, I never have to get stuck in a room with those people again, and I am no longer fifteen.
posted by clew at 11:54 AM on March 30, 2018 [4 favorites]


I think my problem is, one of my favorite genres of music, rockabilly, pretty much lived and died around that time.
posted by Samizdata at 11:54 AM on March 30, 2018


I don't listen anymore to the music I used to listen to, but I'll be damned if I wasn't thrilled to pieces when I was driving back from the mountains a month ago and a Siouxsie Sioux/Sisters of Mercy (not This Corrosion!)/Nick Cave set was played on the radio. You bet I listened to it.
posted by small_ruminant at 11:55 AM on March 30, 2018 [4 favorites]


I was just listening to the sisters of Mercy last night. I definitely don't go back to cradle of filth, though...

I still really love finding new bands to follow. I went to four shows in three days for SF the noisepop festival last month; my coworkers looked at me like I was crazy... (I've now got a great story about losing my cell phone in the mosh pit at the parquet courts show, though.)
posted by kaibutsu at 11:59 AM on March 30, 2018 [2 favorites]


a professor who was annoyed by an intern who listened to a different genre of music every day in the office, while he played the same Bob Marley CD over and over.

That would be Robert Sapolsky. "Open Season," from The New Yorker: "But the writer remains dispirited by the impoverishment that comes with this closing of the mind to novelty. If there’s a rich, vibrant world out there, he figures it’s worth putting up a bit of a fight, even it means forgoing Bob Marley’s greatest hits every now and then."
posted by MonkeyToes at 12:11 PM on March 30, 2018 [2 favorites]


Let's see, I turned 14 in 1957, so the "formative" stuff was what's now called "classic rock." And I still love to listen to it and can sing along, remembering all the words. But it was more about the dancing to me, which was innovative and always evolving. Like most of you, I don't search it out but am always happy to hear it, which is why my Pandora list has a station titled "Little Richard." I'm now much more interested in worldbeat music and Ry Cooder style. It all brings back some kind of memories, mostly good. When young, we're not stuffed with memories and lots of things are new to us and make deeper impressions. Earlier today, my Pandora shuffle tossed up Jackie Wilson and a smile crept across my face; I even got up and essayed a few dance steps (carefully).
posted by MovableBookLady at 12:25 PM on March 30, 2018 [1 favorite]


Insisting on novelty is also a good strategy for closing the mind. "Yeah, that was a great statement of a fundamental problem, I can't resolve what I want to be true with what it tells me in a way I have to see as true, but... whoa! That was last year! Give me something new!" That happens too.
posted by clew at 12:27 PM on March 30, 2018 [1 favorite]


I find that I still like the music from when I was a teenager quite a bit, but it doesn't sound the same-- Motown's arrangements seem very simple, though still excellent, and the Rolling Stones sound astonishingly sweet compared to their reputation.

I don't have a lot of memories associated with the music, I think it's just that people's brains are apt to get imprinted at that age range.

And as for music that I first heard a little later, I was really enjoying some Jarre recently.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 12:31 PM on March 30, 2018


Huh, I spent most of my teenage years in the eighties listening to classical music and although I still love it I've somewhat drifted away from it to listen to more EDM, jazz, surf, ska, bluegrass, and just about everything but thrash metal, slow jazz, Christian and country.
posted by BrotherCaine at 12:32 PM on March 30, 2018


I didn't listen to classical at all until my late twenties, but that's most of what I choose now, and it's what's playing in my head when I stop and pay attention.

But I'm very impatient with claims that classical is somehow superior to other forms, and I find personally that jazz is most complex, and makes the greatest intellectual demands if I really want to understand it.
posted by jamjam at 12:38 PM on March 30, 2018


I don't think that finding your teenage tastes embarrassing is at all mutually exclusive with still enjoying some of those things.

Why would anyone find any of their music tastes embarassing? If you like it, you like it. Screw what anyone else might think.
posted by walrus at 12:45 PM on March 30, 2018 [4 favorites]


I thank the faculty bandmaster of my High School band for rescuing me from my (not religious, just conservative) parents' musical control and the two 'Middle of the Road' radio stations they listened to. He was the youngest bandmaster of any High School in L.A. and somehow acquired brass band arrangements of rock classics... I heard "In A Gadda Da Vita" from my school band before I heard the original. Then, as I noted in the Jethro Tull thread, I had an Ian Anderson-loving flutist bandmate who introduced me to Progressive Rock.

