Where I am right now, musically

 This is a post about my musical background and what I have been listening to lately, before starting this blog.

Metal is the music that has touched me the deepest. I've been a metalhead since I was 11. At first I was into Nightwish and other symphonic metal bands, then in my teens a wide mixture of nu metal, post-hardcore, grunge, punk rock, metalcore, etc. I've been re-discovering some of the music of my teen years and most of it still sounds great, i.e. SlipKnoT, Mudvayne and Bullet For My Valentine. After these I somehow ended up being super into progressive metal and goth metal, but also doom metal and lately, black metal. My favourite band for the past 5-10 years has been Katatonia. Other favourites include Paradise Lost, Moonspell, Candlemass, Leprous and Sleep Token. I also love In This Moment (which I consider to be nu metal, with industrial and pop influences instead of the traditional rap and hiphop ones - some people don't consider them metal at all, which seems odd to me).

Some of the most interesting things in popular music (including alt music) right now are, in my opinion, the angry feminist / queer nu metal renaissance (metal+pop/rap), and hyperpop. I'm talking about them in the same paragraph, because they kinda overlap. They feature a lot in each other's music and many artists do both hyperpop and nu metal. I might do a separate post about this one day, but here's a list of artists I am currently aware of, who do either nu metal or hyperpop, or both (or something similar enough that I want to lump them in here): 100 Gecs, Lil Mariko, Dorian Electra, Ashnikko, Scene Queen, Poppy, Rina Sawayama, Grimes and Delilah Bon. I'm a HUGE Ashnikko fan, and I like (more or less) all of these artists, in different ways. All of their music is very different compared to each other, and also not the easiest to listen. This movement is the main reason I started this blog. I need a place to write about this, even if it's to get the thoughts out of my head and no one reading them.

My latest love affair has been with rap and hiphop music. I have always liked rap, but I've never loved it before. Then, early this year, YouTube recommended Knox Hill's channel for me. He's an American rapper, who has a successful music reaction channel on YouTube. He does mostly hiphop reactions, but he also has a series called Metal Mondays, which at the time had about 15 episodes. I watched through all of those and loved it. He's very good at breaking down lyrics and such, I highly recommend his channel. Anyway, I ran out of Metal Monday episodes within 1-2 days. I saw that he has been doing Twenty One Pilots and Blackpink as well, whom I also like. So, I started watching those. Both groups have rap in their songs, and I saw him breaking down the different aspects of the rapping - the rhyming schemes, the flows, the doubles, etc. All this new terminology I had never heard of. It was fascinating.

I follow a bunch of other reaction channels as well (Code Name: Reaction, Rykerroad, Key of Geebz, The Charismatic Voice, Beth Roars, etc) and every now and then there comes a song which almost all of them react to, like it's trending within the reactor community. A week passes, they do it, and then it's forgotten. Sometimes I check it out and then if I like it, I'll check some of the reactions to it. Sometimes I just let the fad pass and never check it out. Ren's Hi Ren starts making the round. I'm not in the mood for new music, so I won't check it out at first. Next week, the song is still doing rounds. Every reactor I've ever watched is doing it. This isn't a fad anymore, it's an actual hit song of some kind. I'd be missing out if I didn't check it out. So, I cave in. I watch the music video. It's this guy, playing a guitar in a hospital gown. He starts singing and it sounds "off key" a little bit, but you can tell he's doing it on purpose. And then he starts rapping, having this monologue between different aspects of his mind. One side being gentle and hopeful, the other one ridiculing him and bringing him down. In the end he stands up, puts the guitar away and gives a speech about what lead to him writing the song, basically. His personal struggles. Just like metal hit my right in the heart and head almost 20 years ago, this song hit me with the hiphop. It shot it's way straight into my heart and also blew my mind - I finally understood rap music. I didn't just like it, I loved it. Not all of it, just like I don't love all metal, but that song made something click inside my brain and now I just... get it. In hindsight, Knox Hill had laid ground work before that happened, so that's why he got an entire paragraph there.

And now I've been obsessed with hiphop. To the point that I think I'm gonna have to start having Metal Mondays or something. Listening to metal is still like returning home after a trip somewhere else, but this hiphop thing is starting to do the same to me. It took me a couple of weeks to process what Hi Ren did to me, and after that I listened through his entire catalogue. (When Illest of Our Time came out, I wrote Ren a comment on how much I loved the song, and how he got me into hiphop and he liked my comment. I had a full on fan girl freak out moment and screen shotted the like 😂 This is the kinda stuff you brag to your grandkids about.) Knox Hill always has a clip from one of his own songs as an intro, and those sounded good, so this one day I listened through all his albums and singles. Then NF's new songs from his latest album started making the rounds on the reactor community, and I listened to the beginning of a few of his songs and couldn't listen further. The lyrics hit too deep. But, again, his new album was such a big deal people just kept doing reactions to it, so I finally caved in, again. I sat down with the album on Spotify, lyrics view on, pens and papers to write down thoughts, a bottle of liquor and tissues. And it did hit hard. I'm starting to get over it and am soon ready to check out his older stuff, but I have not yet. Instead I fell into the rabbit hole of Finnish rap. I listened to Raptori, but their entire albums are surprisingly hard to find. I've listened to the first 5 albums by Avain/Asa, I have three more to go. I've listened to all the single releases by Mikael Gabriel, and the newest album, and I'm about to work my way backwards from there. I listened through the six albums by Don Johnson Big Band that are on Spotify (the first one is not). Tommy Lindgren was my favourite MC before I heard Ren. Now Tommy is my 2nd favourite. I've really liked Pyhimys before, so I'm probably going to listen to him soon. And return to some of my other old favourites, like Mariska.

Late 2022 / January 2023 I was trying to decide if I'd deep dive into experimental jazz, kpop or black metal. Black metal has been naturally creeping it's way into my Spotify recommendations, so that's happening under the surface. None of the bands have stood out to me, though. Some I like, some I don't, but I remember pretty much none of the names and none of the lyrics or melodies or anything. I'm still waiting for it to blow my mind. On jazz and black metal, I have lists of (sub-)subgenres I might like, but that's about it. On kpop, I know I love Blackpink, and Stray Kids seem super cool as well, but I don't know many other groups. BTS is pretty good.