Mostly I just listened to steely dan and chemical brothers tho, and a lot of trance mixes which I guess some people probably think is a lil cringe, such as people who dont know how to have fun
Arguably some of the silvagunner stuff I genuinely enjoyed in college is cringy but I mean come on who doesnt appreciate this
Oh I did definitely listen to this entire video while working on a final project in sophmore year of highschool
Im not proud of that
I should definitely go back through my old music folder because Im sure theres some way worse stuff that I buried
I mean, I did make a thread here about how Jim Steinman was a big thing for kid me and I still listen to his stuff sometimes, and sure did tear up at hearing the opening song of Streets of Fire on a really good theater stereo, so I feel like self cringing has died for me a long time ago.
Meanwhile across the pond Kid Me was probably jamming to BooH2: Back into Hell while acing Special Cup on 150cc. The SoF-Steinman connection is news to me though
I grew up in a basically amusical household and had no friends so by the time I was first actually getting exposed to music I was like 16 and was basically the guy from the “guy who likes music” vines. I didn’t have bad taste in music so much as no taste in music so I listened to like… whatever was in the top 40 for pop and alternative plus like Utada Hikaru and L’arc en Ciel and Gram Parsons and Dinosaur Jr and Bonnie Prince Billy and Rachmaninoff. I just had literally no filter for anything I heard.
In retrospect I think a lot of that stuff still owns. The only thing I’m embarrassed about listening to was the parade of third rate pearl jam soundalikes and some of the worse emo (At the Drive-in I still think were good, Coheed and Cambria… I mean In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth: 3 rips, but maybe less so all the love/murder ballads sung by a grown man doing like a weird baby voice?)
In general it’s hard for me to dislike music because it’s kind of like pizza. Bad pizza is still pretty good. Exception would be I guess stadium country, which is like if you baked an American flag and a half-empty can of beer directly into a pizza.
These days cello eats most of my musical life so I pretty much only listen to cello rep until my partner drags me out to gogo penguin or something
cringest thing I enjoy listening to is probably drum corps but I’m not embarrassed by it. I love listening to snare drums and horn toots and watching the people float around on the grass into funny formations
maybe soothing sounds for baby? or like perry and kingsley? when I saw jean jacques perry live he was like skipping around on stage saying LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL MUSIC IS BEAUTIFUL
or the ffxiv wedding reception music that I listen to constantly
I think this is all really cool though. if someone is into something enough it surpasses cringe to me. like it’s impossible for me to be embarrassed by harmless enthusiastic sincerity, especially with music
not having an opinion out of fear is the only cringe
At 18, the CDs I probably listened to the most were The Cranberries, Crash Test Dummies, Weird Al, the Jekyll & Hyde musical soundtrack, and the soundtrack to some MechWarrior game I’d never heard of that a friend gave me.
I was going to, as a joke, say that I regret none of the eurobeat I listened to as a teenager, but that Magnetic Fields was cringe.
However, after listening though one of these Magnetic Fields albums again, yeah, it is a little cringe. I think I listened to this as a teenager because I thought it was the sort of thing I was supposed to listen to.
Oh dang, that means you are in the land where Steinman’s solo album actually sold, maybe?
I mean, like half of BOoH2 is from that, so.
But yeah, the opening and closing music numbers is SoF are both by Steinman. Originally we’re supposed to be Springsteen songs, but when he didn’t want to do it, they hired Steinman to write new songs, which is far too good of a fit.
Of the music from my teen years which was mainstream enough to find online Moby’s music is probably the least cringe though as a person he’s the most cringe to like. Reverse that for Rob Zombie. Tortoise is kinda neutral.
I was REALLY into prog rock in high school, I listened to so much of that stuff. The key to really nerding out about it was this website ProgArchives, which had an irresistably taxonomized database of all these various subgenres, with user reviews and a forum. I listened to so much stuff that got hyped on that website, and these days most of it really does not hold up. I look back on a lot of that stuff with embarrassment. I was into even the cheesiest stuff… Dream Theater, Ayreon, Pain of Salvation, Salem Hill, Spock’s Beard. God…
There are a few prog bands I liked back then that I still think are amazing though. King Crimson, Van der Graaf Generator, and Can come to mind right away. And that whole phase was a great gateway into better music.
I have a friend who’s still really into the band The Dear Hunter. We used to both love that band when we were in our early 20’s, but I can’t really enjoy them much any more. They were famous for this series of concept albums set in the 1910’s, all following one character. The music was this weird hybrid of prog rock and emo pop-punk, and the band frequently found ways to incorporate styles from the period pop music of the 10’s and 20’s. At the time I thought that was really cool.
Yesterday I was hanging out with my buddy and he talked me into revisiting those albums. Now, I just can’t take it. Their story follows this guy whose mom was a sex worker, and when he found out he totally lost his shit about it. Then as an adult he falls in love with another sex worker without realizing it, and when he finds out he flips out again. Lots of really dramatic songs where the singer is just airing out his awkward and problematic thoughts about what he sees as the shame of sex work… With frequent breaks for, like, swing jazz vaudeville songs about rail riding hobos who can see the future. I got to one part where the band was aping the style of a slave spiritual and I just couldn’t take it any more. Yikes.
