if you were 17 years old right now, what contemporary music do you think you'd be into?

I ask myself this question a lot, and it's hard to answer with any confidence. I think I'd like Kero Kero Bonito?

Do you think you'd be beholden at all to a particular genre/scene? Would you listen to more new stuff, or old? Have you ever been to you?

based on one of my former students who's into a lot of the stuff i like, the answer is death grips

shit, i don't know. where do i live? what do my parents listen to? what do my friends listen to?

when i was real world 17 years old i wasn't into _any_ contemporary music at all. so maybe i wouldn't be into contemporary music if i was 17 now!

How could you possibly know? Your tastes are shaped so much by the milieu in which you grow up...

maybe devin townshend? i don't know.

It doesn't answer your question (in part because I don't follow new music closely enough to answer), and it's a typical old-guy response, but I am almost positive I wouldn't care nearly as much about music as I did in 1978. There are just too many other diversions.

xxp yeah, what makes this a compelling question, imo, is how completely unsure i am of the answers i come up with. i mean, i do know my baseline tastes/preferences, and you think you could extrapolate that forward and come up with some probable guesses, but even then i have a feeling i'm way off

that's an interesting point, clemenza, i hadn't thought of that. maybe music plays a different role now.

I don’t think there’s any artist today that would play the role R.E.M. played for me when I was 17...

At 17, I was fully into all the British shit Dave Kendall was feeding us on 120 Minutes. To transport that decades forward, I guess I'd probably be into—well, a lot of the same stuff I'm into now.

In 2001 I was 17, I was as constantly hungry for new, different music back then as I assume I’d still would be if I was 17 now. The internet was just becoming very efficient at opening my ears to albums and artists I wouldn’t have heard otherwise... back then I was jumping from Amon Tobin to Jorge Ben to Stereolab to Ligeti to Can to Mississippi blues compilations to Chavela Vargas to Modest Mouse to Cat Power to the nuggets compilations to new wave and so on... Assuming my hunger for more music is nature and not nurture I think it wouldn’t be that different to be honest, if anything it would be much easier with all the options and how fast you can play almost any album you just read about.

One band I’m lukewarm on now that I think I would’ve absolutely loved if they’d been around when I was 17 is the 1975.

(xpost) That's the other side of the equation, and I'm just not sure what that would mean for me today. I started collecting albums in the mid-'70s, and collecting more and more of them consumed me for the next 15 years, until CDs took over. So that's a part of my personality; it's possible, I suppose, that the endless availability of music today would make it more central to my life than it was then. I honestly don't know.

At 17, I was interested in music that that challenged musical conventions, and/or that offered engrossing immersive sonic/acoustic experiences or extreme intensity. I also liked loud guitar rock and combinations of all of these things; at the same time, I didn't have much money. That kid would love Jute Gyte and the local free improv scene. In general, this seems OTM:

I'd probably be into—well, a lot of the same stuff I'm into now.

My son is 13. I can't speak for 17 but I can tell you that the chance of him putting on a rock and roll song for pleasure is about as likely as him listening to opera. It's all rap, all the time. Travis Scott and Ski Mask Tha Slump God are his favorites.

I think I'd like Kero Kero Bonito?

I actually tried introducing my teenage SIL to KKB (whom I really like) — she’s into some adjacent things, and I thought she may dig them — but she had no interest.

(FWIW, if I were a teen I’d probably like KKB just as much, if not more, as I do now.)

absolutely no idea. my early exposure to pop music was via radio, and to a far lesser extent, mtv, and i'm not sure what today's equivalent is -- if there even is one. maybe spotify suggestions?

as recently as a few years ago i think i kept up reasonably well with what was popular -- i could at least look at a chart and have heard of most of the artists and had a sense of what they sounded like -- but at some point in my early 40s i completely lost it. it's fine; there's way too much to listen to already

I think 17yo me would probably have loved KKB for sure. As well as Mitski, Yaeji, Japanese Breakfast, lots of K-pop (ie basically everything I'm into now) - there's so many more options now for an Asian girl looking to find her experiences and interests reflected in music.

