what were you listening to at 15?

didn't really get back into hip-hop until the following year

I haven't listened to it in years! I found it quite accidentally at the public library, of all places, and copied it to a cassette, which is now sitting somewhere in my closet. But yeah, good album!

1973, the year of Dark Side of the Moon. Also:

Nitty Gritty Dirt Band ("Will the Circle be Unbroken"), Dan Hicks and the Hot Licks, Seatrain, Fleetwood Mac ("Mystery To Me"), Ten Years After, King Crimson, Mike Oldfield, Cockney Rebel.

sex pistols
underworld
atari teenage riot
chemical brothers
kmfdm
roni size
daft punk
air
dead kennedys
aphex twin
front 242

NIN
Ministry
KMFDM
Depeche Mode
New Order
the Cure
They Might be Giants
U2
Gang of Four

Matthew Sweet! The Lemonheads!
Weezer -- DGC Rarities / No Alternative -- Frank Black, Pixies, Breeders, Flaming Lips, Smiths, New Order, Beastie Boys, Blur, Helmet

Not much at *all* -- this was a dry gulch year for me in all respects. 1981-1985 was my pop radio time of fascination, very end of 1987 was when I got a first proper stereo system all for myself (even if a Fisher all-in-one ;-) ) followed by a CD player. I think all I bought this year was Sgt. Pepper's and Red Wave, and the only radio hits I remember from the year with clarity were "Addicted to Love," "Rock Me Amadeus" and of course the Pet Shop Boys. Klymaxx's horribly gloopy "I Miss You" literally made me stop listening to Top 40, I remember that much.

Black Flag
Ozzy
Fear
Motley Crue
Flipper
Led Zeppelin
Circle Jerks
Iron Maiden
Minor Threat

Let's see, I turned 15 in Nov 95, so...

Oasis - Definitely Maybe, What's The Story (oh dear)
Blur - Great Escape (oh dear)
Supergrass - I Should Coco
Black Grape - It's Great When You're Straight
Teenage Fanclub - Grand Prix
Radiohead - The Bends
REM - Monster, Automatic, New Adventures
Manic Street Preachers - Everything Must Go

15 was a key year now I think of it. I think the Bends and REM definitely brought me into indie-rock pastures and away from Britpop. And then during summer '96 Dancing In The Street aired, which meant I heard the Velvet Underground for the first time. This, and getting Odelay for my 16th birthday, really opened things up.

circle jerks
dead kennedys
bad religion
crass
rudimentary peni
ssd
youth brigade
7 seconds
subhumans (uk)
x
buzzcocks
husker du
specials
selector
8 eyed spy
yaz
bauhaus
velvet underground
whodini
fat boys
kurtis blow
run dmc
joy division
new order
bronski beat
bow wow wow
echo & the bunnymen
stranglers
the jam

and other stuff. and whatever was on the radio. i turned 16 in october of 84, so some of this stuff i might have been listening to after my 16th birthday. i do remember that i listened to husker du all night ON my 16th birthday, drunk and alone in my dorm room at the bad boy's school that my parents had shipped me away to.

Concrete by 999 (I was inexplicably obsessed...pardon the pun...with this record)
Generation X by Generation X....older by a few years, but I bought it at the same time as the 999 record
Give the People What they Want by the Kinks
Joe's Garage Act I by Frank Zappa
The Number of the Beast by Iron Maiden
Fire of Unknown Origin by Blue Oyster Cult
Oh No! It's Devo by Devo
Wild in the Streets by the Circle Jerks
Stukas Over Disneyland by the Dickies
Troops of Tomorrow by The Exploited
Let Them Eat Jellybeans by various artists (Alternative Tentacles)
Ghost in the Machine by the Police
Rio by Duran Duran

also, richard hell, the velvet underground, and random punk rock and elephant six-ish indie pop

Dark Side of the Moon Pink Floyd
Live at Fillmore East
Brothers and Sisters
Eat A Peach
Idelwild South Allman Brothers Band
Hot Rocks Rolling Stones
Mott
All The Young Dudes Mott the Hoople
Houses of the Holy Led Zeppelin
Marshall Tucker Band
Aerosmith
Alladin Sane David Bowie esp "Panic in Detroit"
Live Dates Wishbone Ash
American Beauty Grateful Dead
Quadrophenia The Who

lots of Sly, Spinners and O Jays on AM radio

I remember being slightly obsessed w/the New York Dolls debut but the cover scared me away from buying it!

