I'm not sure why I thought this was worthy of a blog entry, but it's one of those weird rabbit holes that my mind enjoys wandering down every so often. This blog entry is going to be a retrospective on my musical tastes, starting when I was a small child and coming right through to today. Well...uh...because I can, I guess. Plus, maybe it'll give you some insight into why I am the way I am. If nothing else, you can check out the band names that I'll be dropping and maybe find something that you enjoy among them.

For the first ten years or so of my life, I just listened to what my parents listened to. In fact, I still listen to most of these bands. On the drive to school, my mom always played her cassette tapes (oh, technology) of Boston, Kansas, REO Speedwagon, Van Halen, Aerosmith, and Bon Jovi, among others. As a side note, REO Speedwagon is something of a guilty pleasure; that group is sort of like that perfectly average-looking and slightly flaky girl in high school that you never admit to finding attractive in front of your friends, because you'll just get reamed for it.

Although she won't admit to it now, my mom (and my dad) were big fans of KISS and, before I was born, they went to see them in concert no less than EIGHT TIMES. Not only did they see them eight times, but most of those times were in the front few rows; there is a guitar pick around here somewhere that Ace Frehley threw into the crowd and my mother caught. Other rockers from this age that my mother no longer admits to ever having listened to (and yet, she saw live in concert) include Sammy Hagar and Quiet Riot. Is it just me, or is my taste beginning to look a little like it's a genetic trait? My dad still blasts AC/DC so loud that it causes hearing damage just to be in the same building, and I listen to and enjoy all these artists. I once walked into the garage where my dad was blowing the windows out with AC/DC (at about the age of seven) and told him to turn it down, and asked him what the point of painfully loud music was. Oh, how little I knew.

However, when I got to be around ten or eleven years old, something strange happened to me. This was around the time I was enrolled into a really conservative, Southern Baptist private school, so maybe they had something to do with it. I somehow became convinced that music was either supposed to make you laugh, or it was meant to be used to praise the Lord Jesus Christ, and as such I started listening to nothing but Weird Al and gospel music (thankfully, I don't remember any specific song from the gospel music, so I can't link it). I have no idea what happened there. Weird Al is still fantastic, but that was seriously the only thing I ever listened to, ever. I continued in this vein for several years.

When I became a freshman in high school, my taste began to shift again, and I have to admit that I am proud of absolutely nothing I listened to at that point. This mostly consisted of Green Day, Eminem, and Lonestar. I also listened to some other rappers and a couple other punk/emo bands, but those are the ones that I remember.

I continued on this path for a couple of years until one day, as I was surfing one illegal download site or another looking for a copy of the Green Day song that I linked previously, I stumbled across a song called I Stand Alone by Godsmack. I downloaded it because I had it confused with the Green Day song. I listened to it once and didn't like it, but for some reason I kept it on my hard drive...and listened to it again a few days later. And then again. And again. The beat got into my skull, as did the heavy guitars and aggressive vocals. The floodgates opened. Pretty soon I was listening not only to Godsmack, but Drowning Pool, Korn, Soil, and Saliva. This also included a healthy amount of Slayer and Metallica.

I also began to appreciate the more industrial acts such as Rob Zombie and his younger brother's band, Powerman 5000, although these were secondary.

At the same time, I found what is arguably the cheesiest and most nerdy metal category of all: Power metal. And I loved it. For those that don't know, power metal mostly writes songs about high fantasy; Lord of the Rings and such. Many bands even write their own fantasy stories and create their own fantasy worlds to sing about. These included Rhapsody of Fire, who wrote the "Emerald Sword Saga" just for their albums. It also included Hammerfall, Stratovarius, and Iced Earth. Iced Earth also has an album (unusually) dedicated to the American Civil War, and it's a very haunting album. They did a three-part, 30 minute song about Gettysburg (one part for each day of the battle) which were called The Devil to Pay, Hold at All Costs, and High Water Mark. Every one of those songs sends a chill up your spine. This blog entry just got halted for half an hour while I listened to them all again, they're that well done; absolute works of art.

I will finish this up in a second post, covering 2006-Present. It was becoming a small novel so I thought it best to do it that way.