As a kid I remember listening to whatever crap was on top 40 radio/TV. However my parents bought me a walkman when I was about 8. My favourite tapes were by The Beatles, Buddy Holly and Queen, which I think displays pretty good taste in music for an eight year old. I also remember liking Ratcat and The Cure (their pop stuff obviously, their darker stuff would have scared the shit out me as a kid). So what are some of your memories?

I got into music when I was about 11 iirc. Memory Remains video clip to be precise. Metallica, Jars of Clay (mum freaked out when she found out I liked metallica and bought a bunch of bad christian music, for some reason JoC stuck), and a lot of pop punk. Liked Korn and Limp Bizkit a lot back in the day but y'know if you're a 12 year old and you don't know any better it wasn't too hard to see why.. Moved on quickly from there though. Basically, except for the nu metal shite most of the stuff I enjoyed back then I still enjoy now for one reason or another.

I also remember loving Elton John when I was a kid; I still think No Sacrifice is one of the best ballads ever

I got really into Nirvana and Metallica as a kid, got into them when I was around 8 after seeing their music videos on Mtv. I guess they were the first I was a real fan of, and I bought a new record every time I had enough money. I remember I cut out pictures of them from metal hammer and hung on my wall... I used to lay on the floor while listening to my cd's or I would play air-guitar in my room. Prior to owning a disc-man I also had a walkman, so when I was even younger i would listen to this Swedish pop-rock band, can't remember their name. I only liked two songs so it was hell rewinding and going fastforwards all the time.

Wow. That's a real blast from the past. When I was a teenager all of my Christian friends listened to Jars of Clay. I'd completely forgotten about them, until now...

My parents' collection, mostly: The Bee Gees, Elton John, Billy Joel, Enya (fuck you, she's awesome), Huey Lewis, John Denver, and a bunch of other ones. I listened to a lot of shitty alternative and some pop up until about my freshman year in high school. I shit you not- the soundtrack on GTA: Vice City is what got me started on classic rock/metal in the first place. Then I became a Metallica fanboy, opened up to Megadeth, started exploring better thrash bands like Destruction and Exodus, and finally developed a taste for stuff like Vader.

I probably would have listened to metal at a much earlier age if I knew back then that it existed.

I was into Finnish pop/rock singers like Kaija Koo and Juice Leskinen. After that, at the age of 13-14 maybe, came Metallica and Maiden. Still enjoy some of that Finnish shit.

You could do worse y'know, I still like a few of their songs. Faint praise indeed, but out of all the horrific christian bands out nowadays Jars still have some honesty/integrity, a willingness to experiment. It's mostly rather bland stuff, but you could listen to worse things.

I listened to my dad's music mostly when I was little, he's into classic rock like the Eagles, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Pink Floyd, The Allman Brothers, Led Zeppelin, CCR, all sorts of that kind of stuff. As I got a little older, besides the rock radio stations I was around alot of punk...like everything from blink 182 to hardcore Oi...

I guess it was like 5th or 5th grade that I really stared branching out into "real" metal

First thing I remember to hear was old 70's jazz, 70's prog rock (Zep, Floyd, KC, ELP, Genesis, Camel, etc), Sinatra, Martin, Elvis and guys like that and reggae. I grew with that music for my father being fan of those styles.

My older brother was a metalhead who was into thrash, heavy (no clear doom definition yet, everything was called simply heavy metal) and the arising death/thrash stuff (early/mid 80's). That aside, the radio played tons of hair metal/glam and rock bands + Good pop like Depeche Mode, A-ha, The Cure, Madonna, Michael Jackson and so on. At the end of the 80's I was already into metal enough to discern styles and have a decent collection (tapes mostly).

As a kid all I really listened to was video game music and maybe 20 assorted songs by nu metal bands that I knew from the radio. I was pretty uninterested in rock music until I found Rammstein I think? Prior to that my dad was always blasting "classic" rock bands and reggae, but the sheer volume he played it at and the arguments it caused generally made me highly averse to it. Funny how I ended up liking both in the end.

