I found out recently my girlfriend knows very little about SKA culture so I revisited that after probably a good decade of not listening to any bands in that scene. While some still hold up (Streetlight Manifesto being a good example of that) I can see why ska will never come back, it's really all extremely same-y. It's pretty much the disco of the gen-x and millennial generation.

I'm going to tweak the format a little bit. I was pretty close-minded most of my life with music, and will talk about the stuff I turned away from, and then stuff I came into that I know I'll be into for a long time, as well as stuff I've liked forever.

Stuff I grew out of:

These are going to be a lot of hot takes, and I don't mean them to be, I'm just trying to state what happened. These aren't strong opinions, but they're what I came to when I tried to understand why I didn't like them/don't listen to them as much as other stuff.

A controversial one for me to explain would be System of a Down because while I could be said to wholeheartedly agree with their politics, I don't like how they express them in their music. I was a huuuge fan of them. Then I watched their documentary "Screamers." This film caused me to go back through their discography, and... Like 80% of it is about the Armenian Genocide, and the rest is Bush-era political stuff that is still somewhat relevant. To be honest, I don't know why this caused me to stop listening to them, but I've never listened to more than a couple songs since.

Skrillex. Dude's a good producer, but his music went bland around when "Recess" came out. I sort of stay away from most major electronic dance music because I tend to find it boring eventually. I never got into the stuff that he directly inspired, either (but used to listen to Skream and Rusko, which are foundational/adjacent Dubstep). I'll just jump up here and say there's a lot of EDM I've sort of walked away from, but I still listen to a lot of Drum & Bass (Phace, Noisia, Dom & Roland, Paradox), and IDM. More on these later, though.

Progressive Rock: I loved anything I could get my ears on when I discovered this genre and struck out on my own, but honestly find much of it boring. It's either too clean and dense (Dream Theater), musicaly tropey (Ayreon, though I love all his albums), or was "discovered" and overplayed to the point of being boring (Rush comes to mind). I like some of these bands, but they don't see regular rotation. Others are just not at all exciting or interesting to me, even if they're technically excellent.

Metal: I have a love/hate relationship with the metal genre. A lot is boring because I think I'm over-exposed to it, or it's just annoying, but I'll be sure to talk about stuff I enjoy.

The stuff I grew into, or stuck around

I hope to list more, and frankly in 15 years the music I listen to has broadened, so this will actually be a lot longer, from genres to artists.

Hip Hop: I didn't like rap music except for everything Busdriver put out after I heard is song "Imaginary Places" in THPS4. It was the first rap song I thoroughly enjoyed, and he was basically my bridge to the genre. Then it was rappers who talked about the "right stuff," a lot of nerdcore rap (which I've backed off of, it's generally pandering to the point of being annoying) because I thought they were all thugs (I don't doubt there was a racial issue with me there as well, I remember thinking "He doesn't rap like a black guy" many times. A couple of Open Mike Eagle's songs actually caused me to directly confront this). I took a class on literature, and we covered poetry, and for some reason I found myself paying more attention to lyrics, and going back to Busdriver, and then the people he collaborated with. I found other rappers who made me uncomfortable for new reasons, like Open Mike Eagle rapping about problems Black people face in America, Milo's stuff was weird in a way I could vibe with. Danny Brown because I liked the sound of his voice on Busdriver's "Ego Death," which also introduced me to Aesop Rock. Atrocity Exhibition's handling of drug problems, The Impossible Kid's dealing with depression, Billy Woods and Elucid talking about perspectives on American society. Along the way, I also changed my opinion about artists I'd previously written off, lots of mainstream rappers, but I found a part of this genre that I thoroughly enjoy. I now actually rarely listen to Busdriver, and more of everybody else.

