It's funny when you start tracing your tastes in music back to their roots. I've been thinking about that since I discovered chill-hop.
For those of you who have never heard of chill-hop, it's basically jazz on a hip-hop beat. I started listening to Nujabes when I started at my current job, and since then, I've gradually been adding more and more chill-hop to my Soundcloud collection and, more recently, seeking out YouTube chill-hop mixes to play while I'm working.
So, why musical roots? Because Jazz was my first musical love, as a genre. Smooth Jazz 98.7 was my radio station when I was a kid. When I was younger, I also listened to world music (specifically Celtic tunes, like Lord of the Dance and Celtic Woman, and Native American songs), and my dad was always playing classical. A little bit later, I stumbled onto trance music and EDM -- not even knowing what it was at the time, I called it "video game music" and started recording it off of the radio when it would come on the Saturday Night Bomb (95.5).
The Smooth Jazz radio station and the Saturday Night Bomb went away, and I started venturing more into rock and light metal (Evanescence and Linkin Park).
By the time most radio stations started playing rap and hip-hop, I had all but stopped listening to the radio. This was around the time my cousin shared his Ryan Farish collection with me. And, from there, I started listening to new age, chillout and ambient. Which transitioned into house and other light electronic music. Which led to drum-and-bass, chillstep and dubstep (though I'm not a fan of the really loud, really heavy stuff). Thanks to my brother, a little bit of rap eventually made it into my library, and now his favorite is trap music (techno with a rap beat -- again, the heavy stuff is not my cup of tea).
I haven't even mentioned my anime soundtracks, which are often a mix of many of the above -- or not classifiable at all, and neo-classical (Digitonal). But now I find myself coming full-circle with this jazzy chill-hop. You can be sure I'll have a chill-hop spotlight up soon. XD
What are your musical roots? Feel free to share in the comments!
And here's some classic jazz-tronic music for your listening pleasure.