I started listening to, I'd say broadly speaking, rock and metal music when I was 5. Metallica "Reload" is responsible, which is why I have a sentiment for this album regardless of anything. (Before that I remember some terrible things like Backstreet Boys.)

And since then I basically listened to heavy metal on one side (Iron Maiden and Metallica were the leaders sort of), and also other types of rock, I loved U2 and later also Red Hot Chili Peppers when I was like 8-12 or something. Also some stuff like Linkin Park (I STILL LIKE THEM AND NOT AFRAID TO ADMIT IT) and Rammstein. I also discovered some other metal bands around that time, I remember Rhapsody and later Kreator emerged sort of.

And when I was 14 I discovered Dream Theater and I've never been normal since. (Yeah I know I've said this before but it's true. )

Well, I'm only 18 now, but when I was about 8 I started listened to Linkin Park, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Audioslave, System of a Down, Blink 182, and other rock bands that they played on VH1 Mega Hits. My dad listened to a lot of classic rock but also some metal, so he introduced me to some metal bands like Rush, Maiden, Priest, Sabbath, and Metallica. From there I started mainly listening to metal bands.

It wasn't until I turned 14 that I really started listening to a lot of different metal bands though. Before that I thought that somebody like Amon Amarth was an underground band, mainly because no one else I knew had ever heard of them.

I was thinking of this "roots of musical taste" concept last week, pretty interesting.

I was brought up in a very trad folk environment - my dad and his mates having kitchen jam sessions, being dragged to folk clubs etc. Pretty much hated it, and knew there was more to be had out there, but nothing other than folk music was tolerated in the household. I got various cassette tapes from Aunties and Grannies at Christmas and birthdays, giving me a tantalising glimpse of "other" music. But we're talking bad compilations (the "Now..." series), the Pet Shop Boys, Enya, random stuff at that stage. Then one year (aged approx 11) I was given "Brothers In Arms" and thought this is more like it! Then U2's "Joshua Tree" (played to death, and still enjoy it). Then one day while aimlessly leafing through my dad's vinyl, I came across an album that didn't look particularly like folk music. A stylistically-painted bird mid-flight, it's beating wings visibly rippling the air around it, a human ear picking up the sound waves. It must be a relic from the days (pre-me, possibly pre-meeting-my-mum) when he was not so single-minded about folk, I guess. I'd never heard him play it, that's for sure. I decided to give it a spin, and Emerson Lake And Palmer blew my tiny pre-pubescent mind!

The flood-gates opened, I began buying music myself instead of just accepting what others gave me. It was pretty experimental, much of the time my decisions were based on cover art (internet didn't exist, we didn't have a TV, radio was shite) but frequently it paid off. Vinyl was so cheap, I trawled the £1 sections of music shops ("Music shops, what are they?" I hear the young-uns saying), one favourite haunt had a "£1 each or 8 for a fiver" section - I went mental in there, struggling home on the bus with several kilos of vinyl week after week!

Bear in mind, there was a lot of negative press about metal at this point - bands getting done for 'causing' suicides, a general feel that those who liked metal were the 'bad element' - and indeed, all the assholes and bullies in school were wearing Maiden patches on their denim jackets, it was a scary culture, but I was curious... A friend at school loaned me Faith No More's "Live At The Brixton Academy" to listen to during a free lesson. It blew me away, easily the heaviest thing I'd heard at that point. The current 'big' release at that point was Metallica's black album, I bought it out of curiosity, and the rest is history.

Like many others here, the first music I listened to was largley influenced by what my parents listened to. My mom liked Styx, ACDC, Heart and whatever was on the radio (basically Top 40 stuff). My dad listened to mostly country, but was also into a few rock bands from the 60's and 70's: everything from Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson and Garth Brooks to Don McLean, Pink Floyd and Bob Seger.

