Musical preferences and peer pressure!

While I was living a bit of a flash back last weekend, a very strange realization struck me, leaving me perplexed and with much to think about. – I found that my music preferences have changed quite a bit over the last few months. I tried to extend this flash back to as further back as I could to help me better understand this strange phenomenon. I found that, unlike most other things, my musical preferences have varied a lot over time. I gave it a bit more of thought, but I couldn’t get my head around how and why musical preferences have changed as much as they really have. Further introspection made me realize that this has by far not been a gradual natural shift over years, but instead a highly fluctuating trend largely driven by my external factors!

To put things in context, let me show an illustrative graph of how my musical preferences have evolved over time. (graph above)

With a very theoretical approach to problem solving, I tried to break this issue up into number of small time intervals to derive some sort of trend that could explain this huge fluctuation in preferences. This is how my musical taste had changed over years:

Early and mid 90s: Rehman’s brilliance and Baba Sehgal’s rap music essentially got the first change to my music taste

Late 90s: Much of it was driven by MTV, Channel V and 2 hour a week, 7pm-9pm countdown of western numbers on Chennai’s 107.1 FM

… moving to the more interesting phase of changes…

August 1999 onwards started my vidya vihar campus life. My walkman helped me survive through the initial ragging days on campus. That was not to last long as my walkman was subsequently “borrowed” by a senior (I still distinctly remember the senior who took my walkman away!). Anyways, immediately after the first one month of ragging as winter began to set in, I found my way to Nutan market and bought 2 local rustic speakers with a matching amplifier to help me graduate from walkman head-phones to something more bass-producing.

Our wing had started to gel together, 11 of us from 8 different states talking different languages. So was the music, a bit of Assamese music mixed with Gult and Tamil numbers from other half of the wing. Then there was rock and I had my pop music! I was then so against rock music that I had only one expression to describe rock music – noisy nonsensical stuff for drug-addicts!

Music to me was then pop – I would listen to boyzone and backstreet boys and likes. I called MLTR as rock (by the way, MLTR has and will remain my favorite). As our wing slowly became a wing from a group of 11 different individuals, we became a bit more vocal about our opinions. Soon, I started hearing comments like “THIS guy only listens to dhhop dhoop ding ding pop music” … while I put up a brave face to all the comments with a not-so-convincing reply that went like “so wat, my music, my preference!”. By the end of first year, my wing’s perseverant criticism has succeed in creating one significant change – I had internally started to feel the pinch of not knowing what rock was all about.


Year-2 (2000), I got my comp. to campus – while the intention was to learn some Java and C, the comp. processor spent most of it’s time processing music files and “movies” J.

I copied tons of music files to my hard disk – I now had a vast collection of music including rock. Somehow, I couldn’t get myself to listen to heavy metal. But this was to change soon – a change driven by my wing as they would all barge in and change the music to rock. When I resisted the change to rock, I would get a lecture from my wing and a long explanation to how my pop music sucked big time! Slowly, I started to appreciate rock, what sounded like noise not too long ago, had started to sound like music now – there was energy in bass and metal sound that I started to appreciate, there was madness in head-banging that I had started getting addicted to, etc, etc

Overall, the shift to rock was very much driven by my wing and access to MP3 songs. While it was to become my preferred music over the next few years, the dramatic shift was nothing more than pure peer pressure that raised an internal voice – “me too please…!”

I continued with ‘primarily rock’ music for most of my 2 years at WIMWI as well with no major changes. I played roughly the same play-list over and over again. Unfortunately, this in some ways implied that I had cut myself from following the latest top-chart music. My only exposure to new music during this entire phase was at ramp parties that I was anyways not too regular to.

Once I shifted to Singapore, we got a music system for our home and another amplifier for my room – I continued with my “rock only” music for most of my first year here. My flat-mates and other close friends would often play some nice Hindi-remixes and I gradually started to enjoy non-rock music all over again. No drastic measures as yet, I was happy with the mix of music and the odd addition of Hindi pop was always welcome.

2007, a different beat!

I am not a great believer of making new-year resolutions, but I sorta intended to bring about some change to my musical taste in 2007. It started off with when I got a few Hindi CDs during one of my customary Landmark visits in Chennai towards the end of 2006.

The next quantum leap was in April 2007 after I got my Avante. My first week drive of Avante was with heavy “side-rear-view mirror vibrating” rock music. While I enjoyed the blast of music, my friends didn’t exactly think too high of my music taste. I noticed the gradual resistance building up and I could visualize my music collection being vetoed against – this did hit me! I was now under pressure once again, to bring about a change and become socially more acceptable!

It was on one of those “destination-less” drives in Singapore, by some strange configuration of lack of other time-pass activities, we shifted to playing Antakshri. I had like not played Antakshri for years and it was nearly a life-changing experience for me if I was to stretch my imagination a bit. Firstly, it was back to Hindi music and alarmingly, I could only recall only very old Hindi songs! – the ones that a generation elder to us would classify as old! I was labeled as “1950s songs expert”! While that ended as a joke we had a good laugh about, it somehow made me ask myself some very philosophical and open ended questions “why have I completely shut myself from Hindi songs, Hindi pop, Western pop?” That of course had just one answer as I immediately went to the music store and began the process to gradually upgrade my music collection.

This was a turning point for sure. I still do enjoy rock as much as I once did, but I have started to get back to other forms of music that I once used to relish. It has been a strange rediscovery – certain songs have certain events and time stamps associated with them. e.g. Hindi pop (esp. Baba Sehgal) takes me back to my younger days, MLTR (like Someday Somewhere) takes me back to 30 minutes before a test, Bryan Adams’ “18 till I die” and Roxette take me back to my 12th standard days, Roja to very vague memories, etc, etc

This change in 2007 has again been driven by friends and so called peer pressure. I have little clue about how this trend would shape up in the years to come. However, if there is one thing I do know and I can be sure about, is that, I will continue to enjoy my music collection – the form, language, intensity would continue to fluctuate, but hopefully not the underlying passion!