Five / Ten / Fifteen Years ago today... what were you listening to?

10 years ago: I think it was June of 1994 that I had to make a decision about what new album to buy: the new Sonic Youth, the new Seal, or the new Spin Doctors. I went with the new Seal!! Oh, I think I was also mildly interested in The Crow OST because of that Cure song, and "The Big Empty" by Stone Temple Pilots, both of which were getting a lot of airplay on Q101 in Chicago.

15 years ago: I know for a FACT that on this exact day, 6/23/89, I went to see the Cubs play the Expos at Wrigley Field. My 7-year-old brother was wearing a box on his head to keep the sun out of his eyes, I guess, and a bunch of drunk bleacher bums liked his style and started a trend in right field. I was listening to the crowd yell out "AN-DRE!" when Andre Dawson took his place in the outfield.

5 years ago: boredoms
10 years ago: drive like jehu
15 years ago: hmm.. probably something like breaking circus or bitch magnet

10 years: san francisco, american music club (well September 1994, but close)

15 years: 1989, uh, disintegration, the cure

I still listen to all of this stuff all the time!

5: cure and social distortion and bjork and talking heads
10: (covered above)
15: guns and roses - patience

OK, 6/1999: Fuzzy's Hurray For Everything.
6/1994: Letters to Cleo, Aurora Gory Alice
6/1989: Indigo Girls first album. This one's easy to remember, because I had just seen them open for REM the previous month.

10: got into jazz, Miles Davis, Dexter Gordon, Coltrane, Steely Dan, Zeppelin, '80s new wave, Replacements, Husker Du, U2, the The, Morrissey, Pearl Jam, lots of blues.

15: Slaughter, Skid Row, Dokken, Whitesnake, Warrant, Metallica, Megadeth, U2.

10: Led Zeppelin and REM were my favourite bands. Smashing Pumpkins, Soundgarden, Doors, Hendrix, Rush, Yes, Cream, Jeff Beck, Pink Floyd, The Doughboys (ha), Soul Asylum, Hiphoprisy (heh). I thought the Sex Pistols were totally revolutionary. Buddy Guy, Muddy Waters, Lightning Hopkins, Howlin' Wolf. Oliver Jones, Ed Bickert, Django Reinhardt, Chelsea Bridge, Dizzy Gillespie. Cole Porter. Some John Cage. I'd just started listening to campus radio and was in awe - was appreciating but not buying indie, shoegaze, acid jazz, ambient, techno, industrial, free jazz. Was just getting into Sonic Youth.

15: Bon Jovi was my favourite band, then Aerosmith, then Def Leppard. Other hair metal. Dipping a toe into Iron Maiden and Metallica. Rush's hits. Just starting to be more aware of Zeppelin, Doors, Hendrix, Pink Floyd.

1994: It happens that this was at an extreme point in my Arabic music discovery phase. Warda; George Wassouf; probably some New Sound stuff: Hanan, Ihab Tewfic, Amro Diab, Mustapha Amar; Samira Tewfic; Mohammed Abdo; etc.

1989: Hip-hop, though in June 1989 I probably wasn't into nearly as much of it as I was a half a year later. But definitely Public Enemy and Ice-T. Psychic TV. Roxy Music (which I was beginning to warm to a lot more around this time). Songs on the radio (some of this might have been a bit earlier or later): Guns n Roses, Samantha Fox, Inner City "Good Life," etc.

5 years ago = Pantera, Meshuggah
10 years ago = Smashing Pumpkins, Nirvana
15 years ago = I was 2 years old and somebody already name checked Raffi, so I'm fucked.

Anyway, I don't expect to be knocked sideways again by a whole new genre or a new musical culture. Or anyway, if it happens it's going to have to take some sort of change bigger than just buying a Rough Guide to some place I hadn't considered before. If I were to learn to play an instrument, that could change the way I hear music enough that it would change my taste up in a big way. Maybe marrying someone with a fanatical enthusiasm for a music I don't currently love would do it (although the reports I hear from married posters doesn't suggest that they magically come to love their spouse's favorite music). I definitely think that the limits of my current taste still give me plenty to explore (even if a lot of it is back catalog). Also, it's possible that I will not be thinking about it nearly as much at some point. That would be fine with me. I think my time could be better spent doing other things besides making lists of CDs I want, or songs I like, and so forth.

