Semi-Old Music You Still Listen To

[OGpistolpete]

I'm not talking old like The Beatles, I'm talking like, well, just look at my examples.

I still listen to Incubus' old stuff, along with Jimmy Eat World's 'Bleed American' CD and Brand New's old stuff. Nowadays, I think music isn't as good as that stuff for some reason. I literally do not listen to any main stream hits or bands.

[Guest Mr. Potato Head]

I really don't understand why some people refuse to listen to any music that isn't current. Sure, music from the 20s/60s/80s/whatever might be a little DIFFERENT than what you're used to, but that doesn't mean you can't enjoy it just because the artist isn't performing on Saturday Night Live to promote it.

[Draevyn]

I still listen to a lot of old stuff from the 80's and 90's...the old Hair bands and shit like that.

[SwantonEdge]

I still listen to a tonne of old(ish) stuff. My favorite band is RATM and they haven't put out new music for 5 years or so. My iTunes is packed with a lot of old AC/DC, Sabbath, Bon Jovi, GNR, Hendrix, Led Zep, Nirvana, Pink Floyd, 80's-90's RHCP stuff just to name a few.

I know that's not incredibly old but yeah...

[Only In Dreams]

I listen to early Jimmy Eat World stuff, some 80s-90s Bad Religion, pretty much any band that I like a lot and have most of their early recordings from the 80s-90s I'll listen too.

[YI]

I know you're young and all SKA, but 2001 isn't old. Though JEW/Incubus, I'll give you them as 'old' bands.

I listen to a hell of a lot of late 80's, 90's punk rock. There's probably more bands these days which are 'popular', which means an overally better quality, but as far as individual albums go, nothing recently outside of a few albums give me the same feeling listening to them as "Suburban Teenage Wasteland Blues", "A Comprehensive Guide to Moderne Rebellion", "My Brain Hurts", "Jersey's Best Dancers", "Full Circle", Against The Grain", "boogadaboogadaboogada", "Behind Bars", "How To Clean Everything" etc. A good number of these albums just feel timeless.

But yeah. If there's an 'old' band I like. I generally have a lot of their old albums.

[Matt]

I listen to Nirvana, old/better U2 (early 80's), Michael Jackson (), Bon Jovi, early Chilis stuff. When it's from doesn't bother me, hell I listen to sometimes listen to Frank Sinatra, so long as it's good and I like it, I'll listen. I'm with MPH, it annoys me when people say "OMG they're so 90s!!", why the hell can't I still listen to them, the discs didn't self-destruct when they lost popularity.

[lari]

Meh. 90s music is too recent for me.

[VerbalPuke]

I really don't understand why some people refuse to listen to any music that isn't current. Sure, music from the 20s/60s/80s/whatever might be a little DIFFERENT than what you're used to, but that doesn't mean you can't enjoy it just because the artist isn't performing on Saturday Night Live to promote it.

It's not that I don't want to enjoy current music, it's just that I simply don't care for it. There's really nothing in the current generation of music that has a sound I can really get into. It's just not there for me. It's really nothing to do with when the music came out, as much as me thinking the music is just shitty.

As for the topic at hand, I guess I could say Reverend Horton Heat, Kool Moe Dee, Eazy E, though not much else I can think of. Most of the bands from the late 80s and 90s that I enjoyed at one time are now collecting dust.

[Guest Mr. Potato Head]

You read my post backwards.

[apsham]

I just got back into the Barenaked Ladies.

[Thomas]

I had a listen to Bleed American the other day from JEW, so that counts. I still love to listen to the best of Lightning Seeds too. Old GotM on MotD .

[zero]

I pretty much only listen to semi-old music, stuff I grew up with. Yeah, I'm officially becoming that guy. Even if I'm listening to a new release, it's usually by a band that hit it big when I was younger (Manson, NIN and the upcoming Pumpkins album being examples). I'm old.

[VerbalPuke]

You read my post backwards.

Oops, disregard everything I said in that case.

Sorry, I had just got off work when making that post and was a bit tired after an arduous week.

[Fanku Kaibutsu]

I listen to more 'old' music than new music, though using the definition given of 'old' by Ska, the music I listen to is ancient. I been listening to a lot of Smashing Pumpkins, Iron Maiden, and Metallica recently. Not to mention, I regularly listen to bands like Stone Temple Pilots, Nirvana, 311, Green Day, Offspring, Pre-1994 RHCP, Jimi Hendrix and Black Sabbath.

[ChrisSteeleAteMyHamster]

Kraftwerk (mostly 70s), Aitechre (from '87), Bjork (mostly 90s with Homogenic being her best in my opinion), Blondie, 90s dance stuff like Prodigy, Underworld and Chemical Brothers, the 90s "indie" scene of Blur, Pulp and Portishead, PJ Harvey and more.

I generally don't get into that much brand new stuff these days - I've seemed to pause in the 90s.

[JStarr]

Have to third Hamster and Zero on the "paused in the '90s" bandwagon...I find it hella annoying to listen to the radio anymore, as they're all about song-song-song-10 minutes of commercials-song-song-5 minutes of commercials, and when there is something that sounds kind of good, I have no immediate way to find out who did the song. Mainly because I almost exclusively listen to the radio while driving.

If my fiancee follows through with her threat to buy me a satellite radio unit for the car for my birthday, it'll do wonders for my modern music awareness. Likely kill the bank account from some periodic buying sprees, but hey, there's a tradeoff for everything.

