Musicfrom the past that you avoid

[TheMonk]

At the moment if I hear songs from the early 90s that remind me of certain places and people I actually feel sad for my lost youth in a way that has me avoiding them.
Eg What Is Love by Haddaway, Epic by Faith No More, some REM, 2 Unlimited...
Not all songs I have a particular fondness for. I just hear them and they sound like echoes. They make me feel old. Funny because I am able to enjoy music from 1980 - 87 no worries, without this distant melancholy.

I don't have negative connections with these songs - they just alert me to  a lost sense of discovery .

Does anyone else have music that they prefer to avoid for similar reasons?

[Darles Chickens]

There was a moment in the early 90s when this kind of Euro dance sound was ubiquitous (2 Unlimited, Snap, Capella, Haddaway, Culture Beat and all that) and I hated it.  It marked a bit of a lull in my enthusiam for pop music until Britpop came along and changed the soundscape.

They say that music (and smells) are very evocative, and, for me, the next moment when it all went downhill was sometime post-millennium, around 2004ish - The Killers, The Caesars, Arctic Monkeys, all that shit.  And when I hear that stuff now, it leaves me cold - but it's also probably because around that time, I was utterly fed up with life in the UK and was planning my escape.  Music was always such an important part of my life that I'm fairly sure that any time I have negative associations with a particular song, it can probably be traced back to something bad that was happening at the time: some kind of unresolved regret, or moment of loneliness.  Luckily it hasn't hampered my enjoyment of anything which I love.

[Icehaven]

Yeah, some slightly disparate early 2000s indie stuff (Libertines, Raveonettes, early Killers, 80s Matchbox, various others) I think it was basically around the time I gave up on trying to keep up with newly released stuff because the internet was kicking in and making time completely irrelevant in music. Listening to it now it feels older to me than music which actually is decades older, and a bit sad for my long gone early 20s as that's the last time I listened to most of it.

[MattD]

At the moment if I hear songs from the early 90s that remind me of certain places and people I actually feel sad for my lost youth in a way that has me avoiding them.
Eg What Is Love by Haddaway, Epic by Faith No More, some REM, 2 Unlimited...
Not all songs I have a particular fondness for. I just hear them and they sound like echoes. They make me feel old. Funny because I am able to enjoy music from 1980 - 87 no worries, without this distant melancholy.

I don't have negative connections with these songs - they just alert me to  a lost sense of discovery .

Does anyone else have music that they prefer to avoid for similar reasons?

You say REM, and it should have an air of poignancy about it as they are also part of the soundtrack to my youth. But I only start to love their music more - especially as you get older and more songs start to register. For example, while I loved the tunefulness of Automatic For The People, the mortality aspect of it never appealed. That does become more prominent in your mind, and rather than being miserly about it, I find it's dealt with very peacefully.

[non capisco]

^ Yep. When I was in my mid teens and obsessed with REM I always used to skip 'Sweetness Follows' on Automatic For The People. On an album full of elegiac musings on mortality and clinging onto memories it seemed a dirge too far. Heard it again the other month and it completely wrecked me. Full on wrenching sobs.

[purlieu]

At the moment if I hear songs from the early 90s that remind me of certain places and people I actually feel sad for my lost youth in a way that has me avoiding them.

I have a very bittersweet mix of that and fully embracing the escapism of it. There's a fair amount of '80s music that reminds me of being in single figures. I was only five when 1990 came around, so it's probably just a vague sense of the sound of the music, the production, which bled into the first couple of years of the '90s, but so much '80s stuff reminds me of the comfort of childhood. Similarly, listening to a huge amount of '90s stuff, particularly things I loved, reminds me of how rarely I enjoy music on quite the same level these days. I feel fortunate that I was able to discover my all-time favourite album, FSOL's Lifeforms, at the age of 12, an age when most music seems fascinating, and a complex, somewhat experimental album like this was really like being given an entire country to explore by myself. Over the past ten years, I've listened to such a huge amount of '90s and '90s-inspired ambient techno, and although part of it is because Lifeforms really is an exceptional record, I've always been left cold in comparison. Very few albums I've discovered in the last ten years in general have affected me in the way they did in the first ten-to-fifteen years of music listening. But I still don't avoid this stuff. It gives me a sense of comfort a lot of the time.

What I don't listen to much these days is a lot of the hardcore and emo stuff I was into in my early 20s. A little bit of that is because plenty of it is juvenile nonsense, but also because it was the soundtrack to a lot of bad times for me. There are a number of albums and songs I can listen to and still really enjoy, but it also reminds me of a bit of an identity crisis I was going through when I was getting into a lot of it, and that actually there's a huge amount of the stuff I used to listen to which I didn't get any real pleasure from. It was the only time in my life where I really listened to music as a reaction against something I used to like, rather than because I'd discovered it and enjoyed it on its own terms.

[sponk]

Had the strongest experience of this this morning with Teenage Riot. I don't even like the song or Sonic Youth but I had this as my alarm about eight years ago so probably heard bits of it hundreds of times. To say it took me back wouldn't be right. It beat the shit out of me, gagged me, tied me up, forced me into a tiny capsule and shot me back to a bleak time at about 500 miles per hour.

[Phoenix Lazarus]

Punk/ska/heavy rock.  I'm very much MOR in middle-age.

[mojo filters]

Anything by Oasis that I would recognise. I think that's just the first two albums, which seemed to be everywhere and inescapable at the time.

I have no objection to a half decent tune like Live Forever or She's Electric popping up towards the drunken end of an indie club night. However the idea of having to sit through anything more just takes me back to my utter bafflement at their near-ubiquitous popularity amongst friends who otherwise had excellent musical taste.

