The music from your teen years will remain the best music ever for the rest of your life. Right or wrong?

But I'd hesitate to say that Mega City 4 will always be the best music ever.

but nonetheless i think my responses to music were formed then in important ways that i haven't tried hard to update. i think i could have done, in that my taste in other things has changed, though.

Why?

The person for whom this is true is probably not that interested in music.

I pretty much disagree with this too. Music has always been one of the biggest interests in my life and it still is, and I can still fall in love with new stuff, but in some respect it isn't quite the same: the music isn't connected to certain points of my life as strongly as it was in the past. Maybe I don't associate with music the big changes, with the ups and downs of my life so strongly anymore, or maybe the changes aren't that big or don't feel that big anymore. Or maybe I just need to fall in love again.

xpost

you're chipper today, noodle!

"He who binds to himself a joy does the winged life destroy; But he who kisses the joy as it flies lives in eternity's sun rise."

A lot of people I know who are just a bit older than me grew up in era of punk and new wave. For most of them, whilst it was a special time - they are pretty selective about the music they revisit from that era.

As Siouxsie said, who actually listens to 'Never Mind the Bollocks' now? And she and the Bromly Contingent followed them from gig to gig. It was a great statement at the time though...

Do you see?

Hey, that MC Tunes album is fucking fabulous. Somebody YSI?

I do!

i definitely thought you were older than this suggests NRQ!

I agree entirely. To me (a teenager between 1987 and 1993), I liked a lot of what I heard. It felt like an important time in terms of hip hop, electronic music, and some of the English Manchester / shoegazer stuff.
But 1. a lot of it just isn't very interesting any more, not just musically, but once the context has gone, then yeah, it's pure nostalgia. Which I do agree is a self-defeating impulse to gve in to. 2. the idea of hearing it nostalgically at a themed party makes me depressed. 3. I find it hard not to cringe at people who sing along to old shit. Call me anti-fun, uptight etc, but it's a *lot* more fun to go out and discover and dance to brand new stuff.

ick.

the music i actually liked as a teenager: aerosmith, queensryche, led zep, jimi hendrix, concrete blonde, frank zappa, etc

Music from my teen years? There's some stuff I cringe at, and some stuff I cringe at despite knowing it's good, because I remember how stupid my idolising of it was. I have some assorted stuff that's associated with good memories, but that keeps on happening, innit?

Then again, I am only 21, thus perhaps a bit too young to answer this.

and I can still fall in love with new stuff, but in some respect it isn't quite the same: the music isn't connected to certain points of my life as strongly as it was in the past.

Tuomas, I find this a bit puzzling. Surely this will change once the current period of your life is over?

The only possible answer to this 'question' is: "Not unless you stop listening to new and interesting kinds of music after you leave your teen years behind." The idea that you've heard every bit of music you might appreciate by age 20 is, simply put insane. (See also numerous ILE threads about nostalgia and its poisonous effects.)

This notion you have to discard anything more than 5 minutes old is sad. Embrace all that you are and have been! Bands dont become shit because theyre unfashionable.

(cue the song, etc)

I was abused by my fellow high school classmates for not liking Blink 182 and The Offspring.

CASE CLOSED!

also i think nostalgia is getting overly shat upon in this thread. i cant really be bothered right now to look up old ile threads on that subject but i think a healthy dose of nostalgia can be just that-- healthy.

though it seems dictionary.com indicates nostalgia is a 'bittersweet longing' rather than just a nice looking-back. which can be i guess a good way to write songs but not such a good way to live life

Also, life is more fun now, and I'm going through something of a protracted adolescence. I'm sure I'll remember today's music more fondly in 10 years time.

However, having seen BAUHAUS on Friday, clearly they are the BEST BAND OF ALL TIME!!!!!!!!!!!!

but mostly, its new stuff i listen to. new to me anyway, it might have been recorded long before i was born. maybe its because i write about it all the time, i feel i *should be stretching myself, checking out 'new' stuff all the time, but i get bored by records i'm too familiar with. so i love the old stuff, still, but as much for who i was then as for what the music is now, which complicates matters.

The "90-94 vs 95-99" thread on ILM got me thinking about this again. The thread title was kinda exaggerated, but I still feel there's a certain truth to it.

The title of this thread, I mean.

i agree. and funnily i can hardly bring myself to some of the music from my twenties, perhaps too many awful memories.

to "listen" ferchristsake

I'm still pretty fond of a lot of stuff I got into between 1999 and 2004 (I was born in 1979).

I now listen to the music I should have listened to in my teenage years.

in my teen years (second half of the 90s) i was listening to a lot of late 80s ish.