(The real answer is probably My Chemical Romance, who i was too cool for when i was actually 17, but would be slightly less embarrassing now for a 17yo in 2019. Like me getting into Depeche Mode and The Cure in 2002, lol.)

roz otm

Roz you are describing much of the taste of my soon-to-be 17-year-old, you only need to throw in the Spider-Verse soundtrack and Billie Eilish and you have a snapshot of her iPod. (She's so retro she uses a clip-style Shuffle.)

i wasn't into contemporary music at all at 17

xpost nice! Not huge on Billie Eilish but she definitely counts as someone I would prob be really into if I was 17.

As someone who spends a decent amount of time on these particular frontlines I think a pretty good baseline would be imagining yourself as this kid, and then just adding whatever personal details you feel are appropriate:

http://i65.tinypic.com/20iz1uo.jpg

(As for me, this shift in the timeframe would’ve meant I missed getting into electronic music in the narrow window before the EDM boom confirmed all my prejudices, therefore no real reason to get into dance music from its prior peak in the 90’s + no rush of validation when Calvin Harris or whoever broke on the radio, so I’d probably just be a more boring version of my current self who, like, never discovered Marcello Carlin and got really into the Porter Robinson fandom or something because it was better than “radio EDM”.)

Unlike that kid, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t care about what’s being played on the radio...

My 13 yo mainly listens to kpop. Doubt I would. Otoh maybe I would bec at that age I was into non-threatening pop music. At 17 yo I picked things randomly. There wasn't internet/soc media. (Then again I did have a fantastic pop encyclopedia but I didn't let it guide me like Spin guide did in my 20s.) think I would def be into rap, prob pop music, singersongwriter. I'd let it series guide me: listening to Sex Education soundtrack wld be on repeat.

17 was 1996, so DJ Shadow, Orbital, Underworld, Massive Attack, Stone Roses, Verve, Bjork, also Beatles and some other 60s stuff. I'm not sure what that would equate to now. Probably 6music. But would radio / music press music be as powerful and pervasive in shaping my taste? Definitely not. Would I be sat on Youtube all the time? Methods of consumption have changed so much.

I'd definitely be trying to convince you all that Clarence Clarity had saved pop

a mix between acker bilk and daniel o'donnell with the swagger of des o'connor.

always searching for that zeitgeist.

By the time I hit the age of 17 (in the early 00s), my tastes were shaped by:

1) my dad's listening habits (mostly hard rock, prog rock, new age and 70s/80s electronic, with a bit of jazz and classical thrown in)
2) classic and alternative rock radio
3) the Québécois and Canadian equivalents of MTV
4) a couple of off-kilter radio shows that I discovered in my mid-teens
5) hip stuff I randomly heard in record stores that have since gone under
6) concerts I'd been to
7) Pitchfork and (especially) Allmusic
8) Napster, Audiogalaxy, Limewire, etc.
9) first iteration of ILX
0) misanthropic depression (innate)

How would that play out today?

1) my dad would likely be younger, though given how Romania spectacularly struggles to catch up with Western trends and for facileness's sake, let's just assume that his tastes would be more or less the same
2) I'd either embrace the R&B-esque zeitgeist (which I never fully have) or be a crusading rockist guerrillero, flip a coin
3) I'd turn to YouTube, duh
4) I doubt I'd listen to podcasts or the like
5) n/a
6) I like to think I'd still check out swell festivals such as Suoni per il popolo
7) I could see myself being a low key Fantano fan (I'm sorry, alternate self)
8) streaming, duh, although in my bulimia (yes, I do think music would matter just as much – I'm only mildly interested in visual culture) I'd resort to other means, as well
9) hmmm…
0) bound to remain true across all avatars, it's my sub speciae aeternitatis

I'd be hard pressed to name any actual bands or artists, though, there are simply too many variables to consider.

What would it look like for a radio station to play REO Speedwagon with irony? "Anyway, here's 'Keep on Loving You'. Cronin is such bae j/k. LOLZ"?

True irony is when you unapologetically like it, as the past 15-20 years have taught us. Merely playing the song is enough – no mise en scène needed.

