AINEOP.
AINEOP.
Like most people, I'm a big fan of music. Who doesn't love music? Seriously, who doesn't love listening to a haunting piano melody or powerful lyrics or loud electric guitar or video game OSTs or- well, whatever genre you like?
To be perfectly honest, most of the songs I listened to growing up were songs my parents or elder sibling liked. My sibling liked whatever songs played in these subway train tribute videos he watched, which was, at the time, early 2000s stuff. I think my parents were into older music, since they're older.
There's one artist I really remember liking before I was six. Josh Groban. I have vague memories of me and my mother belting the lyrics of this one song of his. I think the music video had a classroom of some sort? There was a part where my mom and I always hit a high note in perfect sync, and it was great. I think I wanted to meet Josh Groban in person. I was, like, four.
I was always drawn to mainstream pop as a kid. Mainly because I first started really liking music at the age of 7-8 ish. Actually, the second song I ever liked (the first one was whatever that Josh Groban song was) was really It's Raining Tacos. You know, the really annoying one. I was 7. Don't judge me. The third song I ever liked was New Rules by Dua Lipa. I think I heard it playing at the supermarket my family went to every week before the pandemic hit, and was drawn to the catchy extreme autotune like every other seven year old then-girl.
From there, I went on to like a lot of other pop stars. Bebe Rexha and Ariana Grande, most notably. Various friends I met on a Minecraft server introduced me to them. I even liked some rappers, like Iggy Azalea and, one year, Nicki Minaj. Weirdly, I only ever listened to female singers as a kid - and maybe that was foreshadowing to my extreme queerness today. Or it's because I just liked how women sounded more.
I started branching out the month the pandemic hit, I think. From the "music sessions" I had with my sibling (which was just us showing each other songs we liked; We never liked each other's songs because he liked rock and EDM and I liked exclusively female pop,) I had songs from The Orion Experience queued up - which, was probably the first indie band I ever liked. I had Cosmicandy on repeat, I swear. Too bad the lead vocalist is a predator or something.
Another one of the first bands that caught my ear was Autoheart. At first, I only liked the Lent EP, but then I listened to everything else in 2021, and I still love the band today.
More bands I found in early 2020 include The Crane Wives, Will Wood and the Tapeworms, Younger Hunger, and The Scary Jokes. I was finding a lot more indie music, which is probably why I realized I was some kind of queer by the end of that year. I'm kidding, but still.
In 2021, I mainly listened to indie and rap - indie rock, on occasion. Not much to say about this year, except that I figured out I was trans and I think that influenced my taste in music. I was seriously looking up "nonbinary" on Spotify. No wonder I listened to Mother Mother!
In 2022, I branched out even further. My sibling's influence had really gotten the better of me. I listened to goddamn Korn. If I told seven year old me that I was going to listen to bands like Foo Fighters and Staind and The Offspring, she'd probably laugh at me, twirling her pink tutu or whatever.
It's 2023 now. I listen to System of a Down. And Iggy Azalea.