I listened to whatever they listened to for a long time. My older brother got into skate punk, so I listened to that for a while (NOFX, Bad Religion, Pennywise, anything on Fat Wreck Chords or Epitaph). I had an older cousin that listened to anything that had a lot of swearing: rap, Nine Inch Nails, Pantera, etc. So I sparked an interest in some metal at the end of elementary school. Never really got into rap, though.

I remember my real interest in metal came when I was at the beach in elementary school. We went to the same campground in North Caroline every year at the same time and there was a kid (he was probably like fifteen at the time) who my cousins and I hung out with as he was there every year too. Anyways, his CDs included Manowar, Megadeth and Iron Maiden, which got me more interested. One of the older brothers of someone I used to skate with was into a lot of different stuff and got me hooked on Neurosis when I was in sixth grade too. As the saying goes, downhill from there.

I'm a major 90's kid. Most of the things I listened to back then, I still enjoy now. And who wouldn't love to get down with some Eve, Missy Elliott, or old skool Eminem? Basically any 90's pop/hip-hop is where it's at.

And like any 90's/early 2000's kid I was very much into all that nu-metal. The only one that has stuck with me to this day is Korn, though. There are some miscellaneous songs from various other nu-metal bands I still occasionally listen to. I was also obsessed with Whitesnake, and for the most part I still am. And as I've stated before, the parents were always playing country, so all the good ones from the 80's and 90's stuck - ESPECIALLY George Strait.

I consider my "metal years" to be an entirely separate chunk of my life aside from my childhood listenings, even though I really started listening to it around 13.

A lot of top 40 stuff, I'm sure. Don't really remember specifics but I remember having a lot of those Now! That's What I Call Music! albums.

Between 8 and 13 we lived near an US airbase in Germany due to my mom's military assignment. The only radio station we ever had on was American Forces Network, which was kind of boring because they would only play pretty mundane stuff. When the Spice Girls are getting bleeped you know your radio is bland. I watched a lot of MTV Deutchland, which, in the late 90s/early 00s included a lot of dance/house music and electronica (this trend may have also existed in the US, I don't know). So much dance. Daft Punk, Funkstar Deluxe, Vengaboys, Crystal Method, the Chemical Brothers, etc. I just remember seeing a lot of kind of dark music videos like this one, which I'm sure was a really positive influence on my developing psyche: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpKCqp9CALQ At one point my life goal was to become a DJ for rave parties.

When we moved back to the US I got kind of overwhelmed with all the media options, listened to a lot of "new alternative" and hard rock radio. Went through Linkin Park, Limp Bizkit, Staind, Korn, Disturbed, etc pretty rapidly before getting into Type O Negative, Sisters of Mercy, the Cure, and then picked up a Century Media sampler at Hot Topic that had Dimmu Borgir, Arch Enemy, In Flames, and Immortal on it. That set me on the metal path and I just kept delving further and further.

Gospel (Statler Brothers, Don Francisco, A Capella..) and whatever was in the country music radio. It was what Mum listened to, and that was what got passed on to us. When my oldest sister went into high school and was exposed to her friends/boyfriends music, we weren't allowed to listen to it. Eventually she got a job at a store that sold records, and she came home with some herself. I vividly remember Mum freaking out about dc Talk .

From there, they had these samplers called X 2004, 2005, etc. that basically contained hits from the Christian rock radio of that year, sometimes a little on the pop, punk, or hip hop sides. We started out with Hawk Nelson (pop punk), Skillet (radio rock, basically), and then Thousand Foot Krutch (a lot of things). Thousand Foot Krutch is the last band I can say was conclusively from my childhood... I discovered Demon Hunter sometime around 13/14, which was basically when I took the plunge into metal.

Although, I do still listen to Thousand Foot Krutch's semi-debut Set It Off every now and then.

I listened to pop, rock and some heavy metal.

The first time I ever got money from a job as a teenager, I went and bought myself records. I still remember what were my first two albums:

Prince, Purple Rain
and Slayer, Hell Awaits

I purchased them together. I still like them today.

I didn't listen to a lot of music as a young kid. Mostly just listened to what my parents owned, which was mostly classic rock and some folk music records. When I got a bit older, I took to listening to movie soundtracks.

