if there is one thing i'm certain of, it's that an individual's taste in music tells you absolutely nothing about that person aside from their cultural background and age. so allow me to demonstrate to you, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the proof of my status as a white millennial-gen z cusp person. but don't worry, this shouldn't be THAT painful.
basically, what i would like to use this page for is to talk about my favorite music and embed youtube videos so you can listen to it if you like. you will be able to tell if your tastes mesh with mine immediately, and if they don't, you can rest easily knowing you clicked off this page without missing anything of note. something else i've come to accept is that there's no such thing as "good" taste, just aligning or diverging taste. that's obviously my most generous and benevolent centrist Art Appreciator opinion. i do still think quite a lot of music is genuinely bad. but i can also see how people would look at what i like and go "what in the god damn..." so i'm not judgy.
i grew up around people who use their taste in music to assert how interesting and intellectual they are based on how obscure what they like is. while i think everyone should try to stray outside the top 40 as much as they can, just to experience a broader range of art, i think the idea that your music taste is a direct indicator of how smart and discerning you are is for sad people who don't have any self esteem, or who lack their own personality. sorry if that's you. we can all be passionate about the things we love, but when it strays into territory of judging people too harshly over preferred entertainment, i just think everybody should maybe try to calm down a little! so i will present to you, with confidence, my extremely middle-of-the-road White People taste in music. please enjoy! or don't. it's fine either way.
without further ado, i will now open with my herd thinning song. if you thought this was going to be some obscure noise metal song, you are incorrect. instead, it is something so much worse to so many people.
Mediocre Progressive Metal.
if you look up coheed and cambria, one of the most notable things about them is that they're a band that sings about the events of a comic book written by the band's frontman, claudio sanchez. i have never, in the 17 years (at time of writing, 2023) that i have loved this band, read a single page of any of their comic books. i frankly could not care less. i listen to them because i genuinely, really love their music. in fact, because the vast majority of it is so heavily narrative-based, i've kind of had this long-running invented story of what's happening in the plot that runs through my head when i listen to it.
what i enjoy about it is claudio's extremely energetic vocals (the man can belt one out), as well as the stranger lyrical style of their older music. a good example of that being a favor house atlantic (i recommend not watching the video, as it is fucking ancient and deeply cringey. i mean, unless you like mid-2000s music video cringe?).
this is music i've been listening to since i was 14, and nearly every other band i liked when i was 14 i find to be pretty boring as a 31-year-old. but nope, these guys are still at the top of my list. Vaxis II, after god knows how long, finally supplanted Good Apollo as my favorite Co&Ca album, something i thought wasn't possible.
moving right along, let's try get a little more interesting. moderat is another one of my top-10 bands, and their most recent album, MORE D4TA, is my favorite. the 4 is referencing that it's their 4th album, after the albums Moderat, II, and III. my favorite song off MORE D4TA is COPY COPY.
apparently, their genre is "electronica," according to wikipedia. i frankly know very little about music genres. i just listen to what i like. i would describe a lot of their music as, like, not ambient but Vibes Based. which, isn't all music vibes based? but maybe you get what i mean by that. i checked the genres for MORE D4TA specifically, and "ambient" is listed there, so maybe that's all i mean by that, lol. anyway, if there's any band on here i want you to actually listen to, it's these guys. they're a german band that sings in english, and some of their lyrics are just unusual enough to be really interesting to me.
while we're still hovering around the topic of metal, let's get one of the less obscure bands out of the way.
i've loved tool (alt/progressive metal) since i was at least 11 years old, but to me they were always kind of my brother's thing rather than mine. it's only been in the past few years that i started really listening to them again. some of their lyrics have the political analytical depth of an edgy teenager from the 90s, but the shit still bangs so i don't really care lmao. this song in specific - sober - also reminds me of my brother. he is someone who struggles with addiction, and i have a very specific, if foggy, memory of him telling me that sober was his favorite tool song when he was 16 (myself, 15). so, it has some sentimental meaning to me now.
