My history: Music

Everybody likes music, right? Well, I never used to. Not growing up. I think it may have to do with the fact that my parents did their best to keep me away from any contemporary music as a child. The only thing I was ever allowed to listen to was talk radio and the oldies station. And honestly, I didn't have much of a problem with this. I heard other kids at school talking about the latest rap song or dance song and knew I didn't want to be like them.

But two things happened to me in the eighth grade that changed things. First, I saw the movie Highlander, and subsequently started watching the syndicated Highlander TV show. Second, I saw the movie Wayne's World. What do these two things have in common? The answer is Queen. My parents had recently bought a new stereo with a CD player, our first one, and I begged them to let me buy a Queen CD. And so my dad took me to the music store and I bought my first album, Queen's A Kind of Magic, featuring the song Princes of the Universe, the theme to Highlander.

This had my curiosity piqued, but I wasn't ready to dive into the ocean of rock music just yet. The next little push I got came from being left alone at home. With both my parents working after school, and my younger siblings being at our cousin's house, I had the place to myself for an hour or so in the afternoons, and so I could check out some music videos on TV. It just so happened that Green Jelly's Three Little Pigs video was hot right then. I thought it was pretty funny, and also dug the music. I showed it to my parents, and fortunately it was cutesy enough to get them to agree to letting me buy the Green Jelly album.

Now, I can't say in all honesty that it was Green Jelly's music that actually pushed me over the edge. What it actually was that did it was seeing that, upon bringing the Green Jelly album to school on the last day of eighth grade and listening to it in class, this kind of music could open some doors for me. All the "cool", hip hop loving kids, the jocks and popular people, looked at me with distaste, which was cool because I hated them anyway. And suddenly there were all these other kids, which I had never really talked to before, who were into a lot of the same kinds of things I were, who wanted to hang out and listen to rock music! This is what tipped the scale and got me to dive headfirst into rock music.

Since then my love of rock and metal has grown without stopping. I discovered some of my all-time favorite bands soon thereafter, Aerosmith, Metallica, and Nirvana (only just before Kurt died). I developed a deep appreciation of the early days of rock, from Chuck Berry and Elvis up through the Woodstock era, and learned how wide the rock umbrella stretched, encompassing everything from The Cranberries to Cannibal Corpse. And I happily give all of it a chance, even to this day. When it comes down to it though my favorite genres are straight up rock like Aerosmith and Kiss, thrash metal like Metallica, and power metal like Blind Guardian and Edguy.

I've been to a number of concerts in my time, seeing well over 100 different acts live. I keep a database of who I see, just like I catalog my video game and comic book collections. My love of music has developed to the point where I now see music as the highest form of art, and seeing live music is almost the same to me as other people see going to church.

Oh, and I might as well add that I do listen to some other things besides rock/metal. I enjoy the occasional bit of classical music (if Beethoven and Bach had lived today, they'd be metalheads, guarantee it!), especially at night. And then there's my guilty pleasure, J-pop. I was actually listening to Japanese pop the entire time I was writing this post. ^_^;