'Gateway' bands

Oh yeah -'Licensed to Ill'-era Beastie Boys led my adolescent ass to buying a Def Jam sampler with some track of theirs on it, which also had 'You're Gonna Get Yours' by Public Enemy. JESUS, did that ever knock me for six. It sounded like an alien invasion, and was pretty much ground zero for me musically. It was certainly the last beastie boys I bought...

It's Dark and Hell is Hot by DMX turned me on to hip-hop.
In Flames = metal.
Digital Mystikz = dubstep.

my gateway band was the art of noise, the artwork of in visible silence caught my eye instantly. i didn't understand why, when i showed it to friends, they looked at me as if i had gone mad. it was pretty alien music (by top 40 standards).

i know you'll want to decapitate me but the cure has to be the anti-gateway, an invitation to stagnate. my experience with people that are sucked into their world is that they never feel the need to explore anything else, or at the most they discover one or two more canonical groups and then settle down and play their old cure cds on their new hifi or whatever.

Hip hop - Run DMC Raising Hell
Ravey stuff - Altern8, The Prodigy Experience
Ambient - FSOL Lifeforms, then Eno

green day -> operation ivy -> ska -> older ska -> dub -> ragga jungle -> breakcore -> dubstep

green day -> emo -> myspace -> my death space

the sex pistols

Ride - "Going Blank Again"

I clearly remember suddenly understanding, on my first listen to the cassette, that not all songs had to have a short intro followed by verse, chorus etc... and that you didn't necessarily have to be a very good singer in order to sing in a band

Listening to Massive Attack's Mezzanine at the age of 12 was pretty eye-opening. I bought it on the back of Teardrop, but it ended up introducing me to all things dark and electronic, while most of my mates were into guitar stuff. I guess its had a pretty big influence on my musical tastes ever since.

Led me towards Tricky, and twisted hip-hop, Underworld, and on into techno., Trip-hop and on towards garage and eventually grime and dubstep... all kinds of directions from that one lovely Orange disc.

Is that what you mean by gateway?

Massive Attack - Blue Lines, the first album to convince me that there's more to life than guitars.

And following on from Bruno's comment, another anti-gateway band would be the Grateful Dead though you might have to spend some time in the US to really appreciate how true this is. Maybe there's another (far more bitchy) thread in this.

Goldfinger & Bosstones -> Ska, all of it.

LA Style "James Brown is Dead", Eon's "Void Dweller", and Art of Noise -> Electronic Music

A lot of the new music I learned about as a kid was from going to the library and getting cds, then making tapes from them. Or, Id go and buy Comps that I knew one or two bands on, and then buy stuff from other bands that i liked from the comps.

I kinda miss that process now. Now I have a list of things I want, and when i want to learn about new music, theres AMG, message boards, online music mags, and google. I dont seem to do that "stabbing in the dark" version anymore.

Primal scream are a key gateway band just through bobby gallespie constantly mouthing off about bands from the past and laughably comparing them to PS.

This is really the only sane reason for primal scream to exist, all their records suck and Bobby G is a total wanker. But if it wasnt for him I wouldnt have bought fun house, unknown pleasures, on the beach or forever changes.

Buick6 said:

Like that 'gateway drug' concept that soft drugs lead to heroin, though in this case, 'softer bands' that have led people to discover more 'out there' or extreme types of music. The theory of Pink Floyd leading people onto Musique concrete or Nuggets-type psych bands is interesting, tho there are many others.

My own gateway band were defintely Talking Heads and maybe Kraftwerk, which led me to the Birthday Party, the Velvet underground, Stooges, DefJam hiphop, Aussie 80s psych-garage punk to Sonic youth, Dinosaur, Dylan/Young/Mojo type collector-scum muzak, UK shoegazers, Drum n' bass and then house and Detroit and prolly back again...

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the happy mondays, stone roses, 808 state - that whole indie dance scene in my early twenties was a massive gateway into rave for me - and i never listened to indie again. but even before that, it went like this:

heavy metal (metallica, slayer lol) > hardcore punk (napalm death, extreme noise terror, crass etc) > indie (the smiths etc) > indie dance > hardcore rave > darkcore jungle > house music (initially NY and handbag and then all house genres in varying measures) > techno > electro > garage > dubstep

This is an interesting thread, but it's tough to comment on other peoples contributions because they're so personal and by their nature accidental. Certain figures and bands happen to loom large in your personal history just by nature of the fact that you happened to encounter them first.