Ok Ayreon owns, though. It’s incredibly “the little children of stonehenge how they danced,” etc. but that’s good actually
Edit: honestly though to properly situate my perspective I once played an arrangement of a Schumann liede for a recital called “my beautiful love is dead” and it’s all about how this guy’s love is dead, and she was incredibly beautiful, but now she only knows the cold embrace of the tomb so he’s going to go to the sea and probably die there also. Music kicks ass. It’s always been this embarrassing. Any attempt to make it cool or normal only makes it way, way more embarrassing
everything cringe i liked is cool and dope comma actually. noone can stop me
the early 2010s post-hardcore bands i liked? still bang. a number of them with the grain of salt related to the dudes in them being Scum Original Flavortm or Scum Pedophile Blasttm, because, christ that scene just attracted the worst dudes. but i still like (some) of the music (i dont find the rest of it cringe, i just find it … middling, which tbf, i mostly thought at the time also)
nu-metal? if anything i’m MORE into it now. the only thing i’m embarassed about is that i used to like the song Adema did for Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance when it’s obviously their worst track
i find the rest of their discography still fun to listen to tho and, frankly, i find their album structures fascinating (like, i’m sorry, the serious song about loss is immediately followed by the one whose hook is “i wish i could watch you drown and die / and take my time”? i genuinely find it like, anthropologically interesting). also calling a song about how someone was too dependent on you “codependent” because you needed an extra syllable and wanted to sound smart is also fascinating to me because, uh, codependent means a different thing my guy!
uhhh i’ll still belt it out to haruka kanata that shit bangs
basically everything else i listened to was distinctly not cringe by societal standards, so
I no longer listen to most of the stuff I thought was awesome in the old days, but I also have kind of gone past feeling embarrassed about it. I just like don’t really think about it at all I guess.
My main musical regrets are not being curious enough to learn more about cool bands like primal scream and stuff that I only knew one song by from movie soundtracks, and also wasting money on throwaway albums by crappy 90s alt rock one hit wonders. I did feel vindicated after moving to Canada and realizing Our Lady Peace are like still totally a thing here
In terms of childhood music memories lately I think a lot more about the songs my parents played when I was really little that I still think are amazing even as a crusty old person. The Bonnie Raitt cover of Angel From Montgomery was in heavy rotation on the minivan tape deck and I always dug it, but didn’t really care about John Prine at all till I was like thirty. I also used to apparently lose my shit as a toddler to the song Mr Big Stuff by Jean Knight. And you know what? That song fuckin slaps to this day
for a while, I couldn’t listen to these bands because they felt very “teenage years” to me and I’d cringe not because of what they sound like but because of what they reminded me of
These groups were my mainstays from age 15-18 that I was too self conscious to return to for like a decade after, but now I see no reason not to enjoy.
I also listened to white D&D nerd normy shit thanks to the osmosis of my friend group, so I had high levels of exposure to led zeppelin, emerson lake and palmer, pink floyd, etc and I can’t stand to hear any of that now.
Was also, briefly, really into grindcore and while I still respect the local jersey grindcore scene (exemplified by gridlink) I don’t really enjoy this stuff much anymore.
like I said, not my jam anymore, even though this was daily listening when I was 16.
Okay, here’s one that I still just cringe at, and can’t believe I ever liked in the first place (my excuse is that I didn’t have a lot of exposure to ukrainian stuff that wasn’t deeply unpleasant at the time, this was long before I ever dug into kharkiv post-punk)
Overall, my musical tastes were very defined by being a north jersey, wfmu listening, freegan punk who came of age at the absolute height of the jersey punk scene.
just posting this one because I saw them live when I was 15, opening for World/Inferno Friendship Society but I didn’t remember their name until about 5 years ago, and revisiting them I find that they’re still pretty great.
Oh yeah, I did not like MCR at all growing up, even though they were a local north jersey group.
A teenage Tulpa's salty opinions about MCR
Perhaps it was because of their ubiquity, but they were the definition of phony self-important mall-punk to me. Danger Days, the album where they dropped the maudlin self-serious schtick, at last persuaded me that they could make something enjoyable.
I’d never even considered that Can could be called a prog group. To me they were always the seminal krautrock band.
I don’t remember when I first listened to Can, but I was out of high school by that point. I know that I had listened to a lot of bands influenced by them before hearing them
That being said, King Crimson is probably the one group everyone in my D&D group enjoyed, so it was a compromise choice when I was sick to death of hearing nothing but ELP and Yngwie Malmsteen for 6 hours and no one would let me put on Boredoms
I still have a few Dear Hunter songs in my rotation, they’re catchy in the way that showtunes are. I always kind of felt like that’s what they were, showtunes for scene kids.
I feel like Say Anything is kind of in the same vein.
