what were you listening to at 15?

1985- Muncie, Indiana
Led Zeppelin
Rush
The Police
Jimi Hendrix
Iron Maiden
The Who
The Scorpions
Yes
Triumph
Ozzy/Sabbath
Prince (It was 1985, everybody listened to Prince. We had this little dude at my highschool that used to come to school dressed like him, white flowing shirt and weird boots with heels.)

Around that time I probably heard The Clash, Violent Femmes and Black Flag around there for the first time or so. I know Metallica was '86 as I heard them right before seeing them open for Ozzy. I know I saw Stevie Ray Vaughn in 86 and I probably heard him for the first time in 85.

I know I was also a die-hard WFBQ (Q-95) listener, where Bob & Tom started and still are to this day. It wasn't "classic rock" quite yet, it was just rock. So all that Bob Seger and Mellancamp was pretty much heard all the time too.

Love, The Doors, The Animals, Frank Sinatra, Nancy Sinatra, Dean Martin, Piaf, Connie Francis and other older music

The Pogues
The Cure
REM
The Rievers
Fairground Attraction
Kate Bush (Experiment IV)
Dr Calculus (Designer Beatnik)

in '97 some of my favorite recent records were by Ben Folds Five, Skeleton Key, Timbaland & Magoo, the Geraldine Fibbers and Spiritualized, while I was delving into the back catalogs of Elvis Costello, A Tribe Called Quest, Fugazi, the Velvet Underground, etc.

15 was cool cause that was the year i re-figured out that mainstream rap wasn't evil

Prince, Rolling Stones, Billy Joel

in '97 it was impossible to ignore how evil it was, or to resist it (xpost)

just saying, bumping the blueprint sure beat the hell out of blackalicious

Electric Light Orchestra, Wendy/Walter Carlos, AM radio, the STAR WARS soundtrack, very early MTV, smattering of punk rock with my reprobate friends.

oh i know, i was just thinking of my own milder grappling with mainstream/non-mainstream rap at 15

I don't think I even knew what "underground rap" was until freshman year of college.

yeah as a teenager for me it was mostly puffy vs. not-puffy, nothing more obscure than black star

I don't think I even knew what "underground rap" was until freshman year of college.

― suidavyvan eht nioj (Whiney G. Weingarten), Monday, April 30, 2012 8:26 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i feel this way about indie rock

j5, dilated, and pre-fergie BEPs used to get a small amount regular radio play here tho circa 98-02. you didn't have to dig that deep to find that stuff. blackalicious were like one level down the corny west coast underground rap pyramid.

Zeppelin, Beatles, Iron Butterfly, Hendrix, Kraftwerk.
And (as a concession to the then present-day) the hippest sounds that '82-83 AM radio had to offer ("Electric Avenue", "Da Da Da", "1999" and "I Ran" in particular.)

In Florida in the 90s we had Rap City on BET. Anything subterranean was early No Limit, Suave House and Jam Pony cassette tapes. I saw Dr. Octagon on 120 Minutes, I guess.

we had BET but it shared a channel with the CHANNEL GUIDE CHANNEL FFS until like '02 and cut out to tell you what was on nbc and espn right when you heard "rap titty...rap titty"

mostly the original versions of the motown songs performed on the early seasons of american idol, which, you know, were probably better than the stuff i've listened to since officially getting into music

1993/4
Public Image Ltd, Pink Floyd, Wire, Sonic Youth, R.E.M., Stooges, Joy Division, Ramones, Residents, Rolling Stones, Negativland

About 2/3 of what I listened to was culled from the pages of the Trouser Press Record Guide. (Now it's only about half.)

luckily i got full-time BET in time to see killer mike rap about the stickers

I don't think I even knew what "underground rap" was until freshman year of college.

i don't think i knew what it was until they invented it, when i was about 25

Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Pavement and Massive Attack when I was 13. Does that give me cool points or does it reduces them?

i think you know the answer to that question

At 12, Throwing Muses and Pixies, courtesy of an older cousin deeply into 4AD (this was mid-90s Norway). Christmas Eve, 1996, 10pm, "Debaser". Fuck me, what an eye-opener that was.

Then alt-rock extravaganza all through my teenge years. Pumpkins, Jane's, assorted grunge (stuck to first generation, mostly, thank god), Weezer etc.

I definitely think I was cooler than most people my age at the time who were listening to Spice Girls, Guns N Roses and Metallica but judging by ILM's standards I don't know.

Pavement's pretty cool.. I didn't get them until way later.