No music left in schools in my hometown, no professional opera company around for my mom to work in, the wild variety of radio stations in the area gone gone gone, my little kid exposure to music would have been the insipid youtube shit -- I don't think I'd be into music if I were 17 today.

:(. Ottawa has more going on now tbh, although who knows what it will look like after a term of Doug Ford's PCs in government?

Maybe I would have got into Linkin Park and Blink 182 at 9 instead of Bon Jovi and Def Leppard but I imagine this would have still led to playing guitar and going backwards into classic rock within a year so I don't see too much reason to imagine that my current tastes would be wildly different if I were 17. (Probably less classical and straight jazz.) (I checked rock charts for 1999-2001 and lol, Def Leppard, Metallica, and Aerosmith were all still scoring #1s on the mainstream rock chart.)

Yeah, that's how I discovered them in the first place. They definitely felt uncool to 14 year old me, though.

Who are the Bloodhound Gang of the late 2010s?

My 16 year old son likes Death Grips, Daughters, Machine Girl, Car Seat Headrest

My favourite current artists at 17 (1998) were Orbital, Manic Street Preachers and the Beastie Boys but I'd also got into the idea of noisy, politicised music and was listening to stuff like Atari Teenage Riot and Asian Dub Foundation. I'm not sure what the nearest equivalents would be today (I guess Death Grips for ATR, maybe something like Jon Hopkins for Orbital?). I was a very angsty and earnest 17yo!

Probably less classical and straight jazz

(which is, OK, a significant difference)

When I was 17 I was reading about new records in magazines like Alternative Press and Spin, and going to record stores to look at things. There are no record stores left in the town I grew up in. I don't know what I'd be into now. A big part of my teenage taste was rejecting the taste of my peers, so maybe that would still be operative, but who knows?

Hard to guess. 17 was right around the age when I was discovering Can and Miles Davis and whole worlds of music. But I was still mostly fumbling to figure things out one CD purchase at a time, or from forums, magazines, and the Lester Bangs anthology. To have had the current internet at that age could have massively accelerated the process of learning about new music. On the other hand, I have no idea what contemporary music a super-pretentious teenager listens to nowadays. I'm not sure that taste in music would still seem to have the same stakes.

trying to wrap my head around this question, which to me has elements of "how would my taste in music be different if i'd had from birth access to all the music ever"? when i was 17 i'd never heard of can. if there was anybody in my class who knew who they were, i didn't know those people. i didn't even hear can until i was in my early 20s, and even then the record i heard was "flow motion" and it wasn't for another several years that i heard one of their good cds and realized can weren't awful. being able to hear music that isn't on the radio would probably pretty drastically shape my musical taste.

the Doors will always be contemporary

I found the Unknown Deutschland comp of obscure krautrock in a store when I was 17 but had never heard Can. I was once talking to a (6 years?) younger person about music we listened to growing up, though, and mentioned that I got into stuff like Yes, Rush, and Pink Floyd when I was 13; she responded "ah, right, and Can", which, no.

i guess i would’ve spent way less time imagining what joy division’s closer sounded like (darkthrone with fewer notes)

My mom had the "Atmosphere"/"She's Lost Control" single, which I played a bunch of times at the wrong speed since I didn't know how a record player worked.

What stores were you shopping at, Sund4r? For me it was initially the Music World at Billings, then eventually longer bus rides to Record Runner. Later, Organized Sound. All gone.

So thinking about this again, I was 17 in 2001 but by then my music taste was more shaped by the albums I heard constantly in between 1997 and 1999 (age 13-15) these were albums I bought and constantly heard:

Massive Attack - mezzanine
Radiohead- ok computer
Sarah Mclachlan - surfacing
Garbage - version 2.0
Madonna - ray of light
Plastilina Mosh - Aquamosh
Cafe Tacvba - Re
Bjork - homogenic
Smashing Pumpkins - Mellon Collie
Lauryn Hill - miseducation of lauryn hill
Hole - celebrity skin
Air - moon safari
Mogwai - come on die young
Amon Tobin - permutation
Sigur Ros - agaetis byrjun