My Rush infatuation was just around the corner.

(It's my latent Catholic urge to confess.)

I meant you (Daniel) did.

I was very into music but was teased for basically having advanced tatses for my age (due to cool parents and sisters)

...more or less...

For me, the Smashing Pumpkins had pretty much taken over my life, and I listened to Dark Side of the Moon almost every night before I went to bed. Also, I loved CCR, and didn't know music got much better than Live's Throwing Copper, Dookie, Weezer, and KISS: MTV Unplugged.

How much of everyone's tastes then was heavily influenced by what was available in the "Alternative" section of those music clubs?

oh, man...i could just go on and on. this was right smack at the peak of OCD record/tape buying.

Japan
Bauhaus
the Cure
Cocteau Twins
the Waterboys for some reason
the Church
Echo & the Bunnymen
the Alarm (arrrrgh! wtf I was obsessed with them)

OK that was embarrasing.

Later in the same year I was listening to:
The Sex Pistols
The Ramones
The Clash
Blondie
Devo

and the next year 1980, well *that* was golden. 16 in 1980, going to ALL the punk/new wave shows....I'll have to wait for the "what were you listening to when you were 16" thread to tell you about that, old coot that I am.

dow, if you were 15 when the above hits were new, then I must relinquish to you my sobriquet as "ilx's oldest known non-lurker". I'd count that as a huge relief.

XTC
Green (the Chicago pop-punk-soul band, not the Scritti Politti singer)
James Brown
the Replacements
Husker Du
Elvis Costello
Midnight Oil
Prince
the Who
Pink Floyd

Stereotypes of a high school sophomore misunderstood, but it's still all good:

Sleater-Kinney - Dig Me Out
Selby Tigers - Year of the Tigers
Pavement - Brighten The Corners
Radiohead - OK Computer
Pixies - Doolittle
X - Under The Big Black Sun
Stereolab - Emperor Tomato Ketchup
Bjork - Homogenic
Cibo Mato - Viva! La Woman
Public Enemy - It Takes a Nation...
Tricky - Pre-Millenium Tension
Portishead - Portishead
Atari Teenage Riot - Burn, Berlin, Burn

When I was 14/15, my friends and I would go to the record shop nearly every day and buy up cut-out cassette singles for 25p each. Most of them were awful, but I discovered dEUS through that, and a couple of other neat things.

It's safe to say that every single person on this thread was a cooler 15-year-old than I was, lol.

No worries, I was listening to Ace of Base and Enigma too. And I still like them today.

hahaha when I was 18, I made a bunch of my friends lie on the floor of my parents' darkened family room and meditate while blasting the first Enigma album

I don't know what is more amazing, the fact that I suggested this or the fact that THEY DID IT

15 was also just a year or two before everything exploded for me, in terms of music. Having a car and having friends who brought back IT'LL END IN TEARS from the import bins, after a steady diet of LA punk and rock, was a revelation. Then there was all those whack jobs I met when I went off to college.

I do think that 15was the year that 91X, the San Diego rock station (you'd call it classic rock now) went from their old format to new wave/college ratio/alternative before it was alternative. I kept listening, but mostly when the batteries in the Walkman died.

Turned 15 in March 1996, was mostly listening to NME-friendly dance music (Underworld, Prodigy, Chemical Brothers, Leftfield), Epitaph Records skatepunk (NoFX, Bad Religion, Pennywise, Rancid) and the Cardiacs. Also still liked some of the britpop/indie I'd been into earlier (I got Suede's Coming Up that year). Wish I still had my homework planner covered in band logos...

It's safe to say that every single person on this thread was a cooler 15-year-old than I was, lol.

Well, 15/16 was arguably my apex of cool a music listener, but my nadir of cool as a socially functional human being.

it's funny, but i don't think it really occurred to me that music could be "cool", that it could have social and fashion significance, until i was 16 or 17. i mean, i was peripherally aware that others viewed music as cool or uncool, but didn't really get where they were coming from, figured that this sort of judgement was basically the same as simply liking billy joel or not.

i didn't start listening to stuff that i personally thought of as cooler than other music until i was 18 or so. i guess that's the year i became a snob, went along w getting seriously into the proto-indie "underground rock" that jon lewis mentioned above. it's taken me along time to shake the teenage idea that some sounds, audiences, aesthetics and ways of listening are better than others by virtue of their coolness. still rooting out traces (e.g., contempt for bro-rock a la puddle of mudd, jam bands, etc)

Beyond kneejerk class/status etc, coolness can be a good thing, if it involves perspective, not just mindlessly melding w the artiste's self-seriousness etc--not that we don't all need someone we can feed on, comfort-wise for inst

yeah, i'm cool w all that. it's the kneejerk/class status thing i was talking about. got really sucked into that for a while. honestly, i think it's in my nature to divide up the world that way, but i'm trying to me a bit more open-minded these days.

