What kind of music do I listen to? Part 1

"What kind of music do you like?"

I hate when people ask me this question, because I listen to so many genres that I don't even know where to start, plus I don't listen to a lot of newer music, at least not the kind of newer music that seems to dominate in Red States. If I had to break down my favorite genres by decade, it would look something like this. Keep in mind that this is what I like now, and not necessarily what I've liked in the past.

• 1950s: Rock n' Roll/Rockabilly, which can pretty much include '50s Country and R&B as well.
• 1960s: R&B, Surf Rock, British Invasion, Garage Rock/Psychedelia. And I guess some Country as well. I also have a fondness for Burt Bacharach-style Jazz, or whatever you want to call it.
• 1970s: Glam Rock, Punk Rock, R&B/Funk and some Disco, a limited amount of Heavy Metal and Prog.
• 1980s: Alternative (includes too many sub-genres to list, will elaborate later), Thrash/Speed Metal (including Thrash/Punk Crossover), early Death Metal, Hip Hop, early '80s R&B (especially with the Mini-Moog bass), Electro-Funk, and a lot of stuff that was popular, but don't care to split into categories for now (will elaborate later).
• 1990s: Alternative (again, will elaborate later), Thrash Metal, Death Metal, post-Thrash Groove Metal, Techno, early '90s Hip Hop.
• 2000-2013: This is where it starts to get tricky, but the only genres I could say for sure that I liked were Garage Rock and Dance Rock, but I've been trying to focus more on finding music that "moves" me regardless of genre, which a lot of times is music that reminds me of older music, especially New Wave or Synth-Pop.

As you can see, I'm pretty scattered out. It's probably easier for me to say what I don't like, which is usually middle-of-the-road music (MOR), mainstream Hard Rock, Pop-Country (1990-2013, basically file under "MOR/Hard Rock") folksy singer/songwriter stuff, and I hate to say it, Blues. While I can appreciate the impact Blues has had on Rock and Metal, a lot of it just sounds the same to me, or at least the general Blues formula just doesn't do it for me. Plus, I need some Rhythm to go with my Blues. I don't like most R&B from the late '80s to today, or a lot of Hip Hop from after 1995.

To elaborate further on what I mean by "Alternative", a short answer would be that it's the kind of music you would hear on Sirius/XM's "First Wave" channel, or that you could find on the Left Of The Dial box set, and the '90s equivalents of those bands. The long answer is that it is a bunch of genres that spawned from Punk, my favorites of which are:

• New Wave
• New Romantic
• Synth-Pop
• Hardcore (but only from about 1980-1986)
• Goth Rock
• Industrial
• College/Indie Rock (which itself is pretty hard to nail down)
• Alternative Metal
• Grunge (which could also be lumped under Alternative Metal)

Around 1996, real Alternative Rock seemed to go back underground, while commercial Modern Rock radio pushed bands that were a watered down version of the popular early '90s Alt-Rock. It angers me to no end when people refer to bands like Nickelback or Shinedown as Alternative. I should also mention that Pop-Punk and Emo are like the "kiddie pool" of Alt-Rock.

BTW, I don't like Sirius/XM's "Lithium" '90s Alt channel. Every time I turn it on to Lithium, I hear the same old stuff that I can hear on the local radio channels. I got to hear XM's old equivalent to it a couple of times, and I freakin' loved it since they played a lot of stuff that's been forgotten.

I'm thinking that I'll have to continue this topic later.