For instance around 95-96ish I heard a CD called Salt Peter by Ruby. My brother was working for Sony Studios at the time and he introduced me to the disc. It blew me away. It was unlike anything I'd ever heard and pushed me to go out find more of this weird stuff that people were calling Trip Hop. I dug deeper and eventually found Massive Attack, Portishead, and Tricky - all unquestionably better and more important, but it was definitely Ruby that was the gateway for me (I still like the Ruby disc, but I have to wonder what I'd have thought of it if I had heard Massive Attack and Portishead first).

My most important gateway band was definitely Nine Inch Nails though. I was a metalhead at the time Broken came out and it was a distorted guitar lovers dream. But I eventually bought Pretty Hate Machine and (later) The Downward Spiral. They were how I learned to stop worrying and love the drum machine (mental note - great title for a mixtape). From Nine Inch Nails I discovered Skinny Puppy, Ministry, Front 242, the rest of the Wax Trax scene. Suddenly dancing was an appropriate reaction to music you like and that made me less suspicious of The Prodigy and The Chemical Brothers when they started getting exposed in the States around 95ish.

From there I dove headfirst into the myriad subgenres of the rave scene whereupon I stumbled upon the life altering Metalheadz Presents Platinum Breakz which led to a long and expensive obsession with drum and bass.

mrchrispy said:

For instance around 95-96ish I heard a CD called Salt Peter by Ruby. My brother was working for Sony Studios at the time and he introduced me to the disc. It blew me away. It was unlike anything I'd ever heard and pushed me to go out find more of this weird stuff that people were calling Trip Hop. I dug deeper and eventually found Massive Attack, Portishead, and Tricky - all unquestionably better and more important, but it was definitely Ruby that was the gateway for me (I still like the Ruby disc, but I have to wonder what I'd have thought of it if I had heard Massive Attack and Portishead first).

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Wow, I totally remember loving that Ruby album, then hearing portishead too!

My first band obsession was radiohead, which I think is probably a little un-gatewayish. I mean, it got me into Sigur Ros for a while, then Mogwai, Godspeed you Black Emperor, and all that stuff I don't listen to at all now! Something or other got me into various flavours of indie, which in turn led me to various sources of that stuff, i.e. VU, Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., etc., and MBV, then all of a sudden Kraut stuff from hearing Stereolab compared to Neu!. Hip Hop had always sort of been there in the background, and it never really had a gateway for me...

there are also 'anti- gateway' bands - bands who don't lead anywhere very much except to paler and less interseting versions of themselves; think of all of Morrissey's picks - Raymonde, Easterhouse, Sack ...... or Metal, which just leads to more metal

I think that's a bit of a generalisation of metal, which is as diverse as underground electronics... (in its own corpse-painted way of course...) But yeah- Morrissey- not a fan of the most diverse kinds of music is he really? I reckon classic Gateway bands have to be mainstream emissaries of more underground stuff that the average teen aged kid wouldn't have a chance in hell of picking up on from the normal sources...

Buick6 said:

Funny that. It's like listen to these bands coz we're never gonna be that good.

amazing how post late-80s British bands love to compare themselves to all these great bands when they just sound like Soup Dragons or Starsailor or some other crap.

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well now hold on just a minute...let's not say things we might regret later...now sure, Primal Scream may have taken a wrong turn or two, and say what you want about Bobby G being a wanker and all, but you just can't discount Screamadelica...(even with that piss-poor name)...one of the true zeitgist records of the 90's, the final bridge between indie and dance...how many kids do you think got turned on to Thirteenth Floor Elevators, or the Beach Boys, or even bloody AR Kane with that record?...when was Weatherall better?...other than "Smells Like Teen Spirit", did a single of that era make a bigger splash than "Higher Than The Sun"?...well, of course not!...of course not...

(my argument would sound much more convincing in Jimmy Stewart's voice)...