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

I was pretty much listening to a lot of '70s progressive rock and hard rock stuff. The prog stuff was probably at its least "coolest" at that time.

17 = 1991

Probably Siouxsie and the Banshees. MTV used to play "Kiss Them for Me" quite bit and I thought it was the coolest thing ever. I had never heard of her before.

i was already on ilm when i was 17, so this is unfortunately extensively documented

a post on thread '11 favourite songs of the moment, fuck' from the era:

pixies - wave of mutilation
david bowie - "heroes"
the fifth dimension - let the sun shine
bob dylan - corrina, corrina
john coltrane - my favourite things
velvet underground - sister ray
beatles - there's a place
department of eagles - no one does it like you
king khan & bbq show - i'll never belong
les georges leningrad - sponsorships
radiohead - you and whose army

scanning thru some other posts i was onto the-dream, clipse, ponytail, grizzly bear, boris, unicorns, jaylib, tyvek, bunchof captured tracks stuff, animal collective, beach boys, rick ross, sunset rubdown, discovery/vampire weekend, destroyer, wu tang (although i got into that much earlier), major lazer, dj quik. standard corny teen p4k reader with a noticeable canadian home bias, shades of budding popism. can't say much has changed, could be worse

For me 17 was June 91 -> June 92, so my entire senior year of high school. I was probably into "cooler" music earlier, as 8th and 9th grade was all punk rock, 9th and 10th was golden era hip-hop, but then 10th and 11th was kind of a mixed bag classic rock era (doors, hendrix, zepplin, the dead, parliament).

Seventeen was my full-on alternative rock / 120 Minutes era - Nevermind, Badmotorfinger, Blood Sugar Sex Magick, Ten, Trompe Le Monde, Gish, Loveless (which I didn't really get at the time), Mr. Bungle, and Sailing the Seas of Cheese all came out in like a six month period and this was all I was into at that time, plus Jane's Addiction from the summer before. This led to lots of terrible decisions to buy also-ran grunge era records and to truly believe somewhere out there somebody was combining funk and metal into something greater than the sum of their parts.

from the vantage point of a 40-something person deciding what would be a cool thing for a 17 year old American in 1991-92 to be into: Ornette Coleman (thanks to the movie Naked Lunch)
at the time, what I thought the coolest was: Suede

Didn't you like any crap bands?

― Bottlerockey (Tom D.)

Well, every now and then I listened to Velvet Underground & Nico.

But being serious, I was 17 in 2003 so downloading mp3s and exploring and reading about music was pretty easy and that saved me from listening to a ton of crap. I was constantly going through 'phases' of exploring new and old artists. I think the music I heard when I was 16 was actually cooler... that year I remember buying and listening a lot to albums by King Crimson, Can, Arvo Part, Kraftwerk, The Microphones, Boards of Canada, Broken Social Scene and Wilco. I also loved Sigur Ros, Godspeed You Black Emperor and Stars of the Lid though and now I can't find myself putting any of their music.

Depeche Mode

joygoat's post embodies the cool kid at my school

The coolest album I owned when o was 17 was Joy Division's closer, and I thought it was awful. I listened to Ben Folds Five's Reinhold Messner waaaaaay more often

1978: the Ramones, Elvis Costello, Talking Heads

The albums I remember buying in 2002 were:

King Crimson - Court of the crimson king
King Crimson - Sleepless: the concise king crimson (compilation)
Can - Tago Mago
Can - Cannibalism 1 (compilation)
Kraftwerk - Man Machine
The Microphones - The glow pt. 2
Wilco - Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
BSS - You forgot it in people
Mum - finally we are noone
Boards of Canada - Geogaddi
Boards of Canada - In a Beautiful place Out in the Country EP
Sigur Ros - Ágætis byrjun
Stars of the Lid - Tired Sounds of
Pixies - Surfer Rosa
Nirvana - In Utero
Tricky - Maxinquaye
Golden Palominos - Dead Inside
Sarah Mclachlan - Surfacing
DNTEL - Life Is Full Of Possibilities
Four Tet - Pause
Plaid - Double Figure
Low - Things We Lost In The Fire
A Silver Mt. Zion And Memorial Tra-La-La Band - Born Into Trouble As The Sparks Fly Upward <- I remember this one was pretty hard to find back then.
Godspeed You Black Emperor - Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antenna To Heaven

Besides that there were many mp3s and I guess that's where the most shameful selections are since I downloaded pretty much everything I stumbled upon. I think there was a phase were I downloaded lots of punk from bands like New Found Glory, NOFX, bad religion and such which I never really got into. Eventually I found Ramones which sounded pretty stupid back then and it took me almost a decade to appreciate it what they were doing.

The Fall
They're like Pavement except you can't understand them and you're allowed to like them

I'm not sure it was a 'cool' taste though. I only knew one person who also loved those kind of bands. People really hated when we played our music at parties, I guess that's the opposite of being cool.

tool
wire

*our music: music from our mix cds.

cybotron

wait, with all due respect to crass and felt, psychocandy came out when i was 17 and that kinda beats almost anything when it comes to cool.

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

Fran & Anna, Sydney Devine.

― Bottlerockey (Tom D.), Monday, 12 September 2016

Fran and Anna went to the same chapel as me when i was a teenager #namedropping

they still wore the outfits

bad moon rising/evol comes close too though...

I don't think I've ever liked anything cool, in fact this was about the age where I started to actively avoid talking about music with almost everybody around me. I was mostly into dorky modern prog/metal stuff like Isis, Mastodon, The Mars Volta, Tool etc. I still am really. I think I heard Cardiacs at 17 which was probably fucked my musical sensibilities forever.

This was 82/83. I was into so much relatively music back then. Including artists who I had been familiar with for a little but whose catalogs I was still discovering: Joy Division, a bit of Throbbing Gristle, some Sun Ra Arkestra, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Human League, X, XTC, Twilight 22 (brand new, of course), Velvet Underground, Shannon (but I didn't actually know her by name, so not sure that counts). Less sure of what older bands loomed especially large for me at the time aside from VU. 82/83 was a transition to being less snooty about pop and dance music, so random electro tracks and things like that made an impression.

okay, so, psychocandy, evol, new day rising all day long. and crass and felt. and i don't even want to think about how many times i played my "how soon is now" 12-inch. TOO many times. wait, low-life too...

(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.)

Hmm, coolest? Public Image Limited, and Kraftwerk.

Least cool? Ummm... oh the phone is ringing..