(Disclaimer re CDRs: A friend sent me a couple CDRs for me which ended up duplicating a couple CDs I already had in my collection. I offered them on my salsa 2004 thread, and Ned was the only taker. I do not have CD burning capabilities.)

Ten years ago, my mother would have just gotten Daniel Lavoie's "Woman to Man" album which to this day is one of my twenty five favorite albums, yet I would all but guarantee 99 out of 100 people have no idea who this is.

Fifteen years ago I was in Kindergarten/First Grade, in love with the Beach Boys and Bruce Springsteen's Born in the USA album. Oh, and lets not forget Three Dog Night's "Joy to the World".

Seventeen years ago I remember getting Born in the USA because I loved hearing the song on the radio. Played a kiddie broom as an air guitar at age 4. And for christmas 1986 I got my "Born in the USA" plastic guitar and was as happy as any kid could ever be

10 years ago: The Groop Played Space Age Batchelor Pad Muzakblues, Crooked Rain, Bakesale, Inhaler, Evol, Tweez, Orange, White Light White Heat

15 years ago: no bands just certain songs from the radio..."Americanos" - Holly Johnson, "Beds are burning" - Midnight Oil, "Good Thing" - Fine Young Cannibals, "Veronica" - Elvis Costello, "We didnt start the fire" - Billy Joel, "Mary" - The Four Of Us, "Me, myself and I" - De La Soul, "Song for whoever" - Beautiful South

5 years ago: "Supreme Clientele" and lots of Naked-style house
10 years ago: Cheap jungle compilations and "Acid Resistant" mixed by DJ DB
15 years ago: Suicidal Tendencies and "Appetite for destruction"

This makes me sound much more conventionally 'indie' than I really am... but my record collection has become much broader in the past five years, I promise!

5: Fugazi + Shellac @ Stratford Rex
10: S*M*A*S*H + Echobelly + Elastica @ LA2 (my first ever 'proper' gig)
15: Jean Michel Jarre @ Docklands (my first gig of any type ever - my dad took me!)

5 years ago: Can, Slint, Drum'n'Bass, Company Flow, Mogwai, "Warp"
10 years ago: Jungle, MBV, Cocteau Twins, Nirvana, "Trip Hop", Radiohead, Nick Drake, Euro-pop
15 years ago: House, Amiga "mods", Metallica, Commodore 64 game tunes

OH YOU FUCKING LEGEND! I'm now going to wallow in that general memory before answering the question.

mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

Anyway:

5 - GYBE!, Hood, To Rococo Rot
10 - Smashing Pumpkins, Portishead
15 - Tom Lehrer, Ivor Cutler

-- Jacob (jwrigh...), June 24th, 2004. (later)

it's funny that you bring up nirvana but not smashing pumpkins. at 8, i definitely owned nevermind (which was given to me along with green day's dookie for my 8th birthday). i'm 18 now and awful at math so forgive my subtraction.

p.s. i was really into thriller around there too.

1994 Laurie Anderson - Bright Red / Nirvana - Unplugged / Portishead - Dummy / Swell - 41 / Red House Painters - Shock Me EP plus current releases of NIN, Beck, Weezer, Blumfeld, Blur, Jeff Buckley, Catchers, Luna, Glee Club, Massive Attack etc.

1989 Mary Margaret O'Hara - Miss America / Laurie Anderson - Strange Angels

Summer of 94: Aphex Twin 'SAW 2', Stereolab 'Mars Audiac Quintet', and Blur 'Parklife'. (but not Portishead - I didn't hear that until about six months later)

Summer of 89: Not a good time for me. I hated the Stock Aitken & Waterman stuff in the charts, but (to borrow a phrase someone else has used here) my Indie Year Zero was 1990. So, not Stone Roses or The Pixies. That came later. I was actually listening to old stuff by Elvis Costello and The Specials which I'd got from second hand record shops.

1994: Ted Nugent, Black Sabbath, Tom Waits.

