How much of your youth music do you still listen to?

I'm one year younger than the OP. The music of my youth still accounts for a fairly high percentage of what I listen to. I couldn't give you a solid percentage figure because I seem to go through phases with my music and I can't really predict what will come next. But I've learned to hang on to most of my music as I never know what I might feel like re-visiting in the future. I still own practically every album that I've purchased over the years. I started buying albums in the mid-70's and I'm guessing that I've sold off or given away around 5% of those purchases. I started buying CDs in the early 90's and I probably have had a similar rate of retention. I've just added more music of all sorts to the classic rock & blues albums of my youth so the amount of time that I spend listening to that music has dwindled, but they still get plenty of play time relatively speaking as compared to all of my other musical interests.

 

Same thing here. I don't find a lot of new music I like now, but there's an awful lot of old stuff that IS new to me because I didn't give it the time of day back then. Ironically I bought Robbie Dupree's album myself recently. Some of the other acts you mentioned I discovered in the last 10 years too.

 

Me too; although i am am only 62 xx

 

The bands I liked The most in my teens I still listen too.
R.E.M, U2, Prince,Talk Talk etc. Etc.
I listen to many Classic bands from The 60 And 70ths
Floyd,Beatles,Bowie,Stones, Steely Dan,Springsteen.
I buy frequently current music: National,The Xx, Sufjan Stevens, Editors, The War On Drugs.
The mix of old And young keeps me fresh.

 

Quite a bit. In my car, I have Sirius XM and primarily listen 60s on 6, 70s on 7, Classic Vinyl, and First Wave - all stuff I listened from grade school until my early 30s. I have little interest in most of the new music genres that arose to popularity after 1994 such as grunge, hip hop, new country, etc. I do like The Black Keys. Any “new music” that I purchase are new releases from “vintage” artists (McCartney, The Monkees, etc). When I stopped following current pop and rock music, I started getting into both Jazz (primarily hard bop & cool jazz - stuff on the Blue Note label) and Blues, (both modern and traditional) and have CD collections of each. Of course, even a lot of that material is over 60 years old but it’s new to me! I do also listen to Bluesville and Real Jazz on XM

 

My youth music would be............The Stone Roses, Ride, Nirvana, AIC, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Sonic Youth, Mudhoney, Dinosaur Jr and so on.

In answer to the question..........Not as much I as should do. But I still love all of the above. Still get a buzz when I put them on!

 

I still listen to the stuff I liked in my teens but my tastes have expanded massively - I am now listening to whole genres of music I was barely aware of back then.

It seems shocking to think that, at the age of 16, I was listening to Zeppelin, Beatles, Dylan and virtually nothing else. OK, that was before the internet, before Spotify, etc, etc, but the tastes of 'the young' were incredibly conservative back then, at least where I grew up.

 

Most people I know listen from 40 on to the same music they listened to when they were 18.
It's the curiosity for new music most people lose. At least in my experience.
I may not listen very often to the music I listened to when I was 16 (not because I've grown out of it, but because I listened to it 1000 times), but I listen to a lot of new music now.
Also, like Siegmund, I've expanded my tastes a lot. There are bands I couldn't even stand when I was 20, like Converge, that I love now.
And I've added a lot of classical, but I hardly ever listen to jazz anymore.
From my teen age, I still listen to Guns and Roses, Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Sonic Youth, Jeff Buckley, Soundgarden, Rage Against the Machine, etc.

 

+1

I suppose, from your nickname, that we are the same age. I always love discovering new music and finding new talent that deserves attention in a music industry so complex like the one we are witnessing nowadays. Just discovered today: Sam Evian! Having said that, I think most of the music I was listening in my youth stood the test of time. I don't listen much to grunge (the music that really shaped my teenage years), but I'm still very much into Nirvana.

 

I'm not sure it's the curiosity that's missing, maybe it's more that we like to find old stuff that we didn't get at the time. I know some younger people who prefer the music before 1990 to the modern chart list music of the 90s, 00s and 10s.