hey, speaking of metal bands that were big in the 90s and 2000s, it's those guys who inspired me to look up shit like the armenian genocide when i was like 16 and radicalized me against the united states government before i got out of middle school! awesome.
i cannot possibly overstate the impact system of a down (alt, nu, heavy, and progressive metal, apparently) has had on my life. i had their first 3 albums on CD, and would listen to them on the way to school and the way home from school on my shitty, beat-to-hell CD player quite literally every single day. in 2005, when they dropped dual albums hypnotize and mezmerize, i had no idea i would never see another album from them. at the time, i took it for granted that they'd just make more some day. haha. in any case, spiders has been my favorite song of theirs basically my entire life. i know i stole the Toxicity CD from my brother when i was 10, so i've been listening to them for at least 2/3rds of my life.
i used to draw dumb little pictures referencing their songs all over my school folders and notebooks and shit. there was this one kid who was obsessed with trying to bully me for liking them, but to me they were Objectively Cool, and i would not be shamed for liking what was basically the best music i'd ever heard in my life. it was pretty dumb, but it's funny to me now. there's plenty of bands i like more than SOAD these days, but their shit still goes hard and i always enjoy listening to it (even if i've heard every track hundreds of times).
moving away from metal, modest mouse (indie rock) appears from the fog of the late 2000s and approaches me to smash a metal chair across my back.
i fucking love these guys. they sing about silly little nothings with the slappingest upright bass you've ever heard, and it is, to me, eternal. i also really enjoy the frontman's singing style. someone on tumblr made a viral post describing it like he's singing while being chased with a hose, and that is so perfect a descriptor, i don't know what i could possibly add. dude is always going ham in every song, and i can't get enough of it. my other favorite song by them is education; why should be immediately obvious.
and here's the obligatory death grips section. as is only appropriate, i got into death grips because of tumblr memes. you know the baby sensory video with beware playing over it? yeah. that's the one.
shit just goes hard, man. what else am i supposed to say?
nero's day at disneyland is another easy favorite band for me. wikipedia says their genres are experimental, glitch, and breakcore. cool, probably!
i was actually recommended this band from one of my twitter friends. i love all of their music a ton.
little people (instrumental hip-hop) is one of those musicians that's been in my life for so long, i barely remember how i encountered them. i'm pretty sure they popped up as a random song on pandora in either 2009 or 2010 when i was still in highschool. i still like their music quite a lot.
good kid (indie rock) is a much more recent band i've come to love. as you can see, i like a lot of indie rock.
i got into fair to midland (alternative/progressive metal) in 2022 when one of their songs played through spotify's recommendation algorithm. unfortunately, they've been broken up for a long time and only ever released two albums. but they are banger albums. by now, you are probably seeing a pattern in my music taste.
iron and wine (folk rock) is yet another band that's been with me most of my life. my partner in highschool and college was the one who showed them to me, and she told me that at first i thought they were boring and didn't like them. i do vaguely remember that, lol. i don't know why i changed my mind, but i did at some point, and they've been a permanent fixture in my life ever since.
i can't remember exactly how i got into baths (electronic), but i think for him it was another "random song on pandora" situation. in the early 2010s, i was into a lot of indie electronic music. most of it didn't stick to me, but i still dearly love baths' music. it helps that he sings about being in love with men occasionally.
brockhampton (hip-hop and R&B) is another recent addition to the favorites list. i got into them from an animation by worthikids. (which, apparently, is how a lot of people got into them. that's pretty funny.)
and of course, there's the weeknd (R&B and hip-hop). he was another random recommendation, though i think it was a different random radio style website (the name of which i cannot remember).
it was very strange to watch someone who i had first encountered as a random indie artist on an internet radio station shoot into global stardom basically overnight. wikipedia says his first studio album was in 2013, but i swear i heard the song "thursday" as early as 2010. but maybe that's a fake memory. i don't know! in any case, i've kind of been turned off his music lately after a bunch of controversy. it would be a lie of omission to pretend like he wasn't in my top 3 for like 5 years running, or that i didn't still like his music. it is what it is.
