what was the coolest band/artist you were into when you were 17?

(Did not know the term "electro" at the time.)

I'm being kind of literal about "band" too.

people don't know how to be sad anymore. i blame the ritalin in the water.

i was a deeply uncool 17 year old but for some reason i also liked the velvet underground so that's my answer. yup, the quine tapes sitting on my cd rack alongside like eight red hot chili peppers albums, 17yo me was definitely pursuing a consistent aesthetic

(Wait, the question says individual artists, so I think these were kind of cool for the time: Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Fred Frith, Robert Fripp, Robert Ashley, Meredith Monk. . .)

think i was just getting into gabber, black metal and aphex twin at age 17.

music madness by mantronix was huge for me when i was 17. such a huge influence on the person i would become it's not even funny. i mean as much as i loved licensed to ill it didn't have the same effect. it effected my shoe choices. i bought a pair of filas.

music madness the only thing i can think of as cool as psychocandy too.

This was '99-'00 for me. I got into Sleater-Kinney when The Hot Rock came out, but I was still 16. Almost immediately at 17 I started getting deeper into older music. I got both Stand! by Sly and The Family Stone and Exile On Main St. a couple days after my birthday, dipping further a little later into Classic Rock with the then just-released Faces 'Best of' on Rhino, which in retrospect seems the most left field and cool pick because I'd never really heard their music (aside from "Stay With Me" a time or two on the radio--I was still a few months away from seeing Rushmore), and who else at my age at that time would have been listening to them?

FWIW, I got my first Velvet Underground albums when I was 14-15.

tool
wire

― riding a display name through (brimstead), Monday, September 12, 2016 1:21 PM (twenty-one minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

tool is a good call.

Tool, At The Drive-In and Radiohead definitely considered cool amongst teenagers in 2000.

Going by the definition of "cool" as "fashionably attractive or impressive" as per my dictionary, I think this would be either Nine Inch Nails or some hardcore band (I'll say Okara because I still like them), depending on the crowd I was talking to atm. Maybe Neubauten. I don't recall impressing anyone (maybe one other dorky kid) by listening to Glenn Branca or John Cage or Death Squad at 17, nor was an obscure krautrock compilation getting me into any parties.xp

I wish I went to a high school where these were cool:

Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Fred Frith, Robert Fripp, Robert Ashley, Meredith Monk. . .)

i felt hella cool being into Clinic and owning the first album on import

― riding a display name through (brimstead)

Yes! Clinic were one of my favorite bands.

Won you on this one though! I bought Internal Wrangler in 2000 so I was 14 then not 17. I was a huge Radiohead's Kid A fan and when I heard Clinic was going to be their opening band I bought Internal Wrangler. Walking With Thee and the Clinic EPS compilation were also great.

Not much a fan of what they did afterwards or maybe I just grew up.

Hm, 1984-85...probably Husker Du or Velvet Underground, presuming that my usual diet of 1960s/70s hardrock/psych/prog wasn't considered cool

I turned 17 in 1989 and it was all about Daydream Nation.

^ world's oldest Korn fan

m.i.a. and robyn, i was v basic :)

End of 1980/most of '81. Coolest would have been the Bowie of '72 through '78.

I was 17 in 2000 which is when I started going back to older music and not paying as much attention to contemporary stuff (apart from my deep obsession with Mansun). I got Virgin's Top 1000 albums book for Christmas the previous year which made go out and buy lot of the more obvious cool classics such as Television, Nick Drake, Sly & The Family Stone, Roxy Music, Beach Boys, Marvin Gaye, Kraftwerk, Scott Walker etc. The biggest game changer for me was getting Sulk by Associates three days after my 17th birthday. I listened to that album obsessively and by the next Christmas, I'd got all their other records, read the Billy Mackenzie book and found my musical hero. Definitely the coolest band I've ever liked.

I also got into Prince, The Go-Betweens and Felt that year who are still some of my favourite artists ever 16 years later. It really was a huge year that shaped my tastes significantly. I don't really find much time for Mansun these days.

to be 17 in 2000 seems like entering music through the gates of napster being guided by angelfire voices

We didn't have internet at home until 2002 and even then, I didn't really know what Napster was. I just spent all the money I had on albums in 2000. I was lucky that vinyl was so cheap back then. I'd just go to record fairs picking up all the big albums by Bowie, Roxy Music, Prince, Kate Bush etc for a couple of pounds each. I feel bad for 17 year olds trying to build up a vinyl collection today.

agelfire voices and napster guided my beach boys smile edits in 2000, for sure :-)

I wish I could the say the same. They became my favourite group a couple of years later and I ended up spending £30 on a badly presented bootleg of those sessions from a shop in town. I still remember telling my brother I'd got it and he just said, "why on earth did you spend that much on that?". He had a point.

I was 17 in 1984 and had been listening to various 60s stuff since I was 13 or 14 and had been a mod so still had a lot of that stuff.
Then gone through a psychedelic period for a couple fo years. Got into listening to the Birthday Party just after they split and followed influences NME articles from the early 80s were citing for tehm. Which was probably what got me into Pere Ubu and the Pop group, though it took me another couple of years to get into Suicide I think. Also picked up on a lot of things from reading through my elder brother's stack of NME's from the start of that decade.
I'd caught Sonic Youth's London debut at the Venue in Victoria at the end of '83 and had picked up the Kill Your Idols e.p. shortly after, probably picked up Confusion IS Sex sometime around then too.

