#oneaday Day 871: Musicstalgia

I wonder what it is that makes you so specifically attached to the music you listened to growing up — to such an extent in some cases that you find stuff that came later actively distasteful. I was listening to Mansun's Attack of the Grey Lantern earlier — an album that I grew up with — and I was struck with how good it was, and how I enjoyed listening to it in the car on Spotify just as much as I once enjoyed listening to it on my CD player in my bedroom.

In contrast, there's not a lot of today's popular music I would even be able to name, let alone pick something I actually like from. Trends in popular music have been headed in a direction I'm not a big fan of for probably about 20 years or so at this point, so some time in that period I decided to just tune out completely, enjoy what I liked from back in the late '90s — and pick out some selected bits and bobs from the lesser-known side of things from around the world, such as J-pop, idol music, J-Rock and other such things.

Mind you, now that I put that down on paper, that might just be what I always did anyway. While it was fashionable to like "indie music" — which really came to prominence in the late '90s — I tended to make a deliberate choice to listen to stuff that was less on the "chart toppers" side of things and more selected from things that I either found cool and interesting, or that my friends had recommended to me. On occasion, some of that cool stuff found its way into the charts, but for the most part, the indie music scene — or what tended to get referred to as such, anyway — was about sleepers that you could feel suitably smug about knowing and liking when no-one else did.

But I think there's something else there, too. The time in your life that you get into music is inevitably one of the most defining periods of your life: adolescence. It's at that time of your life that you truly start to define who you are, what your outlook on life is, what your core attitudes, opinions, ideas and ambitions are. All of those things can change over time, of course — they certainly have in my case — but since adolescence is such an important time of life when you truly start to nail these things down for the first time, you tend to make positive associations in your mind with the things you were experiencing at the time you were busily defining yourself.

I primarily got into indie music because I fancied a girl called Stacie, and she recommended the compilation "Shine 7" to me. From there, I found some artists I like and branched out from there, picking up some of their albums — interspersed with the albums of artists I'd maybe heard once or twice on the radio and found quite striking. There was a bit of a balancing act there, though; if I heard something on the radio too much I'd never want to hear it ever again. Radio 1's obsession with the Red Hot Chilli Peppers throughout the early years of the new millennium is the main reason I cannot listen to that band at all ever again. And to those thinking "just turn it off" — we had the radio on on the school bus every morning. There was no "turning it off". B97! A better music mix for Bedford!

I never did get off with Stacie, I should probably add, even despite getting really drunk at a party and trying quite hard for someone who had been suffering with social anxiety for his whole life up until this point but had never known what it was called or that it was a thing. My friends called me "non-pulling Stacie freak" for several weeks afterwards. Good times.

But I digress. Several times. I had a point somewhere in all that, but I'm not sure what it was. Oh well.

Listen to your old favourite music; you'll probably find you still like all of it.