Later, after my 'Radio Career' had deteriorated to selling jokes to disc jockeys, one of them got me an "in" with early '80s KROQ, which was evolving away from Rodney Bingenheimer's 'free-form punk' to 'pioneering' a New Wave/Brit Pop/Techno/Modern Demento format that late-20s-aged me loved and stuck with long after KROQ re-evolved to 90s Alternative. I will never deny my love for Devo, the B-52s, Talking Heads and, yes, Men at Work.

But then, I was just reminded of my Amazon Music 'saved albums' collection by the announcement that they're going to pull the plug on their auto-online-storage... let's see... 10,000 Maniacs, Anita Baker, Blue Oyster Cult, Blood Sweat & Tears, Boz Scaggs, Bruce Springsteen, Crosby Stills & Nash (without Young), Depeche Mode, Dire Straits, Earth Wind & Fire, Elvis Costello, George Carlin, Gerry Rafferty, Joan Armatrading, Perrey/Kingsley, Prince, R.E.M., Radiohead, Ray Stevens, Supertramp, Swing Out Sister, Tears for Fears, Tracy Chapman, Weird Al Yankovic... and those are just the ones I have entire albums of. Trying to analyze me by my music choices is a good way to get me taken away, ha haa...
posted by oneswellfoop at 12:46 PM on March 30, 2018 [2 favorites]


how many musicians did they ask? - wouldn't this make my favorite songs of those i've written the ones i did as a teenager?

my favorite year in music is 1967, which really does fit the theory - but the music i put together is often more influenced by much later stuff that wasn't even thought of back then
posted by pyramid termite at 12:49 PM on March 30, 2018


It's an element of teenage years where you follow shit because it's what your peers listen to and you want to be part of an in group, or you just had shit taste and grew out of it.
posted by Ferreous at 12:50 PM on March 30, 2018


Dark was the Night, Cold was the Ground - Blind Willie Johnson
Stoned Soul Picnic - Laura Nyro
In My Life - The Beatles
So Tired of Being Alone - Al Green
I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You) - Aretha Franklin
European Son - The Velvet Underground
Mr. Tambourine Man - Bob Dylan
Like a Rolling Stone - Bob Dylan
Visions of Johanna - Bob Dylan
...and most of each album from which those came...
Tell It Like It Is - Aaron Neville
Omaha - Moby Grape
September In The Rain - Dinah Washington
Bertha Lee - Robert Petway

...These are a few of my favorite things

Among others from when I was nine to nineteen but not in Naples.
posted by y2karl at 12:55 PM on March 30, 2018


Plus all of Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys

And I still can listen to them all most all of the time.
Not so much the Dylan songs, to which I can listen now and then.

ps.

Dark was the Night, Cold Was the Ground I knew from seeing Pasolini's The Gospel According to St. Matthew

Bertha Lee I knew from the Folkways Country Blue lp
posted by y2karl at 1:03 PM on March 30, 2018


I think I'm mostly stuck between 2004 and 2014, when I was 22 and 32. It's not like I still don't try to find new music, but I'm no longer obsessively tracking blogs with regional scenes and whatnot.

I can attribute listening to less new music to two factors: the first was no longer being able to afford going to gigs, as keeping up with was performing at Primavera on the three editions I attended was the main driving force on the tail end of that period - a lot of the new stuff I picked up later on, like Charlift, Y//ST, DARKSIDE, Mas Ysa, Baxter Dury, Ghostigital, Eaux, Melody's Echo Chamber or METZ. You listen to one of them, then find similar bands, and then it's a deep deep rabbithole on last.fm. The second was starting to compose my own, around late 2014. I can multitask a lot of shit, but listening and making music is not that compatible. Although hammering on the keyboard or the guitar while listening to music has produced some interesting results here and there.