Metal: I tend to listen to more progressive or technical metal. Meshuggah stands out as a favorite of mine because while they're tight like Dream Theater, their production, instrumentation and rhythm is generally interesting to me. I got really into more aggressive metal with Mastodon's "Iron Tusk," and Leviathan is probably one of my favorite albums ever. They're the band that got me to listen to screamy metal, even as they went more progressive years later (Blood Mountain and Crack the Skye are also two favorite albums of mine). The metal I listen to isn't because of any nostalgia or anything, but because I like the sound. It's one of those things where I get a tingle in the back of my head that makes me go "Yeah, this is good." Really, if I listen to it, it's because the music does that to me.

Drum and Bass: I'm going broad, as this is covering every genre I listen to. I don't go to festivals or anything, but just like the music. I first found jungle, which sounded like rhythms I heard when I would tap on stuff nervously/for fun, and it stuck. Then neurofunk and tech step, which were similar, but with these impressively crafted bass sounds. Last was drumfunk, which is like jungle, but stripped down to the basics: some bass, some pads, but like 90% about the rhythms and minimalism. I feel like not enough people listen to this sort of stuff, even if they listen to EDM.

IDM: Arguments about the name aside (I swear everybody's forgotten it's likely a call back to that compilation Artificial Intelligence), but Squarepusher and Aphex Twin were the reason I got into all of the electronic music I listen to. Richard D. James Album was my first Aphex album, and "Come on my Selector" was my first Squarepusher song (I would later buy Big Loada and Feed Me Weird Things because they're just good albums). This expanded into similarly brain-tickling music buy u-ziq, Cylob, Venetian Snares, Autechre, and even my current interest in live-coding (via Cylob, who used Supercollider).

I'll go band-by-band a bit here.

Jethro Tull: Nostalgia, mostly. My dad loves this band, and would play it all the time. My brothers and I liked the music, we and my mom went to see the Aqualung 40th anniversary tour. I still love this music, and to me a lot of it is my "feel-good" music, particularly Thick as a Brick, Aqualung, and Too Old to Rock and Roll, which I found as an adult, but it feels like the other two in very important ways.

Soundgarden: They're just a solid band. My dad had Superunknown and Badmotorfinger, and it was the first aggressive music I'd ever listened to, but it was also rhythmically and musically interesting. I don't like their stuff after like '94, though.

I may have more, but there's a lot of stuff I just never went back to and doesn't capture my interest like I used to.

Stuff I've grown out of is tricky and it kinda mixes with the stuff I still listen to tbh.

Manowar - see I grew up in area where metal was the thing you listened to. It was this silly machismo ideal and conflict between "sissy middle class academics" who was ment to listen to electronic music and "Real men" who listened to metal. I know, dumb. Really dumb.

Buuuut it stuck around - and one of those many bands (there was a lot of them) that really didn't age well was Manowar.
But I remember walking home from school - I was a nerdy latebloomer kid and got beat up a lot in school. I lived inside a walkman as a mental support system I guess - it was a crisp early autumn day and I walked through my hometown and tried to figure out how I could hide the fact that the back of my head was burnt from my mum. I grew up with the "men don't cry" and "men are self-reliant" ringing in my ears and that was hard to do that day.
Some kids had set fire to the back of my head and held me down beating out the flames in one of the school corridors only to restart the process - the scars are still there 30 years later in the back of my head. When I got home I cut all the hair off and started wearing a cap for a while while it healed saying it was "a thing now" .... aaaaaanyway ....

In my headphones the song Kingdom Come by Manowar was blasting over and over until the batteries died in the walkman. It's a cheesy operetic kind of fur and leather, fantasy metal song about hanging in there and taking it just a little while longer and things will get better. It was basically my one person "It get's better" project in ridiculous metal form.

So while I grew out of many of the songs - like the wholly sexist "pleasure slave" - and many of the machismo, happy-go-lucky-fantasy-fascism songs and lyrics - it still is my go to when I fell like nothing, like things are too hard and too much and need someone to tell me that its gonna be ok no matter what.

So I guess "Both" is the reply :)

Weird Al is definitely one of those things I, for lack of a better term, grew out of. When I was in middle-school and through the beginning of college, he was by far the artist I owned the most CDs of. I can remember doing chores on the farm as a kid and listening to a portable cassette player and it was always Weird Al. I liked other music, I come from a very musical family, but Weird Al was basically my personality.

