Like many people, the music I have enjoyed and the purpose of it has shifted considerably throughout my life. My parents always had the radio playing when we were in the car, and I of course had a sense of one song or sound being "cooler" than another - and unfortunately for my parents who had to answer my silly child questions, this also extended to catchy ad jingles (and intentionally obnoxious ones).
One summer, as we were visiting the family home in the hills, I was given a gift that I still have in a drawer somewhere. It was a brand new iPod Nano, which could fit a whopping 2 gigabytes of music. I remember playing the simple clickwheel games in the car on my way home: there was a simple one where parachutes are shot out of the sky, a breakout clone, and solitaire.
I installed iTunes, and, being still quite young and new to the internet, went searching through the bookshelves and family computer for music I can pull into it. One CD I had was a mix CD from a hip-hop dance class I took at my school - full of punchy pop tracks whose titles I still do not know. Another was a contemporary Japanese compilation CD my father inexplicably had sitting around, labeled Samurai Collection II, which was really influential on my young brain. There was a lot of Fairuz on our computer, a lot of it religious - it would be sacrilege not to have it. I threw that on my iPod as well. I found a few religious-adjacent songs on the computer as well (I specifically remember "A Spaceman Came Traveling" by Chris De Burgh being there, as well as the Christmas remix of a song called "Coco Jamboo" - should this be embarrassing to mention?).
It's funny what little, grubby idle hands can come up with. There was one year, 2005, which saw my school's yearbook come with a CD-ROM that had a small piece of software that let the user see photos of the buildings and a few photos from events. The menu music was just stored as a file next to the .exe. And thus I got "TNT for the Brain (Night Girl Remix).mp3", which I dutifully threw onto the iPod. I don't think I've heard that song since I was an actual child. I remember it being a kind of futuristic sounding, electronic-but-not-quite-house track. I felt very intelligent listening to it. I looked it up for this post and it was actually the "Midnight Man" remix. I listened to a snippet to make sure it was the right track, so the statement about not having heard it in a long time is no longer true.
A friend gave me a (bootleg, naturally) copy of "The Politics of Dancing 2" by Paul Van Dyk, a compilation of dance-forward electronic tracks that fall in different places around the house umbrella. I thought it was very interesting. I still think of some sections from that album, or at least my inaccurate mental audiation of them, as very influential in my tastes.
I of course knew enough of the radio-type music not to stand out at childhood social events (birthdays?). But at this point in my life I thought that this eclectic combination of tracks that I had assembled were "real music", and that the pop stuff was secondary. I thought the occasional rap or guitar-driven song was cool though.
This early library of music is probably still preserved somewhere, on some backup.
Bonus childhood track: I had a pirated version of Need for Speed: Carbon: Own The City on the PSP, this copy of which had most of its music files stripped out to preserve space. One song played over and over. I liked that song and only cared to search for it over a decade later. It was "Are Friends Electric?" by Gary Numan and the Tubeway Army. I have only recently come to realize how important this track and Gary Numan are; this song sounds like it is a decade or more newer than it actually is.
Bonus bonus childhood track: As a kid I would search the internet for any fan content of Dragon Ball Z - a juggernaut Japanese manga property I knew only as a video game. This lead me to somehow download an episode of a fan podcast called Daizenshuu EX (I could have sworn it was DX before looking it up to write this post). A bunch of American hosts, clearly adults - some were even women! - discussing what to me just looked like a cartoon for teens and maybe kids (me being in the latter category at this point). It was very surreal. I remember a specific part where they were discussing how the same scene from the cartoon were interpreted into very different parts of two very different video games that were made a decade apart. I really liked it, but did not follow up. I would not listen to a piece of podcast style content for at least ten years after this.
My iPod was the true start of me paying attention to music. I would later pivot quite hard into listening to rock and metal as a teenager (as well as the ever-misunderstood Coldplay, I will take no questions). I would, quite handily, find the music I wanted to find by that age. I was no longer bound by what I could just find offline on physical media around me. I was using an iPod Touch now, which also gave me unrestricted access to the internet away from the family computer. We had gotten WiFi around that time.
Googling it now, there are only four years between the release of the second generation iPod Nano and the fourth generation iPod Touch. Baffling to see the numbers like this, as those felt like my tools for very long and different eras of my life. Such was the value of childhood time exploring a new world - but that is a pointless digression.
At this point I was starting to exhibit one of the tendencies that have stayed with me to this day: a desire for some kind of completionism, where I experience a canon from start to finish. I was listening to the Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd albums in order, like they were meant to be a large serialized body of work. I was racking through discographies' worth of music, trying to make sense of it, developing my preferences. AC/DC was on there. Perplexingly, so was Skillet, a band that I had not realized was religious at the time. To this day, religious music, for me, has to have an ethereal churchy feeling to it.