This of course brings an interesting point, that the music I compose is often more in tune with I heard on my teens and early 20s that what I did on that period, although it's likely this is more from a technical standpoint than a subconscious desire to bring back my days of downloading techno sets off Audiogalaxy or watching VIVA. It's that to compose techno/house/trance-y things, all I need is a laptop. If I wanted to do more indie pop things, I'd need at least a way to record guitar and voice properly. However, even if given the resources, what I'd do is closer to Eaux (dance-y electronic dreampop) or later Slowdive (sparse electronics shoegaze), both bands I picked up at different ends of that period.
posted by lmfsilva at 1:03 PM on March 30, 2018 [1 favorite]


I don't think this is an age thing as much as a TIME thing, in my 30's I spent several months recovering from a bad skiing injury, as a consequence I had the time to get into a bunch of new music. So I now find myself in the unusual situation where many of my all time favourite songs are things that mostly people 20 years younger than me are into.
posted by Lanark at 1:07 PM on March 30, 2018 [1 favorite]


I'm 36 and my tastes have continually evolved over my life. In high school I only liked pop-punk and early hardcore, in my 20s I got into goth, in my 30s it's been industrial and metal, and right now I'm particularly into sparse, early EBM, but who knows about a year from now?
posted by Pope Guilty at 1:23 PM on March 30, 2018 [1 favorite]


early EBM, but who knows about a year from now?

I guess that answer to that is "slowly spread the net"
posted by lmfsilva at 1:31 PM on March 30, 2018 [1 favorite]


I still get small pockets of obsession over new music (can’t seem to stop replaying Merchandise's Lonesome Sound on YouTube) but those moments are fewer and farther between. When that primal recognition hit, though...

Nineties college-age me would be appalled that I’ve gone back to listening to a lot of 80's pop music that he put aside, but that kid needed to chill out a long time ago.
posted by Eikonaut at 1:56 PM on March 30, 2018


However, even if given the resources, what I'd do is closer to Eaux (dance-y electronic dreampop) or later Slowdive (sparse electronics shoegaze), both bands I picked up at different ends of that period.

As a person who flew across the country to see slowdive and low play in Portland in 2014 at the crystal ballroom I think I would very much enjoy your music...
posted by Annika Cicada at 2:09 PM on March 30, 2018 [1 favorite]


neomu jjaritjarit momi tteollyeo
Gee Gee Gee Gee Gee

I'm 25, but I'm quite happy for the music of my age between 9 and 22. The privilege of high speed internet and regular computer access was the backbone for my music listening habits. It was heavily influenced by being savvy enough to use Kazaa/Limewire, being annoyed at Rhapsody's business model, then torrenting/IRC all of my J-pop faves (Utada Hikaru, you brilliant songwriter ILU) , and then the Youtube era being able to explode kpop. It's really not quite the same now, everything is so mainstream that even NCT 127's choreography video was used in an official Apple Music promo (but that's exciting in its own way, I don't have stares when I talk about kpop now). However, it was an exciting time when we all were just huddled in our forums, talking, trying, failing, then trying again in understanding ourselves in our growing adolescence. I'll still listen to all of it as I get older, I'm sure. A good bop is an undying thing.
posted by yueliang at 2:12 PM on March 30, 2018


I’ve had a couple of times lately where I’ve been in a Lyft (drunk) and the radio was playing “playlist of teen radio songs for people now in their 30s” and it suckered me right in. Whether or not I even cared for those songs at the time, they were always just around. I was like oh wow look at this new vulnerability I’ve discovered in myself.
posted by bleep at 2:17 PM on March 30, 2018


I am routinely upset to hear songs from 15-18 years ago on the oldies station. I like the songs well enough, but 'Closing Time' is not yet a golden oldie. For me, anything after 2000 will never be an oldie because that was my mid-twenties, man. I know I am officially old because I am always mixing up artists and don't even know the name of the newer songs that I do like until I can read them on my car radio.
posted by soelo at 2:45 PM on March 30, 2018 [4 favorites]


Regarding feeling old because music likes:

When my daughter called me crying because she realized part of the reason she is so knowledgeable about music is because she has rad parents and asked me if she could officially take over the DJ duties in our relationship and introduce me to music like I did for her was the moment I realized that fuck, I’m old. But when she rapidly took over the DJ duties and started taking me through the back roads of my 80’s punk scene (I didn’t really want to be the one to introduce her to GG Allin, she found that on her own.) we had a blast and I realized holy shit man, the kids are alright are so are we.
posted by Annika Cicada at 2:52 PM on March 30, 2018 [4 favorites]



The point of this article is not that your favourite songs are from when you were a teenager. It's that music you hear between the ages of 10-30 is embedded in your memory, because your memory is more efficient in that age range.