1989: Slayer, Paul's Boutique, King Sunny Ade.

good lord thats humbling.

1999:  David Sylvian's Dead Bees on a Cake and Sting's Brand New Day were pretty much all the "new music" I got into at the time, being pretty much disinterested in the whole idea of "new music" and wanting to wallow in my '80s musical comfort food. I think I might've been aware of a new release by Beck at the time, but even though I liked his singles I wasn't enamored of them enough to check his music out further. (Which means that I'm going to have to try to do some catching up and discover what it was that I missed back then.)

1994:  Oasis's Definitely Maybe, Nirvana's Unplugged in New York, Counting Crows' August and Everything Else, The Pretenders' "I'll Stand By You", the Rolling Stones' Voodoo Lounge, Nine Inch Nails' The Downward Spiral, Soundgarden's "Black Hole Sun", Weezer's "The Sweater Song", Green Day's Dookie, The Offspring's Smash, R.E.M.'s Monster, Beck's "Loser", Blur's "Girls and Boys", Hole's Live Through This, anything by the Stone Temple Pilots -- all of this new music delighted me that year. Wow. Such a lengthy list. Um, I was a teenager back then... ? Yeah. And it would be obvious that I was still heavily into the '80s. I think I was still in mourning over the demise of "Classic MTV" and that part of the reason why I would stay up late every Sunday night to watch "120 Minutes" is because they would play their "Cult Classic" and that was the only time I got to watch any '80s music videos. Until maybe the tail end of that year, that is -- I think that's when "The Big '80s" debuted on VH1. Oh yeah. I was totally stoked about that when it happened.

1989:  Geez, I forget. I think I might've still been really into "oldies" then. I certainly wasn't paying as much attention to music as I did five years from then, probably because I never thought to ask my parents if they could buy me cassettes. If I would've, I might've been a huge Beatlemaniac that year. Oh yeah, and I would've begged for the Jim Croce best-of because of how much I loved "Time in a Bottle". One music-related memory from that year -- helping Dad out with some household repair or another and listening to an oldies station with him, both of us singing along to songs such as "American Pie" and "Alone Again (Naturally)".

late 1995: Funki Porcini - Hed Phone Sex, Coldcut - Journeys by DJ, Goldie - Inner City Life, Blur - The Great Escape, Black Grape - It's Great When You're Straight...Yeah

late 1990: Ride - Nowhere, Pixies - Bossanova, EPs by The Cranes, Slowdive, Five-Thirty, The Wedding Present, Pale Saints

10: Bjork, Portishead, Garbage, Tori Amos, PJ Harvey

15: The KLF, Technotronic, C&C Music Factory

10: Zeppelin, Floyd, Fugazi, probably some jazz like Art Blakey and Charlie Parker

15: Living Colour, Primus, G'n'R

10: Oasis

15: the Cure, REM, Billy Bragg

10: foo fighters, cypress hill

15: chris huelsbeck, matt gray

15 years ago: dude, I love Benny Hester's Through the Window, Michael W. Smith's Go West Young Man, and Steven Curtis Chapman's rockin' For the Sake of the Call. "Go west young man, when the evil goes east." Yeah!

10 years ago: me and Jesus both love DC Talk's Jesus Freak, Newsboys' Going Public, and everything - I mean everything - put out by Tooth & Nail Records...especially the hardcore stuff like Zao which my parents think sounds demon possessed!

5 years ago: I just can't get enough of POD's The fundamental elements of southtown, MxPx's The ever passing moment, and I'll be damned (oops, sorry Lord, shouldn't have said that) if Sonicflood's self-titled debut isn't the most amazing thing in the world. Worship music and rock music, together? Who knew!

(Obviously my taste in music has been in a constant state of deterioration)

2000: Boredoms "Super aE", Neutral Milk Hotel "In the Aeroplane over the Sea", Apples in Stereo "Tone Soul Evolution", Ennio Morricone, Chopin, Charlie Parker

1995: Boredoms "Soul Discharge", Capt. Beefheart, Sun Ra, Merzbow, Stereolab, Harry Partch, Fushitsusha

1990: The Smiths, Morrissey, Pixies, Jane's Addiction, Metallica, Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Cure