Music

My music taste is varied and complex, I'd like to think. Changing throughout time, with periods of loving, of hating, and then re-learning to love some genres. I'd like to document them in this blog post, with some recommendations, but also with the assumption that you know how to discover music when given a starting point.

Eurobeat

Unlike most people, I got my start with Eurobeat probably more from the brony crowds than Initial D, which was arguably the biggest source of Eurobeat popularity. In terms of "mainstream" Eurobeat, I cut my teeth on that which I could get from the Initial D soundtracks from Avex. I think I quite quickly went from this to the obvious crossroads for any Eurobeat enjoyment: Super Eurobeat.

The thing about SEB is that it's a fantastic source of Eurobeat, if you know what songs you want. I find it's lacking in discovery diversity, although some people would argue that diversity in Eurobeat is similar to that of the diversity of coal lumps. I disagree, I'm of the mind that Eurobeat is quite diverse in a lot of areas, just that a lot of the popular music within the genre tends to share the same themes, the same feeling. Overall, the most popular Eurobeat is also the least diverse.

I enjoyed Eurobeat, seeking the unique tracks within. This led me to discover one of Eurobeat's progenitors, the illustrious "Italo-disco".

Italo-disco

Italo-disco is a lot like eating a hamburger for me. I could probably eat 1 or 2 hamburgers in a single sitting, but good luck trying to get me to eat them constantly on my way to work. It's cheesy, rich, yet funky. It's the kind of cheesy that has an innate charm to it, I'd like to think. There's not much that can be said for it other than that you should probably try listening to it. Core recommendation would be Radiorama, if you want to get started on this genre.

Game OSTs

Video games often have some interesting music. Usually, game OSTs go along with the game, conveying emotions along with the story. Sometimes, however, the ambient music that plays in these games is an amazing backdrop for working. A few OSTs I've found to fit this need are the Super Lesbian Animal RPG OST, and the Pokémon OSTs.

Rhythm games also provide a good amount of non-ambient music. I wouldn't be sure if I could count it strictly as "Game music" since rhythm game music is often just music, but the designated OST releases for rhythm games often tends to provide a diverse range of music. DJMAX and Beatmania IIDX provide most of the fun here in this regard, for me.

Hardcore

Hardcore is a wide genre, but most of it is categorized by normal people, calling it "noise". I disagree, the wide genre can provide energetic tracks, some more low tracks. It's hard to talk about, just because it's so.… indescribable. I can only really say recommendations, of which my core recommendation would be HARDCORE TANO*C, and their compilation series, Hardcore Syndrome. Moving on.

Breakcore

See: hardcore.

Okay, I've upset a few people with that one, but breakcore's modern revival is amazing. I've listened to goreshit's gnb while in the shower, for example, and it was genuinely somewhat uplifting. It can get somewhat repetitive, not everyone is as unique as you'd hope, but it earns a spot among my favourite genres of music.

An aside on: Genre Naming & Subgenres

This blog post so far has been hard to write, without potentially upsetting people. And that's for a simple reason: Genre naming and subgenres are wild. Take this guide from Ishkur, for example. Look at how many genres of "electronic" music there are. The limit of what is music substantially different from other music to necessitate the creation of a new genre is down to pedantry, essentially.

This makes categorizing music a challenge. Many streaming services don't even bother; making very token efforts to categorize music, just enough to let their continuous mixing work. Many people who collect music in FLAC format are either incredibly broad in their tagging, or just follow the words of their tag source, which is usually Musicbrainz. Some artists escape genre classification, or are essentially an entire genre onto themselves. Take Robert Miles and "Dream Trance"; Dream Trance is essentially Robert Miles, and people who make music that sounds like Robert Miles' music (beyond a genre sense).

I try to avoid categorizing music by genre for this reason, especially "electronic" music. Why bother so much? I know what music I like, so it's hard to justify spending a large amount of time describing what I like to myself, with the biggest term I use being "eclectic". Most of my music collection is tagged using MusicBrainz Picard, so I have no idea what I tag genres as, which is fine because I never sort by genre to begin with.

The cheesy stuff

I'm a big fan of cheesy music; a bit of random, a bit of "taking yourself too seriously", things like that.

On the one end of that, I'd suppose that you'd have Weird Al, who has in some cases made songs I dislike into songs that I like for the humour alone; that's a strong ability to have. Mainly, having the ability to make a polka mashing Lady Gaga and Britney Spears next to each other sound fun, is an ability that I don't believe many, if any, have.

On the other end is Evanescence, whose music sounds how teenage angst feels, and the RWBY OSTs, which make liberal use of Casey Lee Williams' amazing singing talent to hide the fact that the lyrics mean essentially nothing (except some mild semblance of relation to the plot). That's not to say these artists and albums are bad, quite the opposite, in fact, I think it's okay to do what I'd consider "your own thing" like that, and these have their own charm.

Somewhere in between, I think you'd have the "humorous by accident" songs. There's a lot of those.

Conclusion

This has been an explanation of my music tastes. This blog post took over a week to write, with me changing my mind on how to phrase or word things constantly, and trying to not put too much effort into this post. It would feel disingenuous to force myself to write a blog post like this, after all.

I had scrapped a previously planned post only because I felt I could not write, in great length, about a subject closely personal to me, especially directly after my post regarding identity. I do not want this blog to turn into one solely about close subject matters.

Anyway, I often use my Last.FM to track my listening, so you can probably get a lot more info on my listening habits from that.

Thank you for reading.