What has influenced your musical taste from your childhood?

[Negamuse]

First three songs I ever remember hearing and for all of them I remember seeing them on the TV, so I guess it must've been Top of the Pops or something. Kate Bush - Wuthering Heights, Art of Noise - Close to the Edit, Visage - Fade to Grey. (Also dates my age nicely

I didn't realise at the time how much they'd set my musical tastes, and I went all over the place since then but the stuff I've come back to time and again, I can plot a path back to that moment.

[Jonse]

Okay, now I've thought of something.

When I was young, I had a Super Nintendo and there was one game I played so much. It was extremely captivating and the themes from it are as fantastic to me today as they were back then.


This:

This:

This:

And finally, this:


However, there were a few other games with memorable OST's that I loved.


This:

This:

This:

This:

This:

This:

This:

This:

And dear holy mother of Jesus, this:

[Spenner]

That reminds me; Donkey Kong Country games have had a big influence, as well as mario games and even Metroid Fusion has had a significant impact. The Myst games, too.

[jakestott]

I discovered ambient electronica/trip-hop through television. Watching Sky Sports as a kid, when the wrestling would finish at 4am in the morn, the channels would close down for the night and have this really awesome sounding instrumental track playing on a loop for a couple of hours (some UK visitors might recognize what i'm talking about) - here - it drove my parents crazy back in the day!

[Cupz]

video-games
jazz
church
"occult" (as my parents called it back then) television (aka power-rangers, transformers, all that jazz)
cartoons on broken-ass betamax
girls
dreams
fevers - anything that made me feel different
school (hard)
girls
classical music
crappy 90's popsongs (I'll tell you what I want, what I really really want)
awkward prepubescent sexual experiences

[Synthestesia]

Classical music. My parents played it all the time. My dad says he has a memory of me when I was only two conducting the speakers on his stereo like a symphony conductor Also learning the violin at age six definitely changed a lot. My dad played a lot of 60's-70's psychedelic rock like early pink floyd, some led zepplin, etc... That really changed my taste. Probably the single most important part of my childhood ever is when my dad gave me a cd of Kid A when I was 8. I was obsessed with it. I didn't know music could be like that until that point. That led to basically everything I like now. Really life-changing.

[Betacord]

Growing up I must've listened to all sorts of music on the radio and I think some of the 80s / 90s House music has stayed within my tastes. But thinking about it, the greatest early influence to at least some degree was probably Reggae - I don't know if it used to be more in the mainstream anyway, but there were a good few Reggae tracks in the handful of records we used to have as family, and we also had Bob Marley's Legend album on cassette -- not too long after that, I got into gaming and the Megadrive with its FM sounds - sheer electronic instrumental stuff and some of it was actually very good; that definitely changed my perception of what music could be, changed my definition of music.

-- the channels would close down for the night and have this really awesome sounding instrumental track playing on a loop for a couple of hours (some UK visitors might recognize what i'm talking about) - here - it drove my parents crazy back in the day!

This is familiar, yes!

[Elephant Face]

My parents were both Southern-Christian-Conservatives growing up, so all we got to listen to was Christian music. HOWEVER, my mother was also and aerobics instructor so I got to listen to lots of bizarre 80's and 90's house music. The latter stuck with me because it was SO different from what I was able to listen to 90% of the time.

As I got older my parents got more lax about it all and we started listening to other radio stations, and every time I heard Nine Inch Nails and Depeche Mode I would pray to got my parents wouldn't realize something weird was playing and change the channel. I had never heard sounds like that before. There was always a keyboard player in the church bands and stuff, and they always had the coolest, cheesiest, 90's-est sounds emitting from them and it fascinated me. Synths always resonated with me.

I was around 7 or 8 then. I'm 22 now, and Nine Inch Nails is still tied as my favorite music ever along with BOC. Synthesizers will always be my favorite sounds.

[mucephei]

I grew up in the 70s and 80s - pretty much from glam rock to acid house. We had the radio on all the time and thanks to my older brothers I had an education in classic rock - Led Zep, Floyd etc. I loved the Beatles, particularly Sgt. Pepper (imagine hearing that as a six year old).

A bit later - in '79 - two records came out which, on reflection, had big influence on my later tastes. One was "Street Life" by The Crusaders and Randy Crawford. It had the first proper jazz solos I ever heard. Wilton Felder's tenor sax solo had a massive influence - particularly the out-of-tempo section which I'd never heard done before. I later took up the tenor sax and got into jazz.

The other was "On My Radio" by The Selecter. I loved Two Tone music when I was 12 (still do, in fact).

This has nothing to do with my love for BOC's music, but it's nice to reminisce sometimes.

[Contortionist]

a little Bruce Springsteen. For the most part I didn't start listening to good music until college.

