Tenth grade and puberty hit me like a brick when I was sixteen. Being the angsty teenager I was, I had to find some music that perfectly reflect my emotions and attitude.. At the time, I was listening to retro Nintendo game music, and as much as I loved it, I couldn’t relate to it. How could boops and beeps convey what I thought about myself and the world around me?
So I decided to explore my family’s record collection. There, I saw inside a vinyl sleeve covered in dust was Guns N’ Roses Appetite for Destruction. I popped the disc onto my parent’s vinyl record player. While the lyrics did not have a huge impact on me, the music did. I was thrust into unfamiliar territory with music that contained loud guitars, screaming vocals, and mind-melting drum solos. I had not been introduced to this kind of music before by anybody. Needless to say, it blew my mind and introduced me to what is still my favorite genre of music today: heavy metal. Soon afterward, I started to delve into 80’s and 90’s metal bands like Metallica, Slayer, Pantera, Marilyn Manson, and Soundgarden. These bands’ heavy riffs and often-times dark lyrics concerning politics, angst, and hormonal rage helped me purge my negative emotions and helped me survive that year of high school.
When eleventh grade hit, I went further back in time to the 60’s and 70’s. This was an era of music that I long rejected and why I listened to electronic music from video games. I had previously considered The Beatles and Led Zeppelin “old people’s music,” which made it slightly difficult for me to get into at first. But I learned quickly that good music is timeless, and that the Who’s Quadrophenia could give me a emotional connection similar to the one I had gotten from Metallica’s Master of Puppets.
Listening to older and admittedly softer music helped set the scene for twelfth grade. By that point, I was a strict lover of classic rock and roll from the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s, and wanted to find a more alternative type of rock and pop music. With the exception of the Beatles, my music was purely hard rock and heavy metal. My iTunes top fifty most played songs only boasted those by the Who, the Rolling Stones, Marilyn Manson, Metallica, Nirvana, Alice Cooper, ZZ Top, and Black Sabbath. My friends recommended me Radiohead, a Britpop/rock group that dabbled into electronic music. Listening to their album Kid A, I not only discovered their twitchy style of electronic rock, but noticed that many of their musical techniques relied on heavy uses of progressive rock and jazz. It was with this that I learned that there was much more to appreciate other than the overall emotion certain kinds of music conveys. Radiohead made it easier to listen to the more experimental David Bowie, Brian Eno, Arcade Fire, the Velvet Underground, and even Miles Davis. From there, my musical knowledge expanded. I was able to understand what melodies and harmonies musicians were utilizing in order to capture the emotion or idea a their music was supposed to represent. Music was elevated from emotional escapism to an intellectual art.
Today, my music identifies who I am as a person. I believe in music.