I listened to contemporary late 1990s and early 2000s music during my teen years. According to the theory of "music taste forms in your early teens", I should love grunge, alternative rock, hip hop, etc. And it turns out that most of my peers seem to like that kind of music.

What I took out of that time period was mostly house music and new jack swing. I used to especially love house music. I wanted to hear everything remixed as electronic dance music, seeing this as some sort of improvement.

Around the age of 18, I began playing in an after-school rock band lead by one of the teachers at the school. One of the songs we played was A Day In The Life, which we ended up recording in a studio and submitting to a competition of Beatles covers. We didn't win, but the song piqued my interest in the Beatles' music, which I hadn't really noticed before.

I ended up borrowing a couple of albums from the school library for the weekend. I disliked the relatively poor sound quality at first, but soon saw past it, and found a lot of good songwriting. The Beatles were how my journey into the music of the past began.

I keep discovering wonderful songs every day that have seemingly been forgotten today, and I laugh at how much of the new music coming out today is just old stuff remixed and rebranded for the teenagers, and how the exact same thing was the case for the music I enjoyed growing up. I barely have any 1990s music in my collection now. It's full of all the old gold. I'm aware that recycling isn't a new phenomenon, but back in the 1970s they actually knew how to pull it off, and not ruin the song.

One of my problems with alternative rock is the use of distorted guitars in the rhythm section. I'm fine with distorted guitar solos, but when the entire song is just a loud wall of electric guitars, it's just ugly. The choice of chords, while "edgy" sounding, tends to work against the melody. Whereas most music up to about 1980 tries to emphasize harmony, alternative rock seems to fly right in the face of that. I'm sure this is great to some people, but I don't like the direction rock music has taken in the last 20 years or so.

Hip hop? Some of it is all right, but my ears tire of listening to it. It's like someone is aggressively talking to you in rhymes while you're listening to sampled break beats. Break beats which were originally part of good songs I usually discover I would rather listen to instead of the rap song they're in. Today's hip hop is also a guy aggressively talking to you in rhymes, but doing so on top of a TR-808 drum machine and a JP-9000 synthesizer, without the nice 1960s and 1970s break beats. It's such a barren soundscape!

"Barren" and "cold" are terms I increasingly find myself using to describe contemporary popular music. The soul of music is disappearing. I hope it takes a turn for the better, but it's not looking good. It's not that I don't get contemporary music. I understand it all too well. I just hate its values.