I didn't listen to music until high school, period. That's when I got into Black Sabbath and, well, it all snowballed from there. In fact, I had to retroactively listen to nu metal and such to gain insight into (and eventually, disdain for) the style.

I wish I was making this up.

Lots of pop-punk and rock bands. Wasn't huge on hip hop or other genres, but I was definitely a TRL nut. Would always see what the top 10 bands were and I just always leaned in the rock direction. Bands like Linkin Park were my thing big time. I was pretty big into all of it, getting progressively heavier as I went along (by heavier I mean from pop-punk to modern rock bands). Didn't get any inklings of metal until I heard the Freddy vs. Jason soundtrack, with bands like In Flames really breaking into my listening tastes. Thereafter I ended up hearing bands like Hypocrisy and Opeth helping me get over harsh vocals and it continued from there. However, by mid-2005 I was still listening to bands like Fall Out Boy.

I keep forgetting this, but I also had a very good friend move to California and when I went there for a vacation in 2003 his older brother showed me progressive / power metal bands, most of which I forgot. I distinctively remember Dream Theater and Masterplan, though, who didn't do anything for me at the time. Nonetheless, the intrigue was something that never left me.

After I came back from a vacation in Atlanta in the summer of 2005, I really, really cut back on my old tastes and started delving into metal.

I did that with Slipknot. I felt like I should at least understand why they got so much hate, so I bought their first two albums and spent a couple days listening to them. Then I said, "well, that's that" and sold them to a used CD store.

Oh boy...I grew up in a "morally upright" household. Not exactly religious, but still restrictive. So I was only allowed to listen to...Radio Disney. For those of you outside the US or just unaware, Radio Disney is a station that plays a mix of Disney stars and top 40 songs that have been edited to remove even the most remote of inappropriate references and rude language.

However, Radio Disney had a habit of playing two songs at a time, followed by 2 hours of contests, ads and talk about Disney shows. Mom got tired of the talking pretty fast, so I ended up listening to what she liked, namely disco, country or classic rock/arena rock from the 80s. Not exactly the best that music has to offer, but I feel like it gave me the basis for what is now a fairly diverse music palate.

Eventually when I was 12 I bought my first CD at the Christian Book Store (we had upgraded from "Morally Upright" to "Churchy" at that point), a pop rock/hard rock/hip hop sampler called X 2004. I liked the hard rock stuff, much like the classic rock mom listened to, which lead to hard rock albums, then alternative metal and metalcore albums (Underoath's They're Only Chasing Safety was one of them), and finally, my first truely metal release, Becoming the Archetype's Terminate Damnation, and everything grew from there. (Terminate Damnation is an amazing album, BTW. Highly recommended).

My condolences.

Nothing. I didn't listen to music, except what my parents threw on the radio and the soundtracks to movies (while the movies played).

You know...I always thought people grew out of such awful music. While it's obvious which album is still a classic, the other is only listened to by man-children who are confused about their sexuality. Who else could tolerate Kerry King's solos?

In all seriousness, the standard route of pop-rock->nu-metal->Metallica. Saw the Master of Puppets album cover on a high school friend's t-shirt and decided to check it out. The store only had the Black Album, so I got that and enjoyed it for what it was. Little later on, saw MoP at the store, bought it and was promptly blown away. Decided to look into this "thrash" stuff and it just took off from there.

Woha, this whole "christian sampler thing" you guys seem to have in the US comes along quite odd for "us" germans/europeans, I'd say...

As for my childhood - well, I'm an 80s kid (born '77) and music was on all the time in our house, so I was mostly exposed to
either what my parents did put on (from Genesis to Tina Turner) or the UK and US Top 40 radioshows and enjoyed most of
all those catchy pop-rock songs as well as some synthie/wave stuff, so basically everything in the charts MINUS ballads.

At the age of 11 I got exposed to metal thanks to my love for monsters and seeing Eddie on a poster. From Maiden it went on
and on...