I should like to think that the songs I listed work across the generations for some, if not most, people in each cohort.
posted by y2karl at 4:00 PM on March 30, 2018


I started attending SF conventions at 16. A good portion of my late-teens early-twenties music favorites are filk.

My kids grew up with filk, anime and video game music, celtic rock, and whatever the Homestuck fandom has thrown onto YouTube recently. I don't know whether to apologize to them, or cheer for the fact that no advertising agency is ever going to be able to target them with music.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 4:22 PM on March 30, 2018


I like music Abba to ZZ Top and anything between.

Turn it up loud.
posted by bjgeiger at 7:05 PM on March 30, 2018


The fact that the entire, double-CD, Broadway (and in the case of the second, also the original French) recordings of Phantom of the Opera and Les Miserables are embedded permanently in my brain support this theory. Also a number of soundtracks, the Brandenburg concertos, Oliver! and a whack of 80s pop.

I may just have returned from watching a performance of Mozart’s Mass in C-minor which appealed in part because of the Amadeus soundtrack also embedded.

I sort of worry about what senile me will sing and hum.
posted by warriorqueen at 7:48 PM on March 30, 2018


To paraphrase Chris Rock - whatever music you were listening to when you started getting laid, you're going to love that music the rest of your life.
posted by perrouno at 8:32 PM on March 30, 2018 [1 favorite]


So glad that music was golden era hip hop.
posted by iamck at 9:04 PM on March 30, 2018


People joke about nostalgically swooning over music from their youth that they actually hated at the time. But I've been purposely revisiting music from my youth because I had all sorts of stupid and toxic ideas about music. Which music I liked was a tribal thing: it couldn't be too popular, or too girly, or too weird, or too black, or too disco. Basically nothing but Classic Rock and Jazz and Classical. (On top of that I had hangups about "secular" music: I remember being at a friend's house and hearing "Sympathy for the Devil" for the first time and with horror trying desperately but unsuccessfully not to like it.)

So there's all kinds of music I can go back to now that has both the familiarity of having heard it in my youth but that I can now discover was actually good.
posted by straight at 5:39 AM on March 31, 2018 [1 favorite]


People who have more fucks to give than I do would either not post their teenage music list at all or post it with the "so embarrassing!" disclaimer.

New Kids on the Block is an interesting one, though. Most people (ok, women) I know, went through a post-Jordan Knight on a pillowcase phase on thinking NKOTB were so deeply uncool and tragically embarrassing and now, in their 30s and 40s, the pendulum has swung back to fierce loyalty and a successful comeback. I don't remember people being as ashamed of say, Menudo or N*SYNC.
posted by Ruki at 7:33 AM on March 31, 2018


But then I totally neglected to make my actual point from the quoted text, which is that I also have no fucks to give when it comes to music, and I don't believe in music shaming. I don't have any guilty musical pleasures. When Sister Christian comes on, I'm going to make everyone in the car stop talking so I can rock out guilt free.
posted by Ruki at 7:37 AM on March 31, 2018 [1 favorite]


I remember how Chris Rock phrased this observation: "The music you loved when you first started getting laid is the music you're gonna love for the rest of your life."
posted by jonp72 at 8:37 AM on March 31, 2018


I listen to all music from all kinds? "top list" like what, top 10?

I *might* have a Cure song on there. Certainly squarepusher, aphex, autechre, boards of canada are all on there. But I mean i'll put Hendrix on there, too. I guess thats' "from my teenage years"

But Brick in the Wall sticks with me, and I first became aware of that in the early 80s when i was like 7.

Or hell - Summer by The Cars.
posted by symbioid at 10:45 AM on March 31, 2018


I'm as old as dirt, cutting my teeth and "first started getting laid" in the 70s. Because I am a music freak I've always been searching for the next hit, racing across styles and genres for decades. I try to go both forward and back. In my current stack of CDs in the living room there's a Charlie Parker compilation alongside the latest War on Drugs.

i did tabulate a "common core", about twenty acts that I return to on a quite regular basis. A lot of these were indeed ones that I had first discovered in my teens and twenties. I've discarded a lot of music I thought I was great when I was young, keeping a few guilty pleasures (Slade!). Some of these core artists I have followed deep into the rabbit hole, finding bootleg concerts, b-sides, etc. I trade with friends from my favorite music forum. I may be feeding a jones but hey, it's not as costly as some.