As for what I do listen to, there's a lot of Prince, Tricky, George Michael, Terence Trent D'Arby, some Big Daddy Kane, Eric B. and Rakim, and Living Colour. Aside from Prince's "3121" debuting at #1 and nosediving right after, none of those guys has put out anything that casual fans actually listened to since, what, 1998? Yeah, I'm old, too.

[Skummy]

I don't listen to the radio, and rarely if ever watch music TV...the only times I do are if I've got a couple of minutes to kill and there's no alternative of what to do (not often) or at a friend's house, and usually then I'll insist on 120 Minutes or something like that, because if I'm left to watch music telly during the day, I just end up mindlessly channel-hopping...it's either endless identikit Arctic Monkeys/Futureheads clones on MTV2, Kerrang! stuck in a 2002 timewarp (note to Kerrang!: No one cares about Alien Ant Farm any more), Scuzz playing metalcore wank, the off-chance of something good on TMF (Jeff Buckley marathon? Fuck yes.), or the slim chance of a decent band live on Rockworld, but the sound quality's always dire.

Basically, I have little exposure to new bands. What I do have comes from Myspace and Plan B magazine, both of which rarely expose to me what's popular in the "mainstream", so my main knowledge of new music tends to be the underground, alternative stuff that I wouldn't hear on TV or radio anyway, and is a bastard to get hold of.

So, basically, while I do still listen to some new music, it's a lot easier for me to say "well, I don't like music that's around at the moment" (which is always a horrible perspective to take, it's just laziness. There's always good music out there.), and look backwards instead, look for increasingly obscure music from the '60s, '70s, '80s, get more in '50s rock and roll or pre-rock and roll genres. There's a near-infinite backlog of music I haven't listened to yet, so it's much simpler for me to go out and buy an old album, or look in to what a band I like's influences are and buy some of that...older music is, for the most part, easier to find out about and get in to. So, ignoring the few pre-20th century classical pieces I like, my tastes span from about the '30s to present day, with peaks in the late '60s, late '70s, late '80s and early '90s.

I love looking to the bands that never made it, the bands that were doing something really different and interesting, but never really got anywhere with it...it's like a time capsule, looking to directions music could have gone if people bought a Silicon Teens or The Normal album instead of a Depeche Mode one, if people bought "Holland" instead of "Pet Sounds"...things like that. As an aside, that's really turned me on to outsider music...I find listening to something by Daniel Johnston or Hasil Adkins or Moondog infinitely more fascinating than listening to anything contemporary radio could have to offer. It kind of does the same for foreign music....I've been getting in to Os Mutantes, a Brazillian psych band, and a few bands from Brazil's post-punk scene, lately, just to see how bands we'd probably be mostly familiar with influenced entirely different cultures, and to hear bands that normally we'd have no exposure to...same goes for Polish and Japanese music lately.

I think the internet's a wonderful thing, because it allows me to find out about, and check out, these bands with such ease, but at the same time it really should remove the excuse that "there's nothing good on the radio". Each one of us (obviously) has the internet, which is the most powerful tool for discovering new music that has ever existed. There's an almost infinite supply of music right at our fingertips, there is really no excuse not to seek out more and more of it. It can be overwhelming, but I can't be the only one deeply satisfied when last.fm throws me an absolute gem of a song, or when a message board poster I like recommends an absolutely incredible new band.

[VerbalPuke]

Sounds like me to a certain degree, in regard to the backlog of older bands that never made it or remained in relative obscurity. I've been listening to a lot of different bands from those mid-60s Nuggets compilations, which contained some known and some unknown garage acts from the 60s. I've also been on a psych kick checking out bands like Kaleidoscope (from Mexico actually), Fifty Foot Hose, and the C.A. Quintet. It's surprising that these bands never did make it, but at the same time not surprising, due to their sound being a bit too out there for mainstream radio at the time. It's probably still too out there for mainstream radio in fact.

I guess I should get to my point though, which is really an extension of what Skummy said. With all of the obscure music from the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s, it's hard for me to bother with much else. There is such an abundance of bands from those era's that played music that is more up my alley than what's been released in the last few years. It's much easier for me to devote my time finding these type of bands as opposed to checking out the radio. I know that there's a much better chance I'll enjoy a band like Electric Prunes as opposed to some of the watered down rock out there today. I've also found that a ton of bands from the 60s that could be construed as one hit wonders actually had a plethora of great songs. Bands like the Trashmen, Strawberry Alarmclock, and Iron Butterfly had a plethora of great songs but are really only known to the masses for their big hit (Surfin Bird, Incense and Peppermints, and In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida).

I've also noticed that I tend to look for some of the obscure stuff that my favorite artists recorded. It's especially true with Johnny Thunders, as I've recently acquired demo's of his when Richard Hell was with the Heartbreakers, and a live album from his "Gang War" project with Wayne Kramer.

And no Skummy, you wouldn't be the only one deeply satisfied when a "new" band is "discovered". A lot of times, those suggestions I do get help spark my interest in other bands with that similar sound.

Edit - Oh, and sorry for the sort of long diatribe. It's hard for me to stop when I start talking about music.

Edited June 10, 2007 by VerbalPuke

[Matt]

Kerrang! stuck in a 2002 timewarp (note to Kerrang!: No one cares about Alien Ant Farm any more)

Off topic but; A-mother-fucking-men. Every time I turn Kerrang on that, Stacy's Mom or Basketcase will come on within 15 minutes. Black Parade as well, but that's modern, so I guess they can be let off.