[machinea]

Imma little older than you cats.. for me it is ABBA most definitely. The production and pop aesthetic is still spectacular today. Total Wall of Sound indeed. And Tangerine Dream in particular Encore.

[rodox_head]

I think this soundtrack, as well as the original Ape Escape soundtrack, influenced 80% of the electronic music I listen to now.

[NTFMTS]

Any video game music - Super Mario Bros 3, Megaman, The first 4 Sonic games... Paper Mario TTYD in particular was inspiring, the OST for that game is fucking incredible.

Lately I've been influenced by the early Silent Hill games and Earthbound

[arvy]

Any video game music - Super Mario Bros 3, Megaman, The first 4 Sonic games... Paper Mario TTYD in particular was inspiring, the OST for that game is fucking incredible.

Lately I've been influenced by the early Silent Hill games and Earthbound

First Silent Hill scared the living shit out of me when I was playing it as a kid...I weirdly didn't enjoy everythong prior 3d graphics, but with the release of PLaystaion 1, it blew us away, graphicaly, musically: Tekken, Resident Evil, Silent Hill, Metal Gear Solid, Twisted Metal. And with that also came the digital audio CD era, you could play it on your PLaystaion.

And for musical taste from my childhood, like most kids from my yard, these guys :

[rodox_head]

Lately I've been influenced by the early Silent Hill games and Earthbound

I think first hearing "You're Not Here" in SH3 back in 04 probably had a hand in my eventual love of early 80s post-punk music given that I would later find out it's almost a knock off of "New Years Day" by U2. I was also really into Coldplay and the "I Love the..." series on Vh1 at the time so that probably made a bigger impact in that regard. Doesn't change the fact that Silent Hill has influenced me musically, aesthetically, and philosophically over the years.

And for musical taste from my childhood, like most kids from my yard, these guys :

The "Jilted" album rules, I wish I could have experienced music like that first hand.

[The_Duke]

When stuck in the shop it was radio all day everyday for years....my mind has proved to offer a strange incubation period given to some songs, seemingly filtered out of my mind as the new repitition of song introduction took centre focus, a new entry! Only upon revisiting these songs now that they have steadily grown and aged how they always were meant to...appreciation tempered by the unique taste of the individual...Adding clarity and depth to otherwise mundane memories first made during times of what felt like mediocrity....but now become almost a personal treasure trove of pleasent recollections, that cannot be taken away bar life itself.

80S, film/tv theme tunes...
Classical (baroque right through to music score)...

mainly RADIO though...
Driving in the car with my dad and bro listening to stations while driving through the heart of the country, through different towns, along motorways....listening untill the signal strengths weakened but not before having subtly waned that your pressed to tune in again to a stronger signal, presented with the kind of noises you had wished you had recorded onto early cassette while trying to dial in and return back from the over sent manual tuning that a heavy hand might do adjusting late to a position that requires a bit of accurate tweeking....sounding somewhere inbetween an old phillips room 306 track with audible semi intelligible voices in different languages on the longwave bands and slowly stretching morse code and atmopheric artifacts left for the radio itself to decode or translate, always during high solar activity summers....

The music could be virtually any genre....but played in that mid band window that radio seems to colour a d soften so well...

[Negamuse]

The Prodigy were my first live gig and I saw them 5 days before they filmed that video. Absolutely formative.

[Negamuse]

God though, everything. My brother's tapes of meat loaf and bon Jovi, my other brother's Jean Michel Jarre, Kate Bush being the first music video I saw, Art of noise being the second, late night TV theme tunes at imperceptibly low volume because I'd sneaked downstairs, Depeche mode secretly because my fundamentalist mum thought it was dangerous. Good times

[SamuraiDrifter]

My dad used to play Poco, Blue Oyster Cult, Moody Blues, Pink Floyd, and a bunch of other old psychedelic rock in the car when I was a kid. A little later, when I was 11 or 12, my uncle introduced me to Rush, which is part of what inspired me to start playing the drums. But it all set off what's ended up being a life-long taste for complex, progressive, and experimental music.

[Orbited insanitarium]

My dad used to play Poco, Blue Oyster Cult, Moody Blues, Pink Floyd, and a bunch of other old psychedelic rock in the car when I was a kid. A little later, when I was 11 or 12, my uncle introduced me to Rush, which is part of what inspired me to start playing the drums. But it all set off what's ended up being a life-long taste for complex, progressive, and experimental music.

Pink floyd, rush and the moodies? I guess you could say you have a bit of prog in you! Early genesis for me (1970-1975)
I didn’t particularly grow up on that music, I always heard Michelle shocked in my house, she was one of my mother’s favourite artists along with Neil young and Elvis Costello, but now I listen to a lot of singer/songwriter, indie, new wave, electronica, psych & prog rock.
Some artists like Grace Jones, Tom waits & the flaming lips have won over my CD player over the years for top spot in album heaven.