What kind of music do you like?

Someone once said you know you're getting older when you're asked what kind of music you like, and you reply "all kinds".

It's with some embarrassment that I look back on the oldest bits of my CD collection and realise that the most diverse albums are those that weren't on Epitaph records.  It had to be punk rock.  It had to scream about social injustice.  It had to do it all at around Mach 4.  I was picky though - I couldn't abide Blink 182, Nerf Herder, Less Than Jake et al.  The 'big three' for me were NOFX, Bad Religion and Rancid.  I remember making a near 500 mile round trip from Aberystwyth to London to watch Bad Religion.  They blew up the PA, turned up the backline and carried on.  I thought it was the coolest thing I'd ever seen.

SoCal punk can only take you so far.  No self-respecting young punk would ever admit to preferring the new stuff, so I had to dig into the Sex Pistols, The Clash, Stiff Little Fingers and so on.  I established a reasonable amount of old British stuff to look cool alongside my new American stuff.

This didn't last.  Not long after finishing university, I was exposed to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, discovered Tom Waits pretty much for myself, acquired my Dad's collection of Dylan vinyl records (pretty much complete from his début until Saved).  It went from there - the punk rock occupied the lower shelves, and a myriad of troubled singer-songwriters took priority.  I played a lot of gigs myself, and listened to a lot of the bands that the bands we played with sounded like.

It all goes full circle.  I'm listening to Peace and Love by The Pogues, and I suppose they have a lot of things that I really love about music rolled together in one band.  I got into them because they had punky bits, and now I think they probably write as good a pop song as it's possible to write.  Having said that, I was listening to Choking Victim earlier today (now there's a band that normally live on the bottom shelves...), and I think they do too. 

It's good, this music thing.  The genre I've started to explore most recently is hip hop.  It's like listening to music for the first time again, because I'm constantly being surprised by the different styles and subgenres I'm finding.  If I ever stop liking new stuff, shoot me.