Fifteen for me is 1994, so anything that was on the pop stations of that time, mostly embarrassing stuff like Ace of Base, The Cranberries, Enigma (LOL), U2, REM, etc.

I turned fifteen in 92. Things I remember listening to include:

Nirvana
Public Enemy
Ned's Atomic Dusbin (God Fodder was the first CD I ever bought.)
Beastie Boys
Ice-T - O.G.
Black Sheep
Red Hot Chili Peppers
Lemonheads
Matthew Sweet - Girlfriend
INXS
U2 - Achtung Baby

Obviously not exceptionally cool or anything, but I still like most of this stuff.

I think it was the next year that I started getting into indie rock, etc.

1983 - Mill Valley, CA

The Smiths, The English Beat, Simple Minds, Joy Division, Bauhaus, The Cure, Adam Ant

I had switched over from KRQR, an AOR format like the ones I had grown up in the Sierras to KQAK, 'The Quake' 'rock of the 80's' format, essentially leaving behind 60's and 70's classic rock for post-punk and new wave, to some extent impelled by MTV and by the New Wave girls in high school who I lusted after. A friend of mine came back from England w/The Smiths first album which he made a cassette of for me just before I left that summer to tour around Britain on a BritRail pass. That album seemed more moving than any of the pop we were listening to and even more dangerous than any of the gothy poses out there.

1998/1999 - by this point I thought I was really too cool for school - Air, Bad Religion, Belle & Sebastian, Beck, Daft Punk, Fugazi, Imperial Teen, Komeda, Lush, Luna, Moby, Quasi, Radiohead, Sebadoh, Stereolab, Sunny Day Real Estate, Tool, Weezer, Yo La Tengo

Turned 15 in july 1985. That was the combustion year for me-- I didn't stop liking synth pop (saw Howard Jones at the St. Paul Civic Center touring Dream Into Action!) but SST stuff and Sire Records art-haircut stuff teamed up to overhaul my world. Plus Robyn Hitchcock and Foetus. The influence of Greg at Rockhead Records & Tapes on Wabasha in downtown St. Paul (who looked exactly like John Waite) is all over my 1985 shift.

It was also the year I was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, the year I started reading indie comix and the first time a girl I liked liked me back (I blew the chance ;_;). So all in all, super pivotal on every level. I think this would have roughly been my top 10:

Husker Du - New Day Rising
Minutemen - Double Nickels on the Dime
Meat Puppets - Up On The Sun
Black Flag - My War
New Order - Power, Corruption and Lies
Foetus - Hole
The Fall - Wonderful And Frightening World Of
Thomas Dolby - The Flat Earth
Echo & The Bunnymen - Porcupine
Robyn Hitchcock - Fegmania

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

the best concert i saw when i was 15 was THE HORDE FESTIVAL, but at least it was the semi-cool year that they had Neil Young, Spiritualized, Soul Coughing, Morphine, Primus, Beck, etc.

I just realized that the first show I ever saw was when I was fifteen -- Helmet / Faith No More at the Roseland Ballroom in NYC.

Apparently I liked New Order (see shirt), Depeche Mode (see wall), and The Replacements (see below) I liked lots of other stuff too, but these pictures were the funnier than a list of bands I liked.
http://farm5.staticflickr.com/4030/4708560877_a83a99844d.jpg
http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7169/6718436027_a8c0ffb9ee.jpg

1990 btw

actually i might have been aaaaalmost 16 there -- it was the summer before i turned 16, so 1991

I am in my 1985 yearbook with a New Order shirt and porcupine hair

that was my attic bedroom. i loved it so much! it was like having an apartment all to myself. i had a record player, a cassette player, a radio, tons of magazines, scissors, tape, and sometimes my friends would come over and write all over the walls. good times. some of the writing is still there.

lol, jon lewis' list = exactly what i was listening to in 1985, when i was 18. plus the butthole surfers, big black, homestead's speed trials comp, replacements, gun club, cramps, etc. definitely wasn't into that kind of stuff when i was 15, though. at 15, i was much closer to musicfanatic (though 12 years prior).

lol <3 those lechera pix

I wrote all over my damn bedroom walls too, in sharpie. Drew the bird from the cover of Meat Puppets' Out My Way.

hoping someone will step in here and say "All I did when I was fifteen was listen to Rene & Angela records."

i had small discreet shrine to marty willson-piper near my vanity mirror -- what do i win?

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3549/3487401534_066bd048d8.jpg

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_wDkOwxqKmsM/SN5nB2R0bAI/AAAAAAAABw4/Izv49biRb1c/s400/Byrds+-+Mr+Tambourine+Man+pic+sleeve.jpg

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.