[steveh]

When I was a kid we had quite a serious car accident. On the way back from the hospital the taxi driver had Radio 2 on and I remember them playing Cher's Bang Bang, which is quite a depressing song anyway but has become so connected to the crash so I still can't bear to hear it. Thankfully it doesn't seem to be on the playlists of any oldie stations these days, no doubt because it's such a downer.

[Pauline Walnuts]

No heavy metal, rock'n'roll, music from the past, I'd rather jack than Fleetwood Mac. Who needs Pink Floyd, Dire Straits?

That's not my music, it's out of date.

[mojo filters]

No heavy metal, rock'n'roll, music from the past, I'd rather jack than Fleetwood Mac. Who needs Pink Floyd, Dire Straits?

That's not my music, it's out of date.

If that's how you sincerely feel (as opposed to offering up an opinion deliberately designed to provoke controversy and/or appear "edgey") I believe you are missing out - in the worst possible cut-yer-nose-off-to-spite-yer-face sense!

I honestly don't understand how folks can appreciate (or criticise) modern popular music, without recognising that which provided the genesis to inspire and inform current output?

I'll concede Fleetwood Mac peaked too early with the brilliance of Peter Green, though I love Paul Oakenfold's production in remixing and releasing Wild Colour's cover of Stevie Nick's Dreams.

I can't remember if that was in the 1994 seminal R1 Goa Mix - but it was a staple of my own nascent use of CDs, in attempting to put my own amateur DJ stamp on the early to mid '90s musical scene - when it was still respectable to mix poppy Piano House bangers with mid-tempo trance, with Perfecto star "Man With No Name" churning out a succession of fantastic original tunes and solid remixes of amazing dancefloor-filling, MDMA-gurning classics - a la early Sasha sets at free parties and classic venues such as the amazing Sheffield Arches!

Pink Floyd by contrast never needs any remix treatment. From the inspirational Syd Barrett era, to Roger Waters' mighty ego gone full-throttle - I can't think of any other band from that time who were so consistent in releasing amazing and perfect album-after-album, despite major lineup changes, right up to Momentary Lapse Of Reason.

Dire Straits by contrast were one of those contemporary bands I heard but mostly ignored, growing up. They were chart music fodder for the straight-laced adults I was surrounded by.

However I'll freely concede I musically misjudged a certain proportion of their output.

When Aaron Sorkin choreographed his balletic final episode of S2 of The West Wing - Two Cathedrals, with Martin Sheen's Bartlet marching defiantly to his rearranged press conference - through wind, rain, plus all the potential adversity inherent in the character's hidden health problems and possible impeachment and the reelection consequences, I was obliged to reassess my opinion of Mark Knophler (sp?) and that song.

Sorkin has such a gift for matching music to the moment. I was impressed but not surprised he so effectively used Jeff Buckley's classic take on Cohen's Hallelujah - driving the emotions in the finale of S3, as CJ's world collapses around her after pushing back on all Secret Service guy Mark's good intentions in the episodes building up to that dramatic succession of heart-wrenching moments!

I guess that to me it's not just interesting but phenomenally curious, how one could listen to current popular music whilst dismissing all the influences that inform such...maybe I take these things are bit too seriously?

[Twed]

Does anyone else have music that they prefer to avoid for similar reasons?

Yes. I associate almost all popular music with past breakups now, so I've just been listening to the esoteric stuff that nobody can relate to.

[Darles Chickens]

If that's how you sincerely feel (as opposed to offering up an opinion deliberately designed to provoke controversy and/or appear "edgey") I believe you are missing out - in the worst possible cut-yer-nose-off-to-spite-yer-face sense!

I suggest you familiarise yourself with this 1989 classic (and then hastily forget it again).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6VBE1oboK8

[McFlymo]

Radiohead's Kid A and Hail To The Thief bring back a time for me that I don't have fond memories of.

Around that time I was listening to a lot of other mopey guitar music, as well: Jeff Buckley, Nick Drake, Elliott Smith ... All them dead cunts. ...

It was specifically when I lived in Luton and used to commute to London to practice with a fairly miserable "alternative rock" band, while working as a security guard, 60 hours a week. Fuck. What a grim couple of years that was.

Although, while that music reminds me of a fairly shit time in my life, it also reminds me of how hopeful I was that things were going to get better and how optimistic I was feeling about music, in general: Like, if the music of Nick Drake could live on, long after his death and make millions more people, like me, feel a warm sense of foreboding and despair, then there was hope! Hope for the discovery of other music that was lovely and timeless! Hope that I was only scratching the surface of all the wonderful and strange music of yesteryear that was at my disposal. Hope that I too, could become a great songwriter....

....

Well. I've got a nicer day job now, at least.

[Noodle Lizard]

If I hear the JCB song by Nizlopi, I'm instantly plunged into a sort of depression recalling comatose, cold-as-balls rides to school when I was 11 or so.  It actually induces a medical condition in me.

Luckily, I never hear JCB by Nizlopi.  Nobody does anymore.

[flotemysost]

Chasing Cars by Snow Patrol is a depressing song as it is, but hearing it takes me right back to working in a kitchen where the radio was constantly tuned to Heart, which had that one on pretty heavy rotation at the time, and generally going through a bit of a bleak, boring patch of my life. Time After Time by Cyndi Lauper and You're Beautiful by James Blunt also instantly flood my sinuses with the smell of potato peelings and dishwashing liquid.

[jobotic]

Seeing Stereolab tomorrow as i did so many times so many years ago.

Quite nervous in case a) they're shite (don't that's likely) or b) I have some tearful nostalgic breakdown about being madly and happily in love and us seeing them together lots and then being a right fucking wreck when it all went wrong.