I grew up in the 1990s. So I was exposed to music that had meaning, talked about issues and was about having fun or dancing. Also, I was mostly exposed to Hip Hop/Rap and R&B, but i did watch MTV, so I was familiar with Pop and Rock music. This is was I mostly listen to Sirius XM radio stations 90s on 9 and BackSpin because that's the type of music I grew up with.
I was really fortunate to have the perfect eclectic storm. My mother listened to the beautiful classical music of Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Brahms, Debussy, and Haydn while she was carrying me, and she swears that I recognized it instantly on the other side of the womb. In 60s and 70s Nigeria, we had all the typical music indigenous to West Africa billowing from every store and blaring on the sidewalks to customers. Absolutely competing for equal time, though, was reggae (a good ten years before the U.S. even heard of it), Elvis, Beach Boys, Tom Jones, the Mamas and the Papas, and even country ballads were seasonally interspersed throughout the mix. Nigerians are very interested in all kinds of music (maybe not so much opera), and we had many great jazz and highlife bands with plenty of brass, electric guitars, and drums available for nighttime shows or for the ceaseless parties for which bands played quite audibly in the yards of better homes. Best of all, I am thankful for the radio and hundreds of albums my parents bought and played every day; they even subscribed to record clubs. My mother's family are gospel singers and songwriters, so we were always up on our James Cleveland, Mahalia Jackson, Albertina Walker, Hawkins Family, and Staples Singers, but also on everything Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Johnny Nash, and Jimmy Cliff. My international school, run by hippie-oriented Americans, fed us a steady diet of Simon & Garfunkel and Bob Seeger, and purposely exposed us to folk music from every part of the world. To this day, I never try to teach a class-- of any subject-- without music. In my experience, it is the only medium in which new information is permanently retrievable.
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My dad always used to play Adam and the Ants, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Duran Duran.. Then my sister introduced me to Nirvana, My Chemical Romance, Paramore, Rage Against the Machine.. And I used to have a best-friend who's dad would always play Blink 182, Sum 41, Simple Plan etc.
So a mixture of stuff really, not much pop stuff like that.
Every genre of music, mainly because each of my family members enjoyed something different. I became mainly influenced by classical music while studying ballet for twelve years, and listening to my mother sing opera.
It has been wonderful to have been exposed to so many different genres of music in my life thus far. It's helped me to embrace the world's differences through music's universal language.