I was a punk rocker as a teen (tats, bad haircut, I was in a litany of shitty bands, the whole thing) and all i really listened to was The Clash, Sex Pistols, The Ramones, ect into adulthood. This was primarily because i was angry with the turn for the worse that the mainstream rock took (I mean New Wave? Really?)

But then few years ago one of my sons turned me on to the "Pop-Punk" scene (New Found Glory, Bayside, The Wonder Years), and i gotta admit:

It's got to be the saving grace of modern music, and it might even be on par with the old-school stuff

CLASSICAL/OPERA! :D

Though some classic rock and jazz is good, too...

Classical can be fun, it can conjure up images of great battles or romantic scenes on occasion if it's done properly.

But jazz....i find it revolting. Save bebop and swing, I find it all incredibly dull.

M E A T L O A F ! ! !

Actually, not just Meat Loaf, it turns out I like anything written by Jim Steinman - who wrote Meat Loaf's biggest hits, as well as Total Eclipse of the Heart, Holding out for a Hero and Faster Than the Speed of Night (Bonnie Tyler), Bad For Good (Steinman, Meat Loaf) and It's All Coming Back To Me Now (Celine Dion, Meat Loaf).

Apart from that I tend to like one or 2 songs by an artist, but not most of them. Examples: Vienna - Ultra Vox, Orinoco Flow - Enya, Poison - Alice Cooper, Mr Blue Sky - ELO, Lady Eleanor - Lindisfarne, Wuthering Heights - Kate Bush, I'm not in Love - 10cc, Fighter - Christine Aguilera, Jar of Hearts - Christina Perri.

I'm a classic rock, classical, and techno fan. I'm also a big fan of video game music found on streams such as Rainwave.

Meatloaf, Iron miaden and Mettalica anything ade in the last 2 years sucks

@hwh2219

Not true, you just have to dig deeper for decent rock nowadays.

Here, if you like metal, you might like this stuff:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0G6pFc7lEc

im not going to waste internet on looking at waanabe videos
also I forgot dragonforce

what band

haha

Four Year Strong, they're a Melodic-Hardcore band with tons of influences

like who

in fact dreamtheather are pretty good as well

Top 10 Favorite Composers/Artists

1. Tchaikovsky
2. Mozart
3. The Beatles
4. Puccini
5. The Rolling Stones
6. Bach
7. Elton John
8. Billy Joel
9. Beethoven (A lotta B's!)
10. Mendelssohn

Top 20 Favorite Pieces:

1. Toreador Song from "Carmen" (Bizet)
2. Waltz+Chorus from "Eugene Onegin" (Tchaikovsky)
3. Hey Jude (The Beatles)
4. The Queen of the Night Aria (Mozart)
5. Sympathy For The Devil (The Rolling Stones)
6. Nessun Dorma from "Turandot" (Puccini)
7. Habanera from "Carmen" (Bizet)
8. Do You Hear The People Sing from "Les Miserables" (Schonberg)
9. The March from "The Nutcracker" (Tchaikovsky)
10. Canon and Gigue in D Major (Pachelbel)
11. "Turkish March" (Mozart)
12. "O Mio Babbino" (Puccini)
13. Let It Be (The Beatles)
14. Angie (The Rolling Stones)
15. Polonaise from "Eugene Onegin" (Tchaikovsky)
16. Only The Good Die Young (Billy Joel)
17. Crocodile Rock (Elton John)
18. The FULL 1812 Overture (Tchaikovsky)
19. The Turkish Finale from "The Abduction From the Seraglio" (Mozart)
20. The Finale to "Madama Butterfly" (Puccini)

Tchaikovsky tops the list with 4...
Mozart and Puccini are tied next with 3...
And Bizet, The Beatles, and The Rolling Stones all have 2 each.

What the hell? Haven't we already been through this?

But Rock and Roll is the only thing worth listening to...
Classical music is merely a forerunner to ROCK!

Hugo now must be my arch-nemesis since I love New Wave. I was also in a string of mediocre-to-shitty bands, but we were all synth based, I dyed my hair black and tried to act English and everything.

Alright, I made up part of that, but I was in a string of mediocre-to-shitty bands playing Depeche Mode and Cure covers.

Almost everything on obi's list is something that I look at and think, "Yeah, that's good, but I prefer (x)." Where x=another song by the same artist. And then it gets to Angie, where I have no recourse but to say, "Damn, that's a fine song."

Well, if we are doing lists...

Genres
1. Smooth Jazz (especially Japanese Jazz and standards)
Keiko Matsui - The Piano is her best album
Diana Krall - Live in Paris is awesome
George Benson - like, everything he does is great
Grover Washington Jr. - Winelight is my favorite of his albums
I have a ton more artists at home I love in the smooth jazz genre

2. Classical (plus opera and some musicals)
Mozart - everything except Eine Kleine Nachtmusic (it is way overplayed)
Barber - the Adagio from his String Quartet
Copland - Appalachian Spring is narrowly his bets work, but he has many greats
Leonard Bernstein - Symphonic Dances from West Side Story for classical and, of course, West Side Story
I also enjoy almost everything else except Wagner's operas. They are way OTT and given too much credit.

3. Rock (all sorts: Classical, Soft, Hard, even some Metal)
U2
Rush
Led Zeppelin
Rolling Stones
Beatles
Eagles
Aerosmith
Journey
Van Halen
Metallica...
too many more to list them all here.