So as you can see these were popular albums at the time, pushed by critics as some of the best albums from those years. Hip hop culture was unfortunately very lacking in my country at the moment so I wasn’t exposed to some brilliant albums from that time that could have shaped my taste later on. So following that formula I think the albums that would have shaped my 17 year old taste would have been instead albums critically acclaimed from 2013-2015... I think I would have probably enjoyed these ones a lot at that age:

Daft punk - Ram
Vampire weekend - modern vampires
Kanye West - yeezus
Lorde - pure heroine
Arctic monkeys - AM
Run the Jewels - 2
Caribou - our love
Spoon - they want my soul
St Vincent - s/t
Grimes - art angels
Tame impala - currents
Jamie xx - in colour

Artists I have no idea if I’d care about: taylor swift, carly rae jepsen, lana del rey

I think biggest change would be that out of those as a 30 year old I don’t care much about the rock acts like Tame Impala, Arctic Monkeys or even Vampire Weekend but 13/15 year old would have probably loved them. So this artists + pop radio from those years would have been my connections through which I discovered artists... this could mean anything... for example for vampire weekend it would mean listening to their previous albums which would have discovered Phoenix to me which would have ended up in a binge of indie pop rock of the late 00’s and then back to early 00’s albums from something like Flaming Lips and the Strokes.

There’s some artists I love now which I would have very likely missed like Paavoharju, The Books and Animal Collective. I feel like all that freak folk, folktronica scene completely evaporated contrasted to the hype it had in the mid 00’s that inevitably threw me into that scene. Post-rock from the early 00’s and 90’s IDM would have passed me by too probably... those are two other scenes that were very hyped at the time and then lost media attention.

So much acclaimed contemporary music registers as distinctly apathetic to me (in comparison with Moka's 2001 list, which is strikingly similar to my own if I were to come up with one) and I can't tell if it's because of my age or because of subtle, possibly imperceptible shifts in our emotional collective unconscious (perhaps a mixture of both?). I'm tempted to say that if hypothetical 17 year old me had the same sensibilities in 2019 as I did back in 2002, I'd be listening to the contemporary artists I happen to like now anyway (for the most part, at least).

I think, based on what I liked when I was 17 in 1990, I'd probably be really into Ghostemane.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hp4AanxpAKU

i would be cool

so cool

What stores were you shopping at, Sund4r? For me it was initially the Music World at Billings, then eventually longer bus rides to Record Runner. Later, Organized Sound. All gone.

I remember I got that krautrock sampler and Branca's 5th symphony on the same day at Shake Records (which was still a store on Rideau then; it later became a stall in the Black Tomato restaurant, under the name Sounds Unlikely iirc - maybe it's still there). It was right before I went to the NAC to see a performance of Zappa pieces by contemporary classical players from Montreal (this group). It was a relatively uncommon spendthrift moment for 17 but, yeah, sometimes Record Runner or chains near my high school; also tapes at gigs. Over the next couple of years, I bought a lot at Organised Sound, Spinables (where Vertigo is now) and Birdman (still going iirc?).

If you're interested in a quantitative answer, here you can see what's distinctively popular with 0-17yo listeners on Spotify, broken down by country and (reported) gender: http://everynoise.com/everydemo.cgi?vector=activity&gscope=all&ascope=0-17

This is a fun question to chew on. When I was 17 in the late 90s I was listening to 90s alt/indie rock stuff like Matador bands and Butthole Surfers and etc. But after a lot of thought, I feel like if I was 17 today it's really likely that I would just end up being into the same boring internet rap stuff that so many other 17y/o kids are into today, just due to its saturation of the youth market, especially in suburban hinterlands like where I grew up. In my small white suburban town, pre-internet my main way of discovering music was reading about it in print pubs like Spin, alternative/college radio, and buying lots of CDs, sometimes randomly, from the local shops that seemed to carry EVERYTHING since the CD boom was still going strong. Without those things, imagining the influences that would come to bear on me today growing up in the same place – peers at school, social media, radio, youtube – it’s really hard for me to imagine how I would ever organically encounter rock music in any way that would make me want to listen to it regularly.