And then it just stopped. I am honestly not sure why but after Running With Scissors, I never really touched him again. I actually kind of forgot about him until my son started watching this show called Little Big Awesome and he does some cameos in it.

I theorize it's because once I got to college I met people that knew about music besides what was on the radio and they helped me actually develop a taste in contemporary music. I grew up in a rural area and all the radio stations were oldies, top 40 and country. None of my friends were really into music outside of that. I met a lot of people in college that really got me into punk, metal, hardcore, etc and that's what I've been into since then. It was also during the Napster phase, so I was able to easily acquire a lot of this lesser known music. Maybe I liked Weird Al because he made fun of the music I was basically forced to listen to growing up. Now that I rarely listen to top 40 artists, I don't really even know what song he's making fun of.

Still appreciate him as a person and for the place he had in my life for such a long time. And also because when I saw him in concert I took my parent's film camera to snap some photos, but when they loaded up the film they accidentally put in a roll that had already been exposed. It was my confirmation photos. So, in incredible Weird Al fashion, he's super imposed in all my photos a Bishop performing a sacrament on me.

I don't think I've grown out of anything, really. There's stuff I listen to less now than when I was younger but I suspect that's mostly a function of the vast availability of music now compared to the few cds I could afford then.

My tastes have broadened as I've got older, but there's nothing I can think of that I loved when I was a teenager I don't still love now.

There's very little I would say I fully grew out of, that I find it harder to enjoy. But, there's definitely stuff that fell out of rotation, simply because I probably played it out and moved on to other things. Grunge definitely falls into that category. Used to play various albums on loop, but now it's mostly relegated to hearing it on the radio in the car or occasionally when a song pops in my head. Not sure why, I guess it just kinda got pushed out in favor of newer/better stuff.

My musical development was suppressed on account of my family considering modern music evil. Funny that we had a copy of this song growing up that I played on my kid's record player. Music piracy (at least according to the record companies) was the only way I really got a chance to listen to music I identified with for a long time. So that was likely a huge influence on how I see piracy to this day, but that's a bit of a sidebar.

Here's the 'musical foundation' that I recognize and persists to this day, 20+ years later:

1. Nine Inch Nails - The Downward Spiral
   I first discovered Nine Inch Nails during a dark period of my life, being horrendously bullied in middle school, losing my elementary school friends, and barely having met a social circle I could fit into. Closer would play on the radio occasionally, and edgy/depressed/horny/immature teenage Vord only really saw it at shallowest surface level and liked it for that. But what hooked me was finding the CD case in my older cousin's basement (CD not found), and I analyzed every square inch of it. I experienced that whole album as pictures and words before ever hearing a song other than Closer. I basically kept this a secret for several months until I told said cousin and he let me listen to some songs. I was obsessed with Mr. Self Destruct and Closer. Turns out, he had a lot of the various other CDs as well, and made me a mix tape he titled 'Closer to Self Destruction', which was basically an algamation of the various Closer and Mr. Self Destruct versions from The Downward Spiral, Closer, and Further Down the Spiral. Over time, my tastes expanded, but NIN has been a bedrock, and especially when feeling down and out will make me feel better in that cathartic manner.

2. Weird Al - Running With Scissors
   Was always a fan of Weird Al, especially since that one time JoJo of WLAN locked himself in the booth and played 'Amish Paradise' on loop for 24 hours (in the middle of Amish country), refusing to stop until the police escorted him out. Hard to find on the net, but I am not alone in remembering this. Weird Al is the master of musical parody, and the number of other terrible musical parodies on Youtube is proof of that. Running with scissors was the first album I purchased (on cassette). While he's not on regular listening rotation, I will see that man in concert every chance I get.

3. Catch 22 - Keasbey Nights
   Catch 22 was my first live concert, mostly playing from this album. A ska concert was transcendent for someone who had relatively little exposure to music at all. Moshing with all the kicks and bruises...but once someone was on the floor people stopped to help them up.