 

I don't know how to quantify it, but the music I listened to as a tween and teen forms a very small part of my musical diet not that I'm in my 50s.
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I grew up in the '60s and '70s listening to the pop, rock and R&B of that era. There are a handful of favorite artists from that time whose work I return to occasionally -- Dylan, the Stones, the Band, James Brown, Smokey Robinson, Sam & Dave -- but there's lots and lots of music from that time that I almost never return to. It's rare these days for me to find myself listening to P.Funk or Zeppelin or The Clash; and there are plenty of artists I was quite fond of back in the day -- like David Bowie or The Who -- that I don't have any interest in hearing at all.

In fact rock & R&B, once the majority of my musical diet, are very small parts of my listening these days. In 2017 I barely listened to any rock or R&B music of any era at all. I can go years and years without listening to some piece or another that was a favorite of my youth.

I'm also always seeking out new musical experiences -- newly made music, and lots of music I haven't heard before. Yesterday I spent time with the brand new Joe Lovano & Dave Douglas Sound Prints album; a 1950s Mary Lou Williams album I'd never heard before -- so those were two pretty much new experiences (though I've been spinning the Sound Prints album for a week); . And then when I did turn to older favorites it was late '50s Ornette Colemen; '40s Nat Cole trio; and 1990s David Murray, none of which were part of my diet when I was in my youth in the mid or late '70s.

 

All of it. I listen to new music too, but there's nothing from my youth that I've grown out of or am ashamed of liking. I have impeccable taste.

 

The only newer stuff I listen to is pop. As for the rock and metal, I still hold onto what I was listening to in the late 80s and early 90s. I also find myself getting more into older artists a lot more then I ever had previously. I'm a bigger Led Zeppelin fan now then I ever was before. Meanwhile I find myself listening to far less heavy metal.

 

Why do so many of these discussions get reduced to an choice between (1) listening to the pop music of your youth, or (2) listening to today's pop music?

I neither listen to the pop music I liked as a kid, nor do I keep up with today's pop music. I moved on to jazz, classical, film scores, and electronica.

 

Still listen to the Stones from the 60s and the Beatles.

 

Very little really except when I go on YouTube and seek out old live clips.

 

I've always had good taste in music.
...and have thus never had any 'phases' or periods where I look back and wonder 'what was I thinking??'
The music I was into between the ages of 14-20 remains the music I love the most to this day and I'm 46 now.

The only thing that troubles me is that I've overplayed certain top drawer music over the years, such as Zeppelin & Floyd, and now I play it way less than I'd like. It isn't because I've gone off it, just that it's way too familiar now and I'm hoping that absence will make the heart grow fonder.

 

90% of what I listen to now I did not listen to when I was young, 1950's Hard Bop and 1960's Post Bop.
For example I was 10 years old when Herbie Hancock's Empyrean Isles was released but I watched The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show instead.

 

One of those things is not like the other. "Weird" is a very positive attribute in my book.

 

Some I guess. Most of the better "classic rock" stuff I got into, Zep, Beatles (can I say that word on here without getting in trouble now?), some Sabbath, Aerosmith, Blue Oyster Cult, Stones, occasional Pink Floyd or Thin Lizzy, Deep Purple, rarely others like Uriah Heep or Heart or Kiss.

Mostly its stuff I discovered more or less after college. That was still a long time ago. Stuff I listened to when I was a teenager, some, but not that much.

Its funny when I listen now to something I loved when I was kid, I hear all the terrible snare sounds, out of tune backing harmony, guitar flubs, all the stuff I never noticed before.

 

The way I've always listened to music was like this:

Say that I learned the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, and the Rolling Stones first (it wasn't really that simple, but just for illustration we'll keep it simple).

Well, then as a little kid, I was rotating all of the albums of the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, and Rolling Stones that I had access to.

Then say that I discover James Brown, Stevie Wonder, and the Supremes.

Well, then my rotation becomes:
The Beatles, Bob Dylan, James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, the Rolling Stones, Stevie Wonder, and the Supremes

Then say that I discover Charles Mingus, Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk.