deltron 3030 (hip-hop) is another band that was recommended to me through the same internet radio that recommended the weeknd. i really wish i could remember the name of it, it had a ton of indie music that wasn't posted anywhere else. anyway, deltron 3030 is not at all indie, of course. i wish i could say i got into del's music because of gorillaz, but i wasn't very curious about the bands i listened to when i was a kid, so i never looked him up until i was well into adulthood.
mother mother (indie rock) has been one of my favorite bands for so long, i genuinely cannot remember my first encounter with them. they're also a favorite band of my best friend, and we've loved them since we first became friends in 2010. mother mother had a situation a little bit like the weeknd (or more accurately, glass animals) where they suddenly got a huge blast of attention because of tiktok, and suddenly what had previously been something between me and my friends became beloved by teenagers everywhere, and so snobby weirdos online had to make it their duty to declare mother mother Cringe Tumblr Music.
unsurprisingly, all of that shit blew over and nobody cares about them again. goodbye and good riddance.
another band i like that got a blast of tiktok fame is glass animals (indie rock, psychedelic pop). i think rox (my friend) might've shown them to me in 2015? i'm not sure. but it annoys me So Much that their most mid song off dreamland was the one that got all the attention. i'm sorry but heatwaves is mid, man! it's fine, but why THAT song? anyway.
we're getting past my list of "all time favorites" and moving more into "i recommend these artists because they aren't super well known, and i would like if you maybe paid them some attention."
i'm going to start with someone whose music i started listening to because we were both in the furry fandom and knew each other through it. i was friends/partners with someone who liked to make music, and it was probably through her that i met june, but it's been so long that i genuinely do not remember.
she's made quite a lot of music since 2010, but i figured i would add the song that was my favorite 12 years ago. one of my most treasured artifacts is a little poster that came with the physical copy of the CD i bought. i've never hung it up in all this time, because i didn't want to tear it up from tape or tacks, but i've been living in the same apartment for like 6 years, so maybe i should just hang it up already.
sea oleena is another excellent musician whose music i got into because of pandora. it would be a lie to call her a favorite, because for a span of 6 or 7 years, i completely neglected to keep up with her music and frequently forgot about it. i've been taking greater pains to actually get digital copies of the music i like, and re-expand my library after spending far too long relying on spotify out of convenience. for an embarrassing number of years, i just stopped listening to new music out of a depressive fog of not giving a shit.
but i've begun to rectify that, and with doing so have revisted sea oleena and found her music is not lacking.
purity ring (future pop, synth pop, dream pop, and witch house? ya ok), like sea oleena, is another band i found through pandora. basically, i used to just listen to pandora for hours and hours and any song i really liked, i would look up the band who made it and check out the rest of their discography. it's a pretty good way of finding new music.
ratatat (electronic rock) is not nearly as obscure as some of the music i like, but i'll put them here anyway. a prominent memory i have is being in college and telling one of the hipster art kids in my lithography class that i liked ratatat, and he gave me the most geniune "really?" like he didn't expect Me to like (or maybe know about?) that kind of music. to this day, i still don't really know what he meant by that. well anyway, they're very good.
THEY. (R&B, hip-hop, rock) is another musical duo that isn't necessarily obscure, but they're a favorite of mine that i completely forgot to put on this list until i started looking through my spotify library for music to download. it actually used to be a lot harder to look them up before they got more attention, with the name they use, lol. i really enjoy the vocal style, and the music is very catchy.
i just realized i also forgot willow beats! they're another high-ranking favorite, i just have a terrible memory. they're another indie band without a wikipedia page so i don't know what genres to list here, but "electronic" is probably a safe one.
i also somehow forgot lucianblomkamp. again, he has no wikipedia page, so i'm not sure what to list as a genre besides electronic. maybe ambient in some songs as well? i actually have no memory of how i first encountered his music or how long it's been, but it was probably through spotify's recommendation algorithm.