Was also into the Cramps, Gun Club, various of the garagey type bands influenced by them and the Birthday party.
Caught the 2nd Nick cave and the Cavemen gig at the Electric Ballroom in spring of that year. Also Black flag, Swans supporting the Fall at Heaven. Einsturzende Neubauten at the ULU.

had been into the velvets and probably the Stooges for a couple fo years. Think I picked up Foetus's Hole sometime that year.
Trying to think when I picked up the 1st meat puppets lp it was either sometime that year with Meat puppets II coming as an Xmas present at the end of the year or definitely by the summer of the next year since i had it on tape when I interrailed around Europe.

I had the Scientists Blood red river before they played supporting the Bad Seeds at the Lyceum around Autumn of that year too.
Also picked up various bits of new York punk some time between late 83 and the end of 84. probably around december 83.
I saw the Moodists several times that year and really enjoyed them. Also the Box the line up of clock Dva that recorded Thirst minus Adi Newton I think. Loved teh way the singer danced.

Oni Nguyen of Sweet Charity had lent me a tape of some of the better Australian new garage stuff sometime in '83. I'm still meaning to pick up more stuff by the Sunnyboys. She gave me teh Great Society's Conspicuous Only in its absence when the shop shut which went onto be a favourite and still is.

I wish I went to a high school where these were cool

Me too! Although at least by maybe mid-11th grade I had a couple friends who were also into some of this stuff to varying degrees. In high school terms, almost nothing I liked was cool. (I might have jumped the gun a little with the electro--was probably 18 for that. Fall birthday.)

I guess this thread is only for people that had fully developed tastes and knowledge at 17.

I didn't really get properly into music until I was 18 (in `1991)

nirvana / pearl jam broke when i was 17. only inkling i had that something like that was brewing was jane's addiction. otherwise i schizoided between hardcore prog and velvet underground / joy division / dead kennedys / the cure

I wouldn't say my tastes were developed as such, but I'd been listening to music for a few years but my late teens shaped the way to a large extent. My tastes are still developing and will never stop, I hope.

1995 was the year I picked up a used sampler in Dinkytown (Electric Fetus?) that was 1/2 ... i care because you do and 1/2 Spanners. Going with Aphex (despite the fact Rolling Stone had already called his shit "classical music for the 21st century".)

Forgot one big influence. John Peel was fully active 4 nights a week. Which certainly helped at the time.
I also remember listening to David Rattigan playing Reggae on was it Capital Radio though that might have been a couple years earlier.
Also remember occasionally listening to Alexis Korner dj but not sure when that was.

I guess this thread is only for people that had fully developed tastes and knowledge at 17.

― Evan, Monday, September 12, 2016 6:37 PM (one hour ago)

um, no?

I was listening to plenty of 311, Sublime and Dave Matthews to balance things out

I guess this thread is only for people that had fully developed tastes and knowledge at 17.

― Evan, Monday, September 12, 2016 6:37 PM (one hour ago)

I definitely didn't think this was implied by "what was the coolest band you listened to?"

If you'd asked me when I was 17, my answer would have been different.

Up to 1979, the coolest thing I was into was the Firesign Theatre. Then "Music for Airports" came out.

what the hell is "fully developed taste"

i'm not sure i understood just how cool spacemen 3 were when i was 17 but i knew they were and i knew i liked them because of it. the only other band that think may qualify is the vu but i'm pretty sure i'd only heard banana & loaded when i was 17. i didn't hear wl/wh and s/t until i was 18 or 19 and so i didn't properly understand the velvets until after the cut off

1998: Blackstar, Common and OutKast

I'm just expressing my jealousy for everyone's apparently sophisticated tastes. I didn't get exposed to that kind of stuff until much later.

black uhuru and king sunny ade. saw both in concert in 1984/my 17th year. dunno if the smiths were ever the coolest band but i saw them that year, too

1991: Probably whatever new things were popping up on 120 Minutes each week.

I'm just expressing my jealousy for everyone's apparently sophisticated tastes. I didn't get exposed to that kind of stuff until much later.

seems like "what was the coolest band/artist you were into when you were 13?" would be more interesting, or more fun anyway

2000. I was starting to get away from black metal and into stuff like Stereolab, Kraftwerk, Steve Reich, electro music, some older industrial stuff like Chrome and Cabaret Volatire. I didn't think of it as "cool", though, because everyone was into the Bloodhound Gang and Alien Ant Farm.

When I was 17, it was a very good year: Tonight's the Night and Zuma, Highway 61 and Let It Bleed, Heavy Cream and The Worst of the Jefferson Airplane. (And Al Stewart, and Alan Parsons' Edgar Allan Poe record, and, um, you don't want know.)

1987 - Husker Du "Warehouse Songs and Stories" + "Zen Arcade", Black Flag "Damaged" + "My War", Maiden "Somewhere in Time", Metallica "Master of Puppets", The Cult "Electric", G'n R "Appetite for Destruction" and tons of classic rock. I also probably got into The Ramones and Sex Pistols and other punk around the same time. I can't remember when I saw my first punk show as it might have been early '88, but it was Dag Nasty at the No Bar and Grill when "Wig Out at Denkos" was their new record.

A couple years later Doug Carrion of Dag Nasty worked at a Tracks records in Bloomington and that dude turned me onto a bunch of stuff like Gang of Four and P-Funk.

One thing I should point out for period correctness, I had all this stuff on tape. I had a bitchin' set of tapes. I was way too big a dope to actually buy it on vinyl or actually own a CD player yet. I didn't get a CD player for a year or so later.

I also wish I had better taste back then. Most of the bands I listened to back then I still enjoy to some degree so I guess some of them were decent or my taste didnt evolve that much.

I guess this thread is only for people that had fully developed tastes and knowledge at 17.

― Evan

on consideration i guess liking led zeppelin _does_ qualify as "fully developed tastes and knowledge". everything since then has been gravy.