Well, then my rotation becomes:
The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Charles Mingus, James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, Miles Davis, the Rolling Stones, Stevie Wonder, the Supremes and Thelonious Monk

Then I discover the Dead Kennedys, Devo and the Ramones.

Well, then my rotation becomes:
The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Charles Mingus, the Dead Kennedys, Devo, James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, Miles Davis, the Ramones, the Rolling Stones, Stevie Wonder, the Supremes and Thelonious Monk.

In other words, I don't "move on to something else" in the sense of abandoning what I was listening to. I just add to my pile. I don't want to stop listening to Bob Dylan or Stevie Wonder just because I've discovered the Dead Kennedys. I want to hear all of it. So I simply listen to more stuff, to a bigger variety of stuff. I don't remove anything I had been listening to. I just hear the older stuff less frequently, because there's more stuff to listen to before I get back to it again.

Again, this is simplifying things a bit, because I actually do listen to new-to-me stuff a bit more frequently at first--that's necessary to get to know it before it goes into the big pile of everything, but I never exclusively listen to new-to-me stuff. I simply have different "levels" of rotations. So it kind of works out like this:

Next album in the relatively small new-to-me rotation, until I've learned the music in question
Next album in the big pile of everything I own rotation
Next album in the relatively small new-to-me rotation, until I've learned the music in question
Next album in the big pile of everything I own rotation
--where I keep repeating the two

Because I keep exploring new music, and with no decrease in the amount of new stuff I explore, the majority of stuff I listen to is actually from the 80s or later--the 80s or later is almost two-thirds of my life. But that doesn't mean I don't listen to 50s-70s music (and earlier stuff, too) or that I don't love it. It's just that music from the last four decades is a bigger percentage of my collection.

It works out great for me because what I really value most of all is variety. So going from a Devo to a James Brown to a Flatt & Scruggs tune is perfect for my tastes. That's probably part of why I'm such a big Zappa fan. Listening to my collection on shuffle works out kind of like listening to a Zappa album, since it will change from rock to funk to bluegrass to vaudeville to doo-wop to classical etc. so frequently.

 

Most of it. There were some things I listened to in high school that were new and cool back then (Radiohead, Live, Eels) that I do not enjoy hearing anymore, but apart from that not a lot.

 

My perception of that stuff certainly changed over time, too, especially as I became a more skilled and experienced musician myself, but my interpretation of it is different than yours (based on you using words like "terrible" and "flubs").

Take someone like Bukka White, say. I heard him as a kid and enjoyed him. I didn't notice stuff like how "out of tune" his guitar could be at first, or how let's say "fluid" his approach to pitch, phrasing, etc. could be as a vocalist.

Well, when I hear him now, I notice that stuff, but my appreciation of the music isn't at all lessened--in fact, my appreciation now is even stronger than it was.

My reaction is instead a realization that a guitar being "pefectly in tune" doesn't actually have anything to do with the quality of the music, and in fact, part of the charm of stuff like Bukka is the fact that the guitar isn't "perfectly in tune," yet Bukka makes it work as wonderfully as he does. It helps me realize that the more complex alternate tuning that he's effectively using (however unintentional it may be) is part of what makes the music as harmonically rich and gripping as it is, and those sorts of realizations have fueled a lot of my own approach to music-making, where I've intentionally exploited detuning, alternate tuning systems, etc. (And this sort of thing doesn't just go for pitches, but also rhythms, tempos, timbres--all sorts of things.)

 

I still listen to some of those major first influences from my pre-teen and teen years. It's the second wave of artists from my late teens/early twenties where the great purge occurred. Favorites such as R.E.M., Patti Smith, Bob Dylan I don't listen to at all anymore. Failed idealism, I guess.

 

I still listen to most of the music from my youth, which at the time was mostly focused on hard rock and progressive rock, but my musical taste has expanded to all musical genres, and I am always looking for and open to new artists and sounds.