I have always had a weird relationship with music. I didn’t actually listen to it with any agency until after my uncle bought me Guitar Hero one Christmas. There were a few songs in the game that caught my attention and by the time I got my first MP3 player I knew about 10 songs total, all from different bands.
I remember when my original taste in music actually developed and I figured out what I liked. I was waiting in the airport to go to Walt Disney World in Florida with my family and while we were waiting for the plane I kept listening to two songs over and over again: “Laid to Rest,” by Lamb Of God and “Six,” by All That Remains.
It took me a bit to put two and two together and realize I was into the screaming vocals and high-speed metal instrumentation. I didn’t have the musical vocabulary to even notice what it was before then. Keep in mind that there is a large amount of toxic discourse surrounding genre distinctions in the metal community in regards to classifying different bands into sub-genre categories, but for the sake of simplicity I am just going to refer to the whole of metal with screaming vocals as “Death Metal.”
Once I discovered what I liked, it allowed me to branch out and discover some other bands. My friend Bobby was the one who exposed me to everything in the beginning. He was one of the only other people I knew at the time who was into that kind of music. Suicide Silence, Job for a Cowboy, The Acacia Strain, Bring me the Horizon and Emmure were some of the early ones.
It used to be very difficult for me to cultivate new music on my own. I could feel why I liked something, but I couldn’t really tell you why. I had a hard time articulating what I was looking for, so I would just go by Bobby’s general tastes and for the most part it lined up. I got sick of waiting for someone else to show me stuff the more I understood what my tastes were. I learned how to illegally download stuff, allowing me to expand a little further. I was still floating around on the death metal side of things before another friend showed me Eminem, Biggie Smalls and eventually the Wu-Tang Clan.
I ran into the same issue with rap that I had with Death Metal several years earlier — I had a hard time articulating exactly what I wanted to hear. YouTube turned out to be my savior in both cases. The recommended section allowed me to do a slightly more specific search into common bands or artists.
I hosted a show on the SCAD Atlanta Radio for a bit called “the Slaughterhouse,” featuring artists who incorporated screaming vocals at some capacity into their music. I had a decent library of bands already, but I needed to expand the list so I was always playing different bands and new music along with the old favorites.
That forced me to stack up a healthy list of death metal bands and bands that use those techniques in their music. It felt like I had completed my bachelors degree in death metal and any other bands I found after that counted towards my graduate degree.
In the past few years I have been able to step pretty far outside of the normal scope of my taste in music. I discovered a completely different spectrum of bands and artists from what I had been used to for many years. One of the biggest shifts was when yet another friend threw a recommendation at me and it stuck. My buddy Dylan, had tickets to go see Parliament Funkadelic at B.B. King Blues Club & Grill in New York. I had never heard of them despite the fact that they are one of the most sampled artists of all time.
That show still stands out as one of the best live shows I have ever seen. The talent and diversity of instruments and performers left a significant impression on me and I realized how much I enjoyed funk, hip-hop and rhythm and blues. Beyond that, I found Flying Lotus and MF Doom and became more confident in the list of rappers I could name off-hand. Next, I found Odd Future, Tyler, the Creator and Earl Sweatshirt. And then, Vince Staples, Kendrick Lamar and Danny Brown.
One of the best outlets I have found for new music recently has been the NPR Tiny Desk concerts. I have a newfound appreciation for T-Pain because of his performance for the platform and have found other great artists like Noname, Tash Sultana and Tank and the Bangas. The common thread between my new favorite artists has become more clear as I have been able to articulate it. My new favorite genre is definitely soul music.
The band that has stood out to me within the past few weeks has been Hiatus Kaiyote and their hypnotic front-woman Nai Palm. In most cases, even when I really enjoy an artist, I hand pick a few songs that I like the most. Hiatus Kaiyote — the soul group from Australia — is one of those rare bands where I can put on any song in their catalogue and not be dissapointed. The art style and aesthetic of their album covers is exactly within my sphere of interest. Their music is a serene and relaxing mix of soul, with a touch of electronic.
Through the different stages of my musical development I’ve discovered the key to finding what you like is listening to as much as possible and gaining the vocabulary to articulate where your tastes lie. I am far more satisfied musically, now that I have a library of artists that span all different genres across the music spectrum.
