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

As for my teen years, a couple of acts remain specific touchstones from the time -- Depeche, Pet Shop Boys, eighties Madonna -- but that's about it. I think I'm rather glad of that as well.

you were probably my age in the 1980s, a nominal adult in glad rags and a trendy haircut digging "the kids today and their new sounds."

http://www.mb-imaging.net/msx/cc/images/cc4.jpg

Logically there shouldn't be, of course, but I think there's a feeling that if you're into something when it's first coming out it somehow BELONGS to you more than music your parents or older siblings might have listened to.

Haha maybe it does! I mean I loved Japan, Duran Duran, Bauhaus, Visage, Ultravox and Scritti Politti - and I still do. *shrug*.

Sure theres other stuff I think "wtf did I like that for" but I'm not going to drop ALL of my past as embarrasing. I am proud of who I am and what I like, damn you all! even if it is Howard Jones!

I guess it can. When I was a teen there were lots of interesting things going on: electronic music music breaking through, gangsta rap, etc. So a lot of the stuff I listened to then still gets critical praise today. But then again, I also listened to a lot Euro-dance that the critics probably labeled cheesy back then, and which seems to forgotten by the world today. But that makes me love it even more, because it was our music and no one else's: there's been no critical re-evaluation of it, no revival or anything. So I think music can be great either because it's timeless, or for the opposite reason that it's deeply and irreversibly tied to a certain period of your life.

actually, no matter how you read it, your thesis doesn't apply to me. when i was a teen, i listened to a lot of fairly obvious stuff (u2, r.e.m., pavement, p.j. harvey) which i neither hate nor particularly adore these days and then a lot of older stuff (motown, stax/volt, dylan) that i feel about the same affection for 10-15 years on.

there are some records that will stir an elusive emotion in me, akin to nostalgia in its sadness (but a bit more troubling than the word "sadness" typically suggests; i usually get a little rush of adrenaline similar to when i'm afraid--which makes me wonder if it's some submerged confrontation with my own mortality). but oddly those records are more likely to be ones from an era that came just before i was aware of pop music (late 70s/early 80s, i.e. when i was a toddler).

i am quite assuredly NOT a nostalgic person, at least not in the sense of being nostalgic for my own past, wanting to reclaim or relive it. i'm happier now than i had been in my adolescence and after. but as suggested above i do tend to have something like nostalgia for the music of eras i did not participate in.

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.)