The Data Is In: You Like The Music You Heard When You Were 14

I keep a list of the artists who are most important to me and, of that list of twelve, a quarter are approximately from the year I was 14, but a quarter I discovered at university and the rest I discovered after university. So my 14th year has a special significance to the formation of taste, but to be honest my taste has progressed so far since then that I would broadly say that the the hypothesis is wrong in my case.

 

This doesn't apply to me at all. There's lots of music from 1983 that I love, but most of it I didn't actually hear in 1983, and there's as much or more music from 1953, 1963, 1973, 1993, 2003 and 2013 that I love too. Looking at Billboard's top 100 for 1983 there's nothing I'd need to take on a desert island with me. Prince's '1999' comes closest, but there's be several dozen other Prince songs ahead of it in the queue.

That said, I see this very phenomenon all the time in the general (non-music-geek) public. They're incurious and not particularly passionate about music, but they have a strong response to stuff they heard thousands of time when they were teenagers.

 

I come back to a lot of the things I listened to when I was 14. Elton John, The Beatles, The Doors, The Doobie Brothers, even some of the more ordinary dad rock I steered away from shortly after though... But I have found so much new music to love since I turned 25. It has been a journey into genres I knew very little about (hip hop, electronica, house) with music I now cannot live without. But I suppose, generally speaking, what you enjoy at 14 stays with you through your life. But so do many other things, things you enjoyed at 8, at 18 and so on.

 

The thing is, music is mostly a social and functional part of the fabric of civilization. Most people use it for dancing, for courtship, for mood, for kind of a background soundtrack. It's not so much the music itself that matters as much as the association and context. And, to the extent that a lot of the social uses of music are tied to courtship, the associations we have with music are probably tied to the courting years.

It's no different from having your favorite movies be the movies you saw on dates, or generational comedies you saw with your friends in high school and college.

But for those people who are more engaged in music -- or movies, or any other kind of popular or not-so-popular art form, who are not just social users of music, the relationship is entirely different.

Even the author of the Times piece wonders at the end: "In fact, my data analysis couldn’t explain where I got most of my musical taste. O.K., maybe I caught the Springsteen bug because I grew up in New Jersey. But why my obsession with Bob Dylan? Or Leonard Cohen? Or Paul Simon? Most songs I listen to came out well before I was born.

This research tells us that the majority of us, when we are grown men and women, predictably stick with the music that captured us in the earliest phase of our adolescence.

But it also adds one more piece to the central puzzle of my adult life: Why did I develop so abnormally?"

But, was his development "abnormal"? Or is this kind of broad average look at people's relationship to music not granular enough a look to tell the story of our relationship with music as humans?

 

At 14 I bought a Captain and Tenille album.

Just sayin' . . .

 

oh, muskrat sam

 

It's glaringly obvious at concerts by "legacy" acts. Anything deep gets played, and they all start chattering or making a beer tent exodus.

But when that song that was all over the radio back in the day comes up, it's pandemonium.

 

I turned 14 in 1965. It was a very good year. I still like a LOT of it, but I'm not stuck there. 1967. I'm probably stuck there.

 

Back then I wasn't into funk, reggae, country, jazz, classical,... so boom goes that theroy.
I was already a rock nut so it's true for Hendrix and Johnny Winter. At 14, I was also mad on Sabbath and Deep Purple but don't really care for them since the mid 70s.
Also Rory and Groundhogs who I listen to very rarely now.

 

Stylistically, I think my tastes were basically established at that time. The rest has been expanding my knowledge of artists who work in those styles I initially liked. Stuff I didn't like then, I still mostly don't.

 

I think the idea is that it is true for a majority of people.
Of course some will vary, I do also.

But I could name a dozen friends that still like what we all liked while crusing the mall at age 17.
Their tastes never evolved or varied much.

 

The music that I most love today I first heard during my childhood - Classical Music, and a bunch of my favourite composers I remember having first enjoyed them when I was a child.

 

I just turned 22
I was wondering what to do
The closer they got the more those feelings grew.

 

Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa,who writes this stuff,I been diggin music since I was about oh...SIX!!

 

You guys never read all the posts with guys claiming... "Music was so much better back then"

Those guys!

 

"The greatest music of all time miraculously coincided with the brief window during which I was young, emotionally vulnerable, and had deep feelings about music.

"Weird, what a lucky coincidence, I can't explain it!

"But it's an objective fact that it was the greatest music of all time and that since then music has become an inferior hellscape of trash."

 

The whole idea of this thread is a cliche and like politics they can turn any study to the outcome they desire.

 

But oddly enough sums up probably 80 percent of the guys I know.

 

Man! I feel like a woman! (Sorry Shania!) Seriously, I clearly do not fit the profile. Certainly I like music from when I was 14, which was in 1977, but I really love music from when I was 11 too, and 22, and 32, and 42, and 52. I also like music when I was 3, and every year in between!

 

I was 14 in 1966.... what does it mean?

 

Revolver.

 

For me, it was a little off. I looked up the billboard charts for the year when I was 14. It was nothing but garbage. But, when I look at my own library, Windows media player shows that the years 2015 and 2017 are tied for having the most content. The year 1990 isn't too far behind though. The year when I was 14 (2012) was some what lacking. It was only off by three years. Whatever.

 

Hmm, I think since my 20's the 'influences' that entered my musical taste have tripled...

 

Meh, I came of age in the 1980s. Even as a kid I knew that the older stuff was better. That's the music I fell in love with. Not the plastic stuff they were pushing on MTV.

 

It says the music you LISTENED to, not the music that happened to be popular.