The Fall, the Slits, the Clash, Wire, the Banshees and the Buzzcocks were biggies, as was anything on Rough Trade. Two-Tone. Burgeoning taste in reggae, which was quite tough to find in suburban America, but Linton Kwesi Johnson was a big fave. At 15 or 16, I remember my mother asking what I wanted for Christmas, and I gave her a list of records - from which she bought Wire's "Pink Flag," the Fall's "Early Fall" and the Pop Group's "How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder?" albums. I still smile thinking about it, and the pain of waiting to play these on the stereo, which couldn't be done until my grandparents had left! Thanks, mom. Beyond that, nothing too embarrassing, remarkably, though I quite liked a lot of things that are forgotten / dismissed today - the Yachts' "Box 202," Chelsea's "Urban Kids," Henry Badowski's "Baby Sign Here With Me" and many others . . . as well as stuff like the debut Lene Lovich album, which is still pretty fine, but probably too silly to be revived in any way nowadays.

Ages 13 through 16 or so were lonely and odd . . . you can't imagine how much crap you'd get just walking down the street being into "punk rock" at this time, and I didn't even look or dress in punk-style! (I still love that the dismissive remark I'd always get from jocks riding by in a care was always "Devo sucks!" - apparently the sole weirdo-music frame of reference amongst Neanderthals.) In fact, pre-internet suburbia at that time offered few ways to learn much about punk at all - there weren't really any books about it when I got into music, and imported copies of the NME or whatever cost as much as a 7", so guess what I'd buy! Consequently, the idea I had of punk - shared by one other guy, and later two "much older" guys (one year older) - was largely self-invented, and involved things like making attaching resistors and funny looking but tiny electrical parts from Radio Shack to odd parts of our clothes, doing any drug we could find at any time and quite a lot of what today would be considered much more dada or situationist than recognizably punk. By the time I was a senior in high school, "new wave" had become just mainstream enough so that it appealed to the officially "cool" kids, and quite suddenly I was very popular and even looked up to by those who avoided me like the plague just two years earlier.

The early days of punk were great - so many concepts that are common today just didn't exist then - the idea of anything "retro," for instance. Records that weren't big sellers stayed in print for about 18 months and then you never saw them again. A lot of crucial stuff, like the Velvet Underground, was unknown to young music fans with good taste, because their best records had been out of print forever. Being into punk was a heavy choice; more or less one's musical choice was either REO Speedwagon, Styx, Kansas and Foreigner and the dregs of disco or stuff that was *genuinely* upsetting to people. I remember, around 1982, that there were suddenly records that offered kind of a middle path - you didn't have to make that crucial decision to avoid Eddie Money in favor of things that would get you beat up . . . you could listen to Soft Cell or the English Beat or something like that instead.

later two "much older" guys (one year older)

That should read ". . . later two "much older" girls (both one year older) . . . "

Reggae was extremely tough to find a long time ago, a crime considering how some American kids followed the British press! I used to like to read articles about reggae.

New wave and r & b.

Don't remember xpost "retro" til maybe late-ish 70s, a fashion thing, re bomber jackets etc--xgau defined it as "nostalgia with a will to power." When was it first applied to music? Anyway, although that was when I finally bought The Velvet Underground & Nico and The Who Sings My Generation--a punk deed, in my mind--after recently buying Nuggets, and in the wake of Patti Smith x Lenny Kaye distilling 60s into their own minimalist art-punk; ditto New York Dolls, folding "Pills," "Stranded In The Jungle" and "Don't You Start Me Talkin'" with their glam-punk originals. I bought new copies of those VU and Who LPs, but yeah, lots of other stuff now taken for granted was hard as hell to find until CDs took off. Sorry bout the boomer bait, but can't resist one more (it wasn't all Anglophilia)
http://images.45cat.com/sam-the-sham-and-the-pharaohs-wooly-bully-mgm-3.jpg