Music the great communicator

Co-incidentally, there were some talk of musicians in some other blogs that I'm watching, so the timing for this post is... I dunno, good?

Anyway, I figured that after my rambling on anime watching, I'd talk a bit on my music listening. Bear with me as I go on for a bit of rambling...


My brother once described my music taste as 'indie'. He was of course not really comparing my choice of musicians to that of the so-called 'indie musicians' - what he was merely pointing out was that I listen to many different genre of music - with some genre that is even rather hard to pinpoint.

Linkin Park's Meteora - the one that start it all

My first foray into serious music listening start with these guys that were named after a certain place. At that time, I was like any other teenagers, rebelling without a cause. At that time, nu metals band (Linkin Park, Lostprophets etc) are riding high on the radio airwave, and their music resonate well with most of us (at least, that was the case with me). But somehow, I didn't brought much album at that time beside LP's stuff - I wasn't really willing to spend on bands that I'm not familiar with, and this was the time when I was still a 'buta IT' - but that was only the beginning.


But before we go further, I'll tell you some of the music that I don't/won't be listening to much (hey, told ya there'd be a bit of complaining in this post =P):

Get out of here, Gaga and Bieber >=/

Although I don't really consider myself as an oldfag when it comes to music, I can't really stand all those hyped-up musician such as these guys (Gaga = guy? You be the judge). And all the other generic rap/r&b/pop people too... Well, all right, so I basically don't really dig the more recent stuff that's on the radio now, heh.

So much about the stuff that I don't listen to... but what about the stuff that I do listen to?

I'll admit that being a bookworm I am, I like to read all those articles where they were talking about a few albums or artists/bands - and whenever I came upon a band/artist that sounded unique and/or unusual, what I'd usually do was, I'd go and listen to some of their songs. And, more often than not, the songs would grow on me, and said band/artist would then be in my music collection.

So yes, it's kinda funny, but that's the fact: the more unique sounding musicians would really catch my attention, no matter what genre they belong to.

(Also, I'm saying it's funny because this is quite different from the usual story where people dig a certain musician after listening to a song or two from the radio... don't you think so?)

Massive Attack and DJ Krush - their names were a selling point for me

I've also came to listen to some musicians based on word of mouth: I'd cite Iron Maiden and Radiohead as the chief example (for these two example, I'd blame it on a teacher, and an online friend of mine)

(by the way, it is also interesting to note that these bands are some of the musicians that I bought their albums as opposed to merely downloading their songs - only musicians that I really love would get this kind of treatment)

A quick browse through my MP3 folder would give you names such as Battles, Coldplay, Fatboy Slim, Joe Satriani, Nirvana, and Weird Al Yankovic, just to give a few examples. It's plain to see then that I don't really have a specific genre that I listen to - I practically listen to all type of genre... well, except perhaps country, folks, classical... and some other genre that doesn't really suit my (not-really sophisticated) taste.

If I'd have to cite a genre tho, I'd say... I listen to much rock, with a dash of metal. Yeap, that's the kind of person I am.


But, if you really want to know the truth, I don't really come to like all the music that I listen to immediately on my first listen: I'd have to really listen to a musician two or three times before I can decide whether they're merely all right, plain awesome, or total nonsense (hey, just because I listen to a particular musician doesn't mean that I think they're really awesome or anything)

Oh, and another thing about my music listening: I've recently started to take interest in cover songs from games. It might sound rather funny to some of you - especially if you're not really a hardcore gamer - but there is somehow a certain satisfaction listening to those familiar video game tunes being rendered into various genre of rock, techno, metal, vocal remix... well, I guess the only way to get what I'm talking about is to show you an example:

Here's a song from the indie game Cave Story...

...and here you can listen to the heavy metal rendition of the theme (don't worry, it isn't as heavy as you'd expect it to be =P) - pretty cool cover, eh?

(and of course, don't forget some of the covers that I mentioned in my last post on Touhou as well!)


So there you have it, a really brief introduction on musics that I listen to. After reading this, would you label my taste of music as being 'indie', just like what my bro did?

I don't really mind being called as such tho =P


To top it off, here's a funky video from Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Enjoy~