However, I kind of crashed back to my childhood days some years ago and these days the majority of music I play isn't metal (anymore) but
mainly all those "childhood hits". To name but a few of my fave songs "Danger Zone" (Kenny Loggins), "Boys of the Summer" (Don Henley),
"Blue Monday" (New Order), "Man in Motion (St Elmo's Fire)" (John Parr), all those great AOR songs from the Rocky movies etc.pp.
These songs directly transport me back to the golden days of my childhood and switch on sth in my brain metal music has failed to do
in the last year. Not that I don't play any metal anymore, no, but as I said the majority are childhood hits.

I really didn't get most music as a kid. Mostly it was around what the family listened to. Greenday, Social Distortion, Nirvana, Staind, crap like that. My father sometimes turned the classic rock radio on though, and I ended up actually liking that.
My journey down the dark path eventually happened when I was 8 and two songs by Metallica played in a row, "Enter Sandman" and "Master Of Puppets". "Enter Sandman" was kinda okayish, but I ended up really liking "Master Of Puppets". I asked who did both songs, and my father said they were both the same band. I didn't HOW that was possible, but I said I thought they should play stuff like that more often. My father said that was nothing, and pulled out a little cassette entitled Reign In Blood. From there on out I understood why didn't like that other stuff.

oh boy...

Video game music, shitty pop punk, 'alternative rock' and nu metal, until the Metal Gods(i'm not talking about Manowar) showed me The Way

Korn and Limp Bizkit were my favs when I was a wee lad, around 11 years old and gradually moved away from it onto rap really bad rap as well as some of the good stuff, still like the good stuff now but am embarassed by my young music tastes then started getting into Metallica and that moved me on to thrash metal at which point I remember hearing Carcass Heartwork when I was about 16 and thinking this is the scariest heaviest music alive but was captivated by it so downloaded the song(now a proud owner of the Heartwork album) and it all just went from there and I got into heavier and heavier stuff when I was about 17/18 and now here I am.

I used to go to work with my mom when I was about 5 or 6. She would always have the radio on and I remember loving bands like Rainbow, Metallica, Judas Priest, etc. The first album that I purchased when I was in fourth or fifth grade was "Hellbilly Delux" by Rob Zombie, followed by Powerman 5000, Limp Bizkit, etc etc etc.

I was born in 1988, so I obviously grew up when Nu-Metal was at its peak. I used to say that Slipknot and Mudvayne were my favorite bands, but obviously I cannot listen to them anymore. I think the point that my musical taste changed was when I was playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. My whole perception of music changed the moment I heard Slayer and Anthrax. Good times

When I was in Elementary school I listened to a combination of what my mom was into (Britney Spears, boy bands) and whatever was on MTV. When both my parents where at work I would watch music videos for Korn, Limp Bizkit, Smashmouth, etc. When I started Middle school, I discovered Blink 182 and Papa Roach, and was also listening to 3 Doors Down, Creed, etc. When I was twelve I started getting more into the sugarcoated poppy/skate punk. I was listening to MxPx and Greenday. A friend of mine was really into Slipknot and System of a Down so I started really getting into those guys. By time I reached high school I was into bands like NoFx and Rancid, but was also listening to lots of metalcore. I discovered Kreator, Behemoth, and Cattle Decapitation my junior year and started exploring music more actively. My senior year is when the gates REALLY opened. I was listening to black metal and grindcore by time I graduated.

I was born in 84, so my first musical loves were Blur & Oasis. Man, I played those tapes constantly. From there I experimented a fair bit. When I was 14-16 I would mostly listen to Radiohead (still one of my favourite non-metal bands), Massive Attack and a bunch of 'classics' - Beatles, Bob Marley, Jimi Hendrix, The Doors.

I then got into nu-metal, like so many here. Where I differ, though, is that I didn't then run with the ball and get into real metal. When I was first at uni, I switched to the popular 'indie rock' of the time: The Strokes, Interpol, White Stripes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and my other favourite non-metal band, Sigur Ros. I still love those albums.

