Everyone loves that first album!
5 Likes
I haven’t revisited Ayreon in many years (I’m too scared), but I think some of their records probably hold up much better than others. The earlier, more self-awarely goofy albums probably fare better than the later ones that took themselves more seriously and tried to establish a mythos.
I bet Into the Electric Castle is still a fun, stupid time. I mean, it’s basically about a dumbass D&D party of warriors from different time periods and cultures having to work together to escape an evil techno-castle.
I think The Universal Migrator probably holds up OK too, always liked that one’s concept more than the others. The last man alive on a martian colony uses a VR rig to experience the lives of various figures from the past. So the first disc is basically just a bunch of songs about cool moments in history. Then, through learning about the history of humanity in this way, he undergoes a mystical transcendence and becomes some kind of cosmic force of reincarnation, traveling through the universe to rebirth humanity. Which means that disc 2 is this manic, triumphant journey through outer space, with all these metal songs about quasars and nebulas and shit. Pretty fun! And I was probably reading too much into it, but it sort of has this nice children’s-book-style theme of self-improvement and transcendence through reading and learning about history.
1 Like
That’s totally true. I’ve been waiting for the Dear Hunter guy to just write a stage musical like he so clearly wants to do. I’ll say, from revisiting the band, they do have some good tunes. If they edited down their monstrously long and wanky records and they got a new lyricist, they’d be a decent band.
1 Like
i was a huge huge fan of the lead person’s previous band the receiving end of sirens, but i only ever listened to the first album
that was wild, the arrangements were bonkers and they basically had 3 singers and these really long intense songs with interludes and transitions between songs
that’s all the things i like
1 Like
I was the oldest sibling and I was terminally uncool, so I didn’t listen to any cool music. In fact, I had the horribly cringe opinion that “all new music” was “bad.”
I got really into Frank Sinatra, Nat “King” Cole, and the Beatles in high school. Always had one of those in my Discman.
Oh, and the Final Fantasy VII soundtrack.
I was fucking insufferable.
8 Likes
Oh and a cringey thing about me now is how much I’ve come to like a lot of pop shit from when I was in high school, 1998–2001.
6 Likes
Reading the posts in this thread it occurs to me that I’ve never really had a cooling off period from the music I listened to in my teenage years because I’ve been able to maintain a functional hard drive for my entire life and almost always listen to Everything I Own on shuffle, and also have a weird archivist’s instinct where I just keep everything I’ve ever had and refuse to delete any of it, you know, Just In Case; so my teenage cringelistens have come up regularly any time I just put on music for the past two decades+. I never stopped listening to any of it.
I have Weird Al Yankovic’s entire discography on my computer.
15 Likes
this has been one of the best things about living with dylan actually. he also just has everything and putting the entire library on shuffle is always a fun adventure. i’m kinda sad that i’ve selectively culled large chunks of my music with each laptop migration.
1 Like
i listened to the entirety of hybrid theory a couple days ago. i bet if you gave me a blind guardian or one of the old S3RL songs to listen, i’d be ok with it too. i’m beyond cringe. no – cringe fuels me
7 Likes
I keep trying (and occasionally do it successfully) to integrate new music into my listening repertoire, but I keep returning to the stuff I got into in the early 2000s when I was in my early 20s. Elliott Smith, Modest Mouse, Cake, the Decemberists, Suzanne Vega, Sufjan Stevens, Mary Lou Lord, Neutral Milk Hotel.
I don’t regret any of it, 'cause I like it, but I know someone’s gonna think that’s cringe.
1 Like
i still to this day will call linkin park my favorite band and i will never apologize for it. they whip! i simply do not see it when it comes to mike shinoda’s current affairs
1 Like
but do you have System of a Down - Zelda Rap.wma
6 Likes
as i went looking for what you meant i kept murmuring “please tell me it’s just NFTs and not something even more repugnant” and, yeah, sure enough. w-what a relief . . .
4 Likes
This is child’s play. The true gem is Weird Al Yankovic - Weenie in a Bottle
1 Like
One of my friends in high school was the world’s biggest SOAD fan during that first record period and Serj actually mentioned her in an interview in Circus in one of the article’s bold pull quotes. She could not believe that the Zelda song was actually by Rabbit Joint instead of her boys and we had a very intense debate about it over a round of minigolf.
2 Likes
me and cuba and brooks and a bunch of others were listening to someone play toxicity on midi guitar in ffxiv a few days ago
7 Likes
i don’t really get the concept of ’ cringe ’ i listen to whatever the fuck i want esp since at the time of my teenage years i was undergoing and experiencing extreme trauma and neglect. it’s nice to come back to stuff i used to like and simply enjoy it. it’s just music who fucking cares that much anymore lmao
i used to make fun of mcr but then go home and listen to 3 cheers in it’s entirety. it’s just music if it sounds good to you whatever maybe learn how to enjoy things instead of having to ascribe stuff as weird or cringe and actually enjoy your life and stop being such a mark lmao
7 Likes
i just remembered i went through a pretty big creed and p.o.d phase but i honestly don’t care pop music is fun it’s okay to like things we can’t all be avant garde all the time and i don’t trust pple who feel the need to put on those kinds of airs you’re just a mark srry lol
2 Likes
My teenage music was Cake, The Talking Heads, The Decemberists (late teens into early 20s I think), a small number of highly specific songs from popular bands my friends listened to, and an overwhelming amount of movie soundtrack instrumental music. I was listening to it in order to learn to play it on the xylophone. I went to a school with a big music program so although this wasn’t cool at the time, it also wasn’t quite cringe to my peers either.
The only cringe thing I did with that shit was in my senior year of high school… everyone in the marching band was expected to give a five minute lecture about a song they liked to the rest of the band once a year, and I insisted on giving TWO presentations… one on a song from Pirates of the Caribbean that I could play on a xylophone, and the other on the composition process for the original Doctor Who theme song. Everyone hated both my talks.
I over the pandemic, living in a tiny two room apartment and still being totally unable to understand anything my husband says unless I am actively aware that he is speaking to me, I have begun to suspect that I have some kind of mild brain audio processing issue?? I frequently cannot understand the words I am hearing in songs or in person to person conversation unless I am concentrating on them, and as a kid I sometimes felt huge anxiety at not being able to understand every word sung in a song. This was partially because my parents were very hard on songs they deemed inappropriate and I was constantly worried that the soup of words I could not understand in most pop music contained secret evils my parents would punish me for. I liked Talking Heads a lot because they do have a lot of songs with pretty clear lyrics. The clarity of Cake’s spoken word singsong definitely appealed to me too. However my obsession with understanding every word said in any song I listened to did basically drive me away from popular music entirely, and is probably the biggest reason my entire teenage CD library was my dad’s Talking Heads albums and like 15 instrumental movie soundtracks, haha.
5 Likes
i don’t disown it or whatever but there was a weird period where i was a teen and really abruptly found myself hungry for any kind of music and just had no idea where to find it, just making do with like tv show themes, musical segments from futurama or something. filling up cd-rs with whatever tracks seemed most uptempo and rockin from my dad’s country music albums. gordon lightfoot’s underappreciated new wave period.
was also really into bob dylan circa desire, i still like the sound of that band a lot even as i grew increasingly skeptical that the songs themselves really merited each being 100 fucking hours long. you’re telling me that “joey” is a child of the streets, and yet still cares about his family…? i simply must know more about this character. please, use as many verses as it takes.
ironically the stuff i feel embarrassed about in retrospect are like the novelty versions of other songs that i would have felt embarrassed about listening to directly at the time, the gourds version of “gin & juice”, a whole hayseed dixie album. shame begets shame!!
4 Likes