i used to do that thing where i would listen to the same 20-or-so songs on shuffle (rotating them in and out over time of course), all day every day, from as early as i can remember to twenty-two years old when my hearing was taken from me.
i've become really attached to the memory of music since then, so in this post i will take a brief look back at some of the songs i used to listen to, broken down by era or influence as best as i can, in order to share some nostalgia with you!
my earliest music tastes were, as you might guess, largely because of my parents. i also have two brothers who are older than me; i'll talk about their influences as well.
⚠️ just wanna make sure you're aware: this page has a lot of youtube links (not embeds, for privacy reasons). the song titles are there as well in case you want to find them elsewhere.
mom's influence
as a kid my mom and i spent our time in her car jamming out to the kinds of music she liked in her teens & young adulthood.
Styx - Too Much Time On My Hands
at one point she also had a karaoke machine in the basement where she would sing disco songs while i played with my train set. i have a strong memory of this specifically:
Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons - December, 1963 (Oh What A Night!)
she introduced me to Queen and i became so fixated on their music that she bought me a greatest hits CD i had picked out on more than one occasion 😂
dad's influence
my dad's music tastes are sorta what someone might call eclectic (positive). he had a vinyl record player in the basement and a sizable collection of LPs from back in his day, which is how he introduced me to the greats of classic rock such as Eric Clapton, some jazz, as well as "weirder", less serious stuff.
he also made me aware of the local college radio station (which i would end up working at!) due to him having his car stereo always tuned to its AM broadcast. we picked on him sometimes for listening to grating static but it eventually gave me an appreciation for the indie and esoteric.
grunge / metal / emo rock
my parents laid the foundation for my appreciation of rock music, but i have my brothers to thank for keeping me up on newer stuff (read: 90s-00s era). bands like The Offspring, 3 Doors Down, Nirvana, Foo Fighters, et cetera...
my brothers aside though, i'm pretty sure the largest contributor to me liking this kind of music was Jun Senoue who composed the soundtrack to my favorite videogame 😁
Jun Senoue, Ted Poley & Tony Harnell - Escape From the City - archive.org
one CD that really stuck with me is Green Day's American Idiot. it's considered a Rock Opera, which is a concept i may have scoffed at at the time (lol who likes opera??), but i think it's a fitting description because of the way the whole album kinda flows together and tells a story. it was also politically edgy in a way that blew young reese's mind while watching the invasion of Iraq unfold on the news.
around the same time, a new family had moved into my neighborhood and i became quick friends with their two kids around my age. they also liked Green Day as much as I did and they introduced me to Linkin Park. also around this time i had learned how to rip songs from youtube by recording the desktop audio with Audacity, and my mp3 player quickly became packed with pirate jams 😎
Linkin Park - In The End - just look at that state-of-the-art CGI 😍
comedy music
i've already mentioned the king of comedy music, Weird Al of course; and the albums i grew up with were Running With Scissors and Straight Outta Lynwood. as a kid on the internet in the 2000s i discovered flash animations and watched many of them several times. so many flash animations!!
Lemon Demon - The Ultimate Showdown
my older brother got me into Jonathan Coulton with his Thing A Week project and i ended up listening to his music a lot on my own time. my brother had also bought MC Chris Goes To Hell at some point and we listened to that shit in the car a few times. C tier meme rap if you ask me.
one of my friends in high school (who, sadly, was a four chan user at the time 🤢) made me aware of even more Cool Music for Disaffected Teens, like vaporwave (slowed down glitchy 80s mall music often with appropriated eastern aesthetics) and memecore (also often kinda racist and just like, a bit tasteless thematically, but man were those beats good.)
Pink Guy - Fried Noodles - CW for so many things. suicidal imagery, food, pranks on strangers, strong language
this kind of music is a bit embarassing to think back on but i'm including it in this post because it helped me have what i think is a healthy amount of irony poisoning (knowing when it's okay to take things less seriously).
EDM
my gradual shift toward primarily liking electronic music started with Daft Punk during the Discovery era. again, it was my brothers who showed me them. but i also owe a lot to top 40s pop radio 😹
Daft Punk - Harder Better Faster Stronger
through algorithmic recommendations i ended up discovering musicians like Basshunter, S3rl, and deadmau5. after i showed interest, my brother started recommending me more electronic artists such as Madeon, Zedd, Nero, Porter Robinson, Excision, and KNOWER. i was and still am really into mashups and medleys (...because of Weird Al...) and this one quickly caught my attention.
Pop Culture is also the reason i started making my own electronic music. i actually bought a Launchpad that came with Ableton Live Lite, found/fixed someone's recreation of the project file, and learned how to play it myself! not to perform for others, but just because i wanted to. i felt so proud 🤓
once i got better at using the internet i was able to find music i liked without family influence. i ate up those cookie-cutter netlabels (cough Monstercat) like slop, but on the social medium formerly known as twitter i was able to find a group of fans for probably the single most influential artist to me.
adulthood
once graduation rolled around i had some maturing to do since now i was an Adult® with Responsibilities™. at this point i was realizing my queerness (more than just knowing i'm some kind of non-binary) as well as my increasing disability, and i had to plan for my future. i felt like it was always assumed that i would go to college right after high school, since that's what everyone does. and, well, that's what i did too. but it was tough because for the whole time i had no idea what i actually wanted to study. i technically had three minors under one title by the end and never finished 🤣
Carly Rae Jepsen - Happy Not Knowing
the positive is that college gave me a chance to experience more of the culture shared by people my age, and the kind of music that was poppin' off at the time was Hyperpop. i had known about the netlabel PC Music and associated artist SOPHIE (rest in peace 🩷) before college but it gave me a chance to bond with other fans, learn about their music tastes, and stay updated on new releases. from them i learned to give Carly Rae Jepsen and Charli XCX a shot, both of whom shattered my expectations based on what i'd heard from them on the radio before.
i ran a specialty show on Radio K called Switchboard where i put together playlists of electronic music i enjoyed. i tried to find more obscure bangers that came out within the last 5 years so i could introduce listeners to stuff they might have never heard of.
i will leave you with links to the two spotify playlists that made up the soundtrack of my life, frozen in time. enjoy!
conclusion
throughout college i knew that my loss of hearing was approaching. i was getting brain MRIs i think twice a year so they could monitor the tumor, and once it grew past a certain point we set a date for the surgery for January 2020. looking back now i'm pretty glad it wasn't in the midst of a pandemic and was just before. 😅
my inner ears can't process sound anymore but i still find ways to enjoy music. i can read lyrics! i can also play loud music over a speaker or try to play a low instrument and i still feel emotions from the vibrations. music seems like an innate part of being a human and i never want my disability to take that away from me.