When you ask a person what sort of music they are into you tend to get one of two responses. Either they say something along the lines of "anything that's good" or they will give a specific genre. I would give the first response but once upon a time I would have said the latter. I do sometimes wonder why someone will only listen to one genre and at the same time some of those people would question why someone would listen to more than one genre.
One thing that sticks in my memory is a number of years ago I had a housemate who was also really into his music. However although I was listening to a variety of music by this point, he seemed to like pretty much everything I didn't like. I was mainly listening to Rap and R&B at the time and he would mostly listen to bands like Oasis. We would often slag off each others music tastes.
We went to a house party one night and a Green Day album was being played when we arrived. I struck up a conversation with someone I'd just met about Green Day which lead to talking about Punk in general. Later on at the party me and my housemate did one of our usual piss taking of each others music taste, I would slate Indie and he would slate Rap. The person I was conversing with earlier showed up and said to me "I thought you were into Punk". What he seemed to be implying was either you can't like both Rap and Punk or if you like Punk then you should like Indie too like he seemed to.
Still to this very day I have people aware of me liking a certain genre of music and then get baffled when I go to see someone of a different genre in concert. The reality is with me and my former housemate is that it was our favourite genres at the time that were drastically different. I don't think all Indie music is bad and have some in my music collection and I know his collection includes Alicia Keys, as does mine.
Sometimes though its not surprising for someone into one genre to be into another. For example if someone is into Rap then few would be surprised if they were into R&B too. Likewise someone into Happy Hardcore is quite likely to like Drum & Bass too, though less likely the other way round.
When I was a one genre man which was Happy Hardcore I did listen to Drum & Bass and Techno too and to a lesser extent House and Trance, but crucially it was all in the Dance music genre.
I remember watching a programme with a Rock or Indie musician being interviewed, I think it was the singer of Feeder but I might be wrong. He said that at home he mostly listens to Dance music or other non-guitar music because after playing gigs or being in the studio he is sick to death of the sound of the guitar.
That's something I can relate to in a way. For example after going to Slammin Vinyl around 2001 where I'd been listening to Happy Hardcore, Drum & Bass and Hard House all night I was in no mood to listen to any of those genres afterwards and put on some Garage instead. In fact I went to a 90s daytime rave the first weekend of March which I enjoyed but I don't think I've listened to any Happy Hardcore since, I think I can only listen to it in small doses these days.
A question I always have about people who stick to one genre though is had they been living in a time before their genre existed would they be listening to music at all?
The same could be applied to those people who don't like "old" music, though admittedly when listening to music from the beginning of the charts in the early 50s there is very little to my liking. On the flip side you get people who question why someone would listen to any music from before they were born. I'll leave that till another day to write about.
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