I don't know why, but I have an urge to sleep with you.

i started listening to music really young, so by the time i was 17, i was already looking for music that was a decade or two older.
so, conceptually, with that in mind, i suppose i would be listening to 90s music, which is what i was also into around the age of 15.
a roundabout way of saying i wouldn't really listen to any of the new music out now, i guess.

this is a terrible thread

why?

I was definitely a lot more of a snob at 17 than I am now so I imagine if 17 year-old me was teleported to 2019 I imagine I'd be missing out on Cardi, Migos, Taylor Swift, Ariana, etc.

Yeah, idgi, this is one of the more fun threads I've seen on ILM recently.

I was always into pop as well as rock, but I doubt a 17-yr-old me today would rep as hard for Ariana as I do today, or be buying Taylor Swift albums, etc. -- out of concern for "optics" (as an adult, I only have to deal with my wife teasing me, lol)

why?

― yuh yuh (morrisp), Monday, March 4, 2019 11:55 AM (eight minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

people don't have the self-knowledge, and/or the ability to navigate all the intangibles inherent in this attempt to transpose their younger self into an alternative timeline. so they end up just writing what they'd like to think they would listen to, which has included answers as asinine as what they're currently into or what they were into as a teenager

I noted in my first post that it's impossible to answer, that hasn't stopped me from having some fun with the question.

no fun on ilm please

Yeah if we're taking the concept really seriously, I'm not sure a version of me born in spring 2001 would even still be me in any way. The discussion was still fun though. (That also means I was off by 10 years so wouldn't get into Linkin Park and Blink 182 at 9 but idk someone who was big in 2010.)

I was interpreting the question as "what contemporary music would a present-day 17yo with similar inclinations as your 17yo self be listening to?" Otherwise, it would make no sense. In the alternate timeline where I was born 17 years ago, I may well have died on my 16th birthday.

Clearly we'd all be listening to Marty McFly rip into "Johnny B. Goode"

"If Mon-El killed Ahmet Ertegun, simultaneously erasing him from every point in history; and Glorith re-inserted him from a pocket universe, to undo a dystopian alternate timeline; would you still love Led Zeppelin just as much as you did before the first reboot?"

So much acclaimed contemporary music registers as distinctly apathetic to me (in comparison with Moka's 2001 list, which is strikingly similar to my own if I were to come up with one) and I can't tell if it's because of my age or because of subtle, possibly imperceptible shifts in our emotional collective unconscious (perhaps a mixture of both?).

A band like Parquet Courts seems to maintain some sense of the old oppositional indie culture that also courts the mainstream, but it seems like the space in which to do so is much narrower, already historical in an overstuffed archive, whatever the quality of the work. I was listening to Human Performance yesterday and hearing this optimism in the fact that there is dust — dead organic matter — to sweep, to remove from your vinyl record. Where the speaker in "Teenage Riot" is content to lie in bed, the protagonists of some of PC's songs force themselves to get up in the morning and do more than nothing.

There must be some Simon Reynoldsy take on dream pop and the aspirations lurking historically in different manifestations of songs that negotiate the boundary of waking and dreaming, and how nostalgic or forward-looking they are. In fact the last pop album that I really found bracing was Bonito Generation, which starts with an adamant wake-up call to a cartoon version of '90s big-city big-time cool. Then on Time 'n' Place, KKB have a song about dreaming as a refuge: "If I never get to decide my reality...." I mean, shouldn't you want to decide your reality? Why be so quiescent, so mature, so fast?

Also this might be me being old but I feel like the indie/alt rock scene hasn’t really evolved much from the early 00s to 2009 to 2019. Almost 20 years have passed without a clear aesthetic distinction in sound or evolution to my ears.

Compare the alternative and underground rock scene from 1995 to 1985 to 1978 and there’s a clear evolution in sounds and production. The indie rock scene from 2002-2018 fells much more static to me. Albums from 2004 or 2009 could be released today and nobody would bat an eye.