The music that I heard in my teen years was pretty suckass.

― DV (dirtyvicar), Friday, 3 February 2006 10:01 (3 years ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

For me this would be '87-'93, and I have to say that I don't look back on the music of that period with any kind of fondness.

that was my late teens and i loved it, acid house and warp stuff.

i don't think it's necessarily the music from that era, but what you listened to during that era

anything that brings you that sense of teenage nostalgia

SO not the case for me.

Actually, most of the best music was made while I was still a pre-teen, or not even born.

I think this is one of the greatest statements in the history of ILx:

If i start jacking off to the lemonheads again.. shoot me in the fucking head.

― slow jamz and white guy indie acoustic shit (Chris V), Friday, 3 February 2006 11:18 (3 years ago)

My favourite band when I was 16/17 was Dillinger Escape Plan. I still love Calculating Infinity but not anymore than I love, I dunno, the O'Jays or something that I only started listening to last month.

And I listened to a lot of lamentable shit in my teen years at different stages: nu-metal, idm, I ONCE SAW LESS THAN JAKE FOR THE LOVE OF CHRIST!

This is so wrong, for me, anyhow.

Teenage listening history:
13: exclusively hiphop and R&B
14: did not know what to listen to. asked for The Unforgettable Fire and Little Creatures and License to Ill for Xmas. Ended up being lukewarm about them all.
15: exclusively hardcore/punk, much of which I can't listen to nowadays with the exception of Bad Brains, Minor Threat, and maybe Descendents, Ramones, Dickies
16: most anything on Dischord label; Rites of Spring and all that stuff
17-19: Teenbeat label stuff, various indiepop, random thrift store finds, fifties and sixties "oldies"...

anyway, it would be a more accurate contention that what i listened to as a young child would last lifelong, i.e., the Beatles, my older brothers' "classic rock" records, my dad's weird bacharach, dick hyman, soul, country mishmash of sensibilities more = forever than whatever i scribbled on my notebooks in high school

I love Alice Cooper much more now than when I was an impressionable 12-year old...

I think I'm coming down on the side of 'wrong', but that might be because it feels like I've lived more of an adolescence during my 20s than I did during my teens. There's a lot music from 2003-05 that really hits home in the way I think Tuomas was getting at in the opening posts - far more than stuff I liked when I was 15. There are always exceptions to that of course.

Hah, it turns out I said a very similar thing three years ago anyway.

One thing not really touched upon on this thread is that really this is less a question about music and more about your view of being a teenager. What really stands out about my mid-late teens (and I'm sure those of many others) is that big feeling of *possibility* - that even if things were shit you were at the start of some big adventure that could go anywhere. And the music you listened to when you were a teenager brings that all back.

I think I managed to keep a bit of that feeling of possibility going until I was 27 or something so I don't feel the teen thing as keenly as others. But on the other hand if you had an appalling time during your teens you might not feel it at all. This question could be 'the music from the time you met the love of your life will remain the best music ever...' and it wouldn't be hugely different.

OTM, Matt. I definitely feel the same way, even at 27 now.

Yeah, Matt def. OTM. I actively hate 90% of the music I loved as a teenager actually, because: a) most of it was total crap, and b) my high school years were the absolute worst time in my life. In fact, I think my prior idolization of certain bands as an adolescent actually *prevents* me from appreciating them now. I get much more of a nostalgia buzz from the music I was into as an undergrad.

I'm with Matt DC in that i feel like my early 20s were more adolescent than my teenage years, and that the music from that era has far more of an impact. Around that time I had given up on paying attention to music that wasn't made by my friends - with the exception of discovering new things from an era that I grew up loving as a child (raised on 60s British Invasion and 70s glam). I think when you're an adolescent and you're 'discovering yourself' your setting yourself up for all the stuff you 'know' is you when you're a cynical, tired adult.

Ha, I kind of feel like my late 20s are more adolescent than my teenage years.

music i had to actively seek out - primarily spacemen 3, velvets, similar droney stuff - for me, it still stands up. music that was current at that point and popular w/ me and my friends, not so much. lol britpop.

i would easily have had a lot more "WOW!!" listening experiences between 2001-2006 (22-27) than i had 1994-2000.

at the age when music was really taking over my life, round 14-17, yeah definitely this stuff still sounds great - mostly aussie indie, some creation/shoegaze stuff, new wave. the things i listened to from most of my 20s now sounds a bit shit, save for some of the better noisepop/shoegaze. particularly lol britpop and the also ran sarah label (and lesser twee labels) type stuff.

(That was blatantly false, by the way.)