Then I got into Amon Amarth, Finntroll et al, and there was no turning back: the only way was deep into the realm of extreme metal.

Great Thread!

I can say that i have always been a metal fan, and as far as i remember since i was about six years old. It's been my older brothers fault. I was born in 1980, and my brother is 18 years older than me. I remember back then he had some video tapes recorded from the german tv-series "hard & heavy". I can still see me and him sit in our living room and watching Twisted Sister's "Leader of the Pack", Priest's "Turbo Lover", Maiden's "Wasted Years", Dio's "The Last in Line" and lots of others and my brother always trying to convince me that this is the "real" music. The reason for this was that my sister who is six years older than me was listening to pop and charts music she reorded from the radio and also tried to talk me into music, "her" music.
I was still a kid and didn't understand much what they were arguing about when they talked about music, but i was so fascinated by these awesome videos that chart music simply had no chance. From now on my brother gave me some tapes from time to time to listen to, and i really loved what i heard. Some of the bands on these first tapes i remember were Accept, AC/DC, Maiden and Krokus.
But to be honest, i was not really a "fan", i just listened to the tapes he gave me, liked the music, but most of the time i was rather listening to my He-Man and the Masters of the Universe tapes
It really started when i was ten years old and my sister had her first boyfriend. He was into metal and quickly became my best friend, and he brought me some new tapes almost every week. I discovered so many great bands thanks to him, and when my sister kissed him goodbye two years later i probably cried more tears than both of them together
But this loss of my #1 tape delivery source finally brought me to wish for a own stereo for my twelfth birthday to replace my crappy cassette-player, and starting to collect my own CDs and Records...

Everything from my dad's Motley Crue, Van Halen, and Quiet Riot cds to my mom's Duran Duran, Bruce Springsteen, and 80's compilation albums. My grandmother played a lot of early Music, baroque, and salsa music and my uncle was my intro to metal with stuff Dio, Priest, Anthrax, and Metallica (Black album and AJFA).

First cassette tape I had was MC Hammer "Please Hammer Don't Hurt 'Em".

Still know all the words to "U Can't Touch This".

Also had a tshirt of it with the title in big neon green letters.

I was 5!

As a kid I only heard the music my mom played: these old tapes of Bible verses put to song, and Christian radio. I had little interest in music until I was 12 or so and started listening to Top 40 radio (mostly as a rebellion thing- I was banned from listening to it). At 14 I liked modern radio country plus top 40 pop. At 15 I listened mostly to Eminem, and a few nu metal/modern radio rock songs. At 17, an acquaintance showed me his CD collection featuring Slipknot, Iron Maiden, Pantera, Marilyn Manson among others, and that made concrete my blooming interest in angstier rock like Breaking Benjamin, Chevelle, Korn, Slipknot, 30 Seconds to Mars, Shinedown. That lead into metal within 6 months (thanks internet).

I grew up listening to country, with bits of pop and classic rock thrown in by my Dad. When I got a bit older, my Dad introduced me to heavy metal and glam metal, opening the floodgates for me. At the time, I wasn't really one to pay attention to music, but as things continued I paid more attention. I first began to be truly interested in metal after listening to Nightwish's Once and discussing it with a friend. From there, he introduced me to Amon Amarth, and I grabbed Twilight of the Thunder God soon after. I quickly broke into looking for harder and harder stuff, getting into straight death metal quickly. I lost interest in that scene after a certain amount. I quit finding death metal that actually did anything for me. From there, I moved into melodeath, then moved back and back and so on.

Now I listen to a pretty wide variety of metal genres, barring the majority of straight death metal and black metal. I do dabble in those, but growing up listening to country, I've developed a love of lyrics and a need to understand them. So mostly melodeath for harsh vocals.

Opera, classical, weird Asian theater, and lots of David Bowie, Genesis, Peter Gabriel, Pink Floyd....then some Springsteen and Seger...and a good chunk of musicals and classic Hollywood. It explains a lot...