This was a second music library, one whose remnants are still on my phone. I think I have a Scorpions album that still has the same files from back then, as well as a few classics from the above-mentioned bands. Muse as well, in the later stages, a much newer band with a true modern rock sound and a modern anthemic punchiness that these old bands could not achieve.
This exploration of band music was what I built my first true musical internal canon with. And Coldplay, of course. Gone were the days of just listening to whatever electronic music happened to be burned to a CD near me.
When I was in my mid-teens, I picked up a desire to learn the guitar from seeing people (who I otherwise didn't really like) in camp having a good time. This gave my appreciation for this band music a much deeper dimension, and had me learning basic chords for some of the songs I'd liked. I told my parents about it, went to my school's conservatory, and there I was, on a new journey.
Small tangent on the guitar stuff: Where I am in the world, instruments are still primarily taught in conservatories and not modern-style music schools, at least for most people who take up formal learning. The band music I was strumming along to was very different from the classical etudes I was trudging through every week, and I felt like trying to toe the line between the two held me back in both styles.
I have since stopped playing regularly, and my playing and singing have both atrophied to what I consider to be an outright shameful level. But before that, I had a quiet little golden age of musicking in high school.
I learned the word musicking much later. Musicking, as I have chosen to internalize it, is the concept of music not just as a pleasant sound or artistic expression, not just theory or technical ability, but as action. The action of creating atmosphere, of being someone who musicks. I am struggling to word this, so I will fall back on asking a search engine for a definition for the sake of brevity:
a verb that encompasses all musical activity from composing to performing to listening to a Walkman to singing in the shower (source)
Musicking is part of that iconic, gestural process of giving and receiving information about relationships which unites the living world, and it is in fact a ritual by means of which the participants not only learn about, but directly experience, their concepts of how they relate, and how they ought to relate, to other human beings and to the rest of the world. (source)
This band music, so human and full of expression, was music that was designed to be musicked. I was even listening to some indie bands here and there. Not by the albumful, but I listened and learned to play softer, more natural music that lent itself well to campfires and the like. I distinctly remember sharing Mykonos by Fleet Foxes with a girl I was into, and being surprised when, years later, she would send me a screenshot of her phone playing it.
I bonded with a good friend over bands like Coldplay (go listen to Parachutes and tell me they are/were not a legitimate, excellent rock band with a straight face) and Muse.
I discovered the band Porcupine Tree through them, which sent me down a very specific rabbit hole of what I would later learn was called Progressive Metal, the modern, more abrasive answer to the past's Pink Floyd. Porcupine Tree especially was a big influence on my musical world - the interesting sounds, the bleak vocals, the unorthodox chord variations that I still strum to this day. We would sing in the woods behind my house which today no longer exist.
This phase was definitely after moving from the iPod to an actual phone, in case the hardware still bears any significance in the story. I listened mostly to whole albums at a time, usually while not doing anything else, to really listen - but often when I was out and about, waiting for something. I was cataloguing things in iTunes to an almost obsessive degree, populating the database fields like it was an integral part to enjoying the tracks.
I would later discover bands such as Dream Theater and Tool, which are the quintessential band of the shut-in metal nerd: wails and growls both from guitars and from human voiceboxes, and lyrics that, even revisiting as an adult, are still very emotionally charged and abrasive:
What a whimsical fun time I must have been having in high school eh?
I now understand that Tool fans have a bit of a reputation, lol.
I went through a short, sweet phase where I was preparing to act in a musical. Cue a phase of musicals. That came and went.
The current musical canon that my adult brain has been marinating in is very different from the last two. The first was a product of happenstance - the library of idle hands and a CD-ROM drive. The next was a product of following what I felt was a succession of "real" music: classic rock, modern rock, and then modern progressive metal, music that I found to have very pure and elevated qualities. That was where I was as a teenager.
Then something very noteworthy happened. I found something called Vaporwave. This was antithetical to every rule I thought music had and every raison d'etre that I had for each album in my collection. Vaporwave was, in the traditional sense, I think, unmusickable music - it cannot be performed, it cannot be shared by sitting next to someone in a room and judging their facial expression. It was intentionally detached from how music typically conveys emotion. The sounds were unnatural, there was a cheapness to the presentation and intended discovery process.
This was all a preamble to my thoughts on electronic music, internet music, vaporwave and its myriad cousin -waves, house music, noise music, and a lot of what occupies my ears today. Will formulate part 2 of this post soon.