Long live the new discoveries and long live my common core.
posted by Ber at 10:46 AM on March 31, 2018


This is timely. I just went on a reminiscence bump binge last night, which I do maybe twice a year. There's a certain adolescent feeling that's anchored to a set of songs that I used to listen to. When I want to access the feelings again, I youtube them. The urge seems to hit when I'm feeling stretched thin from adulting, as that mindspace is free from obligation and responsibility, and free to feel intensely without needing to understand, all of which I'm nostalgic for ten years on. It's satiated once I listen to each song once or twice, since I don't have the patience or taste for the songs and their sentiment anymore. They're none of them my favourite songs though, and I don't have them on a playlist. Actually, my favourite songs, formative songs, reminiscence bump songs, and songs that are important to me don't neatly overlap on a venn diagram (same for books/films), so I can't relate there.

With so many different recordings of famous works available, will classical music fans still show preferences for their teenage favourites? Are their preferences still largely driven by their association with treasured memories? Or are they more likely to be guided by objective judgements about the music itself?

I had a think through my teen favourites, and it turns out that I do still prefer the same recordings. The weight of the memories and feelings attached to the recordings definitely make them more important to me, even if I might prefer the interpretation of other recordings now. However, I feel like they're trying to cast a 'your teenage preference is probably objectively worse than your preferences now' dynamic here, and I don't think it's that straightforward. Classical music recordings are generally played at such a level that each recording is of similar quality sentiment/complexity/maturity/sophistication/whatever, so one wouldn't definitely listen to a recording of lesser sophistication than if they were older, and the issue is mostly one of interpretive preference.

I kind of wonder how this maps to people who listen to a lot of different covers for the same song.

You don't need to have been a teenager in the 1960s to have strong musical memories of The Beatles

My tastes differ so much from my parents' that I never grokked their music, and their reminiscence bump music doesn't cascade to me. However, something about the music of the beatles and the carpenters does give me a nostalgic feeling almost like memories even though I've heard only snippets of their music before (not from my parents playing them).
posted by womb of things to be and tomb of things that were at 11:13 AM on March 31, 2018


I'm pretty sure the music that stays with you through middle age is the music that the cooler kids listened to but you didn't at the time though you now pretend you did.
posted by srboisvert at 1:39 PM on March 31, 2018


I still have a deep appreciation for Talking Heads and Ramones, which are the two bands that meant the most to me during high school. My taste in music has opened way up since then, but my teenage bands remain very dear to me.
posted by davebush at 1:52 PM on March 31, 2018 [1 favorite]


I’m with foosnark and fraula; I was a (weird) teenager in the 80s and hated all the popular stuff then; I would rather have been dragged over carpet tacks and dipped in iodine than listen to stuff like “I Ran.” My usual line is “I hated all the music in the 80s, and I don’t like it any better now.” I listened strictly to opera, lieder, and choral music. That’s it. And yeah, I still have an affinity for the works that were my favorites as a teenager, although when I was in my 20s, I started listening to The Clash and went on from there, so that most of what I listen to now, but by no means all, is pop/rock/indie/etc.
posted by holborne at 9:36 PM on March 31, 2018 [1 favorite]


It was the 1980s, and I listened to New Kids on the Block, Duran Duran, Wham!/George Michael, Madonna, The Go-Gos, Tiffany, Debbie Gibson, and you get the point.

All of which are seen as embarassing because *gasp* teenage girls listened to them and we as a culture have decided teenage girls are the worst. Objectively, the worst you could say about any of these is that they made inoffensive pop that got slightly too popular so you get earwormed by them too quickly. Hang tough.

I personally decided to stop worrying and own my tastes in music, even if critical opinion is dismissive of them. The same way i wouldn't shame others for their tastes. Far more interesting to see why people like something you don't.

Just this morning I was wondering whether neuroscience could justify my deep enjoyment of some old Counting Crows on the radio

No that's just because you're a terrible human being.
posted by MartinWisse at 4:19 AM on April 2, 2018


I got into progressive rock in my early teens, and that has been a mainstay of my musical enjoyment for decades. But I get bored of hearing the same artists, so I'm regularly learning to appreciate artists and genres that either left me cold or were not known to me when I was young.

Lately that means Harry Nilsson!
posted by Radiophonic Oddity at 6:39 AM on April 3, 2018


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