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"Listen to the music!"
Almost everything I listen to is from the 1970s, although there is a smattering of the '80s and a tiny little bit of the '90s in there. That is perhaps the most general, overriding theme of the music I listen to. Moreover, it's not just any music; it must be good music, it must be rock, and it must be music which I can sing along to. I never listen to anything I wouldn't be comfortable singing. That's why it is that Donald Fagen and Ian Anderson may have terrible singing voices, but you would be hard-pressed to find a band I like better than Jethro Tull and as it so happens Steely Dan is my favorite band in the whole wide world.
But I have digressed. If we want to discuss, say, what unifies the music that I like, I always think first of the era and secondly of its singability. There may be little that brings, say, The Eagles' "Take It Easy" or "Seven Bridges Road" close to Jethro Tull's "Bungle in the Jungle", and little else is like Steely Dan's "Reeling in the Years" or "Don't Take Me Alive" or "My Old School"; but when I have those songs on my stereo in my car, or even in my room, or even in the kitchen or at someone else's house, I have this blinding urge to sing along. I know every word to Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young's "Judy Blue Eyes", and I sing them all; by contrast, I don't feel like I could ever sing along to Led Zeppelin or Queen, because the lyrics are both impossibly complex and detailed and follow no clear rhythmic pattern. So perhaps that is the unifying quality: their rhythmic unity.
But then again, perhaps there is a theme. None of the bands I listen to (perhaps with the sole exception of Foreigner) are pure rock bands of the '70s and '80s; they are instead fusion bands, intending to draw multiple genres together. With The Police, it was rock and early punk; with Jethro Tull, it was the blues and rock; with Fleetwood Mac, it was country and the blues and rock; with Santana, it was jazz and rock; with the Moody Blues, it was classical music and rock and pop; with Lynyrd Skynyrd it was Southern blues and folk and rock; with Electric Light Orchestra, it was classical music and rock; and of course, with Steely Dan, the best band that ever was, it was jazz and rock.
Do you get the impression that this is important to me? You should. And even if you do, I'm sure you don't get nearly as much as you do. This is not meant to patronize, it's just that words cannot do justice to how important music is to me. It's not mere background noise, it is the soundtrack to my existence. There is always something loaded in iTunes whenever I'm at my computer, and if it's asleep it'll likely be the radio or my iPod that has something playing.
If you're still interested, I have exported my MP3 playlists for you on the next page, to give you an idea of what I listen to.
(mwm223), Webmaster, 2002