What Did Music Sound Like When You Were A Teenager?

[Yeshuasdaughter]

Can't talk about 90s music without RATM. I wore out a couple of their CDs.

OMG Everything that I want to post, you post first. I swear, we listened to the same bands as kids!

In my hometown, it was all about either metal or hip hop. If you listened to alternative, you were kind of ostracized. Was it the same where you lived?

 

[Yeshuasdaughter]

 

[Aspychata]

Elastica- Connection

Punk and punk lol from Britian

 

[Tom]

Can't say this all was typical, but it was what I was listening to. Hard Rock, Strangeness, Progressive and Fusion.
'71

'73

'74

'75

 

[Luca]

I'm younger than a lot of you who are posting on this thread, but I'm probably about median age on this forum, so some of these songs will make me look old too to anyone from Gen Z lol.

These are some iconic songs from when I was a pre-teen to when I was in early college.

This one is my favorite childhood song. I still love Shakira.

I made sure to post the CLEAN version of Hollaback Girl lol. Although the original was one of my first musical exposures to... a certain four-letter word.

What would a list of iconic 2000s songs be without this one?

Or this one lol. One of the very first meme songs, before memes were a thing

I was technically an adult when this came out but it's probably the most iconic EDM song of all time (debatable if it's this one or DVVBS- Tsunami.) I was at a rave the first time I heard both this one and Tsunami and everyone just went off lol

 

[Luca]

Possibly the most iconic song of the 2010s. Hope this is clean

 

[Luca]

I still have scars from this song, for a while it owned the 90s in Scandinavia. You couldn't get away from it, that was the problem, it was everywhere. Darn Swedes, I think they did it just to mess with people.

This one was everywhere around here in the 90s and 2000s too lol. It haunted my entire childhood

 

[Darkkin]

 

[Darkkin]

 

[Darkkin]

The number of miles I logged on my bike listening to this song on repeat was insane. I wore out three copies of the CD in one summer alone. Nearly got pulled over for speeding...

 

[Luca]

I always hated this song and the stupid dance that went with it. Another one that haunted my teenage years. Not sure if this was really circulated in the mainstream tho or if it was more just a niche song in urban areas. I also hated the Cha Cha Slide!!!

I loved this song growing up but I'm pretty sick of it now. Although I can still appreciate that it's a good song.

I think every black and Hispanic girl my age has twerked and "dropped it" to this song at some point in their teenage and young adult lives. Most definitely white girls too.
This is probably one of the reasons ass music has gone mainstream lmao

Any other millenials remember this song? I think I had it on a Radio Disney CD lol. I couldn't remember if it was M2M or Play that sang it. It's M2M!

This is from when I was in college. I feel old as hell lol. Many people have said that this song makes them think of me and my personality.
When I was a DJ at a local club, this is one of the first songs I ever included in one of my sets. Female DJs were super uncommon in the 2010s and I had to prove my skills against several men in order to be a DJ and not get relegated to being a "sexy" bartender lol. We were popularly referred to as "D-Janes" for a while I think EDM mixing and club residency has gotten more inclusive since then but it is still largely male-dominated. I always had to hold my own against male drummers too!

 

[Darkkin]

This group is on my bucket list. Absolute favourite.

 

[Tom]

I liked some songs mentioned: Numa Numa (I know it's some other unspellable name - that means The Linden Trees in Springtime or some such ), The Chumba Wumba song and Crazy.

 

[Tom]

Towards the end of my teens mainstream music was dying out, thankfully. Disco and Big Rock Bands faded and there was a period of more experimentation and shifting sounds. I still love these songs.

 

[Luca]

@Darkkin we must be somewhat close in age lol. I remember most of these songs too. I loved Bowling for Soup as a kid. I was hoping someone else on here appreciated "Numa Numa" (Dragostea Din Tei)!

 

[Richelle-H]

Here is the thing about my teenage years: while they were not horrible, they were certainly not in tune with the other teenagers I was around. I grew up in possibly the most turbulent decade I have lived through. There was R & B, Elvis Presley, The Beatles, The Stones, The Vietnam War, The Kenedy Assassination, The bay of Pigs and Cuban Missile Crisis, The Mai Lai Massacre, Medicare was passed....