4. William Shatner - Has Been
   Was walking through a record store (remember those?), saw the last copy of this standing out awkwardly in the rap section. Said 'damn, I have to see what this is about,' bought it, and have been listening to it ever since. Was my first exposure to Ben Folds, and this album shows just how great of a musician Ben Folds is, because hew was able to play into Shatner's strengths and complement it fantastically. This album, more than any other, is one I would advise everyone to give at least one listen to.

5. Thin Lizard Dawn - Thin Lizard Dawn
   Found this in a used record store in Ocean City circa 2003. It's weird and catchy. My wife and I consider Happy-Loonies one of our most important couple songs.

6. Daft Punk - Discovery
   Discovery was introduced to me via Interstella 5555. Get stoned an watch it if you haven't yet. Something About Us def another couples song for wife and myself.

7. Pink Floyd - Dark Side of the Moon
   Vinyl, CD/FLAC, or GTFO. I've listened to this album hundreds, if not thousands of times in virtually every medium. It's a definitive stereo/headphone tester for a reason, and one of the only ones I can easily pick out whether it's compressed or lossless on a decent setup.

Other musical tastes come and go, but those remain on rotation. They're not even necessarily my favorite albums anymore from those artists, but those are the ones that make my brain tick.

Weirdly, music I kinda despised while I was growing up I actually like now, I guess because nostalgia is a hell of a drug.

I was a Rush fan in high school and had all their albums on cassette. (Half of them copied from I guy I met at a store I worked at.) I don't remember any particular thing that changed, but after I got a CD player, I only bought one greatest hits album on CD and mostly bought other music instead. I still like a few of their songs sometimes if I'm in the right mood, but don't go out of my way to listen.

Weird Al is forever. However, I went a long time without checking out his newer albums, until someone shared a song I hadn't listened to before here and I went to check them out on YouTube.

I have gone through many phases of music at this point. Though I still revisit most of them from time to time, they all exist as semi-discrete blocks of musical interest. For a while, I was really into the hard rock of the 90s and 00s, like Tool, Chevelle, 10 Years, Mudvayne, so on. Then in 2013, I got really into trap and twerk/bounce. I grew out of trap a few years ago and got into house music. And then got really into pop, then new R&B, then Americana/singer-songwriter, then lounge music and big band/crooning, and now I'm on new soul music. Oddly enough, the rock I was listening to 10 years ago has become relevant to me again, especially with the angst I felt over the recent election. I also found the Sirius XM Turbo station that seems to play music I haven't thought about in forever, so that's a nice outlet.

I never grown out, just got bored of.

A few examples can be:

• Metal in general.
• Christian music.
• Chiptune.
• Modern Trap/Hip Hop.
• /mu/ core (this one is the only one I found embarrassing).

I was really into Disturbed in my teens. I think partially because their sound and album art seemed “evil” which I knew would freak out my ultra-religious parents. I did genuinely enjoy the music though for years. But these days with only a few exceptions I’ve got no interest in their music at all. As for what spurred the separation, their stuff after Ten Thousand Fists doesn’t click with me and the old stuff feels cringey through the lens of who I was when I was into it.

As for music that’s stuck with me, it has to be 70s/80s rock/metal. It’s music my dad grew up with as a teen and into his 20s and he shared pretty heavily with me when I was a kid. He used to pick us up from school and we’d play “what’s the band” where’d we’d try to guess which old band was on the classic rock station. He’d drop hints (usually in the form of bad puns) until my brother or I could guess the answer. And it just kinda stuck with me. Styx, Queen, Rush, Zeppelin, Black Sabbath were some of my favorite bands as a teen (around the same time as Disturbed, oddly enough!). The staying power is just that it’s really good music. The only stuff that survived to live on as “classic rock” decades later was the best of the best.

I've been a Funkadelic fan for decades. I still listen to them by phases. It's like comfort food.