4. 80s Pop / New Wave
J. Geils Band (Centerfold is the most fun song ever)
Michael Jackson (gotta love Thriller)
Bangles (Hey, Susanna Hoffs is *hot* and Walk Like an Egyptian is just fun)
lots of others here as well

5. Alternative (a limited list mostly because I haven't experienced enough of it yet)
Staind - Illusion of Progress
Evanescence
Puddle of Mudd
Linkin Park

6. Artists I don't know what to class them as or who nobody knows
Blue Man Group
Coldplay (alternative? pop?)
Fisher (actually, pop or adult alternative, but almost nobody knows them)
I'm not into Country (although I enjoy real Western like John Denver for his mellow feel andf can handle Shania Twain as long as I get to look at her too). I don't do hard core gangsta rap. Mix it in like Linkin Park does and I'm good, or do some old school 80s and 90s rap and I can listen, but I just don't like rap that degrades women and talks of being a cop killer and shit.

Did I miss anything?

Coldplay sort of classifies as alternative, but they're one of those bands that the local alternative station embraced until they got too big, if you know what I mean.

SMOOTH "JAZZ"? Ughhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh lol your musical taste is incorrect in this instance. Lol.

My genres:

Old school hip hop, some new stuff too like Odd Future I'm slowing getting into that kind of stuff.
Classical, my favorite era is Baroque and Vivaldi
Jazz - especially bebop and cool jazz, but also free jazz and New Orleans Jazz
World Music - especially African but also Indian and anything else really.

Favorite artists, none of this is in an order:

A Tribe Called Quest
Pete Rock and CL Smooth
Lords of the Underground
Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All
De La Soul

Vivaldi
Mozart
Captain Tobias Hume
Philip Glass
John Adams
CPE Bach
JS Bach
Mahler!! (Tragic Symphony is the pinnacle of Western Music)

Miles Davis
Charlie Parker
Dizzy Gillespie
Ornette Coleman

Youssou N'Dour
Daler Mendhi
Ladysmith Black Mambazo

etc

Some honorable mentions include some American country and folk such as Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash and good ole bluegrass. Also medieval music like Petrarch I really like to hear.

Some of the indie music my friends listen to piques my interest sometimes but keeping up with those mofos is too much work. I know I like LCD Soundsystem, Daft Punk, Slightly Stoopid and Animal Collective though.

Classical is by far the best. It is not offensive in any way, and is actually real music, unlike some modern "music" that has so much cussing it would be essentially one long bleep if censored. Go classical, especially russian classical.

Diplomat as a fan of both classical and hardcore gangsta rap I dispute your (in my opinion) subtly racist statement that vulgar music is not music or has no artistic value.

Dr. Dre's The Chronic, for instance, was at that time a shocking and unapologetic look into LA's hardest ghettos and the mindset of a gangsta.

OFWGKTA, arguably even more vulgar, is a look into the mind of my current generation's crippling malaise and apathy. I could go on, but it is all relevant and meaningful, as much or more than some classical.

Equally I would say to those who dismiss classical as dull or irrelevant that the emotions expressed therein are sublime and universal, that classical music is not all about beauty but is often a form of self-expression of deep pain.

See: Mahler's 6th Symphony.

Michael Eric Dyson has some really great stuff on the subject of profanity in rap music, a memorable quote being, "It's not the curse words that bother me so much but rather the cursed worlds that these artists are growing up in."

Sometimes the best way to get your point across is to shock people with the way you present it.

Music, for me, satisfies 3 functions:

1) Relaxing music, music that is "cool" and fun to listen to. Much of old school hip hop and jazz is like this.

2) Emotional music, music that lifts your spirits or reminds you of your personal demons. This is moving music, and can come from most any genre.

3) Beautiful music, this music also lifts your spirits, but more BECAUSE it is aesthetically pleasing than because of the content of the music. These two things are in my mind separate. Many masterpieces are intentionally ugly. Much beautiful music is little other than beautiful.

Mozart, for instance, is usually not much more than beautiful and harmonious. It is, however, AMAZINGLY beautiful.

Mahler, for instance, is rarely beautiful, but almost always expresses extreme emotions.

Debussy often does both, so does Chopin.

Rap is rarely beautiful, but sometimes the smoothness or skillfulness of an MCs flow can engender the same appreciation of beauty.

And so on.

@Thucy - I don't go for the popular smooth jazz artists, but more some of the crossovers that get played on smooth jazz stations. Diana Krall is a legendary voice in the vein of Anita Baker or any of the classic female jazz singers of old. Keiko Matsui is an incredible pianist and composer of Japanese Jazz and she can lay down some incredible hot riffs. But being Japanese Jazz, gets lumped into smooth jazz over here. Gorver Wahsington, Jr. and George Benson? Why arguably the fathers of the modern smooth jazz movement, they still have a lot mor in common with the cool/East coast jazz sound. I don't get into the Kenny G crap that has become modern smooth jazz. It has to have more edge. Chuck Mangione in his early days for example, especially his albums Tarantella and Children of Sanchez and a live recording at the Hollywood Bowl with Dizzy was incredible.

So I guess I should clarify it more as cool jazz than smooth jazz, plus the standards like Chris Botti (With Orchestra and Friends is tres magnifique) and Al Jarreau.

And while I can see the artistry and social statements of gansta rap, I can *not* see the musicality of it anymore than I can see the musicality of a painting. It's arguably art (and very much social statement), but it isn't music. It is closer to a speech and literature than music.

Oh, and my all-time favorite Jazz album is Miles and Coltrane - Live in Stockholm. that is one *hot* set.

No no not at all it certainly is music.

There is rhythm, there is pitch, you listen to it.. it is performed. Tell me how it's not music? You can dance to it.... etc.

tell me the sense in which the following is not music, for example:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C99iG4HoO1c