Guess what, with the exception of the Kennedy Assassination and its aftermath, I was mostly oblivious to what was happening in the world. I remember loathing the Beatles, mostly because I was only into classical music and Broadway musicals then and I found their music loud and noisy and not particularly pleasing to my ears (I still do not like most of the really early stuff when they were barely out of their teens themselves).

Having said all of that, the music that influenced me from birth (i.e. classical music) was my mainstay and their are just to many pieces that influenced me to pick just one or two, so I won't even try ( I have mentioned at least one or two in other posts here).

The strange thing about this time was I was a huge fan of Broadway musicals, so I am going to list the ones I remember (plenty of examples everywhere for many of these although some might be tad obscure:

In no particular order...

Bye, Bye Birdie
Camelot
The Unsinkable Molly Brown
Stop The World I want to get Off
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
Pickwick (I actually saw the touring production of this in Los Angeles with the Harry Secombe and a pre-Monkey's David Jones as Sam Weller)
Fiddler on the Roof
Mame
Funny Girl
Hello Dolly
Cabaret
It's a Bird... It's a Plane... It's Superman....
Sweet Charity

Most of what I know of popular music from that period was only discovered in the following decades. I grew to appreciate a great deal from back then that I was oblivious to at the time, but it was classical music and musicals (is it any wonder then that I had singing roles in a couple of high school musicals long before Disney monetized that ) that informed my teenage years.

 

[tkcartoonist]

I was a teenager between 2000 and 2006, and I do remember what was big at the time: stuff like Nelly, Shakira, Nickelback and their derivatives like Creed, and so many terrible samey-sounding pop-punk bands that they turned me off of punk music for many years (I have discovered so much great punk and post-punk music since then). However, most of my teen years were spent listening to metal music.

It started with the bands my brothers were into like Iron Maiden, Metallica, Megadeth and the like. Later, I dived into more extreme stuff like Slayer since one of their songs was on the Vice City soundtrack. Even later still, I used to hang around the Metal board on GameFAQs and that introduced me to bands like Death, Dream Theater, Opeth, and some others that I'm having trouble remembering at the moment. It was around the last year of high school that I was introduced to Sepultura, and through college I listened to more obscure, technical, or extreme bands such as Sigh, Bathory, Voivod, Spastic Ink, or Nile. Speaking of Nile, I highly recommend Karl Sanders' solo albums if you want some ambient middle-eastern sounding music, as they stand in stark contrast to his main band's brutality.

Since there's a limit of only five Youtube videos, I'll just post the stuff that I was into the most.

 

[Forest Cat]

This one was everywhere around here in the 90s and 2000s too lol. It haunted my entire childhood

Really? Cotton Eye Joe made it all the way from Sweden over to the US? That song was like a virus. It inserts itself into your mind and then you can't get rid of it, you're humming Cotton Eye Joe for days against your will. Darn Swedes. That band also holds the world record for the longest song title and it is very silly. They should have called it "We are just messing with you ".

 

[Luca]

Really? Cotton Eye Joe made it all the way from Sweden over to the US? That song was like a virus. It inserts itself into your mind and then you can't get rid of it, you're humming Cotton Eye Joe for days against your will. Darn Swedes. That band also holds the world record for the longest song title and it is very silly. They should have called it "We are just messing with you".

Yes!!! All of my school dances/birthday parties from elementary school up until high school were PLAGUED by this song! I think they even played it at my senior prom! Along with some of the other horrible songs I posted, like the Cupid Shuffle and Apple Bottom Jeans (I think it's actually called "Low")
Now, you're right, I will be humming Cotton Eye Joe for days against my will. Thank you Sweden. Lol

 

[Forest Cat]

OMG Everything that I want to post, you post first. I swear, we listened to the same bands as kids!

In my hometown, it was all about either metal or hip hop. If you listened to alternative, you were kind of ostracized. Was it the same where you lived?

Metal was popular and we had the black metal wave here in the 90s. Black metal really took off in the 90s. Burzum, Mayhem, Satyricon and so on. Churches burned, people were killed, some took it so seriously. It was dark. If you listened to hip hop during the first half of the 90s, people wanted to beat you. So that was rough. All those other bands I posted were so popular, people loved it. I was in a snowboard/skiing enviroment and alternative music was huge there.

Norway in the 90s: