What sort of music did your parents listen to when you were a kid?

paolo

Mechanical phantoms
Mine mostly went for fairly mainstream rock, classical, some country, blues and jazz

This would probably be about normal for a middle-class UK family in the eighties and nineties I imagine
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Pinched all my parents' records so I know quite well -

Mum: Motown, Beatles... that's about it
Dad: Stones, Neil Young, Leneord Cohen etc

And they've got stuff that literally every household had such as Tapestry and Bridge Over Troubled Water obviously.
Funny, pretty much the only Neil Young album I like is After The Goldrush which my Dad used to play when I was a kid. I guess I don't really like NY, just enjoy the ones that bring back memories. Out of all that stuff it's definitely the Motown that sticks with me, those Chartbuster comps are just killer after killer, certainly the early ones.
 

Leo

Well-known member
they didn't listen to much music. i think they owned about a dozen albums, mostly 50s-60s easy-listening (but not even cool e-z like martin denny or anything, we're talking ray conniff singers, perry como, etc.) and a few classical records. no rock, no jazz. they spent too much time watching tv, although my father read a lot.
 

luka

Well-known member
sam cooke, john coltrane, miles davis, astral weeks, thelonius monk, leadbelly, bessie smith, bob dylan, woodie guthrie, john lee hooker,
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Yeah, Dad had lots of Simon and Garfunkel and Paul Simon - I guess it all stemmed from Bridge Over Troubled Water. I still know pretty much all the words to Graceland (the whole album I mean).
 

Leo

Well-known member
sam cooke, john coltrane, miles davis, astral weeks, thelonius monk, leadbelly, bessie smith, bob dylan, woodie guthrie, john lee hooker,

i might have found it more difficult to rebel against my parents if they had such cool musical tastes.
 

mistersloane

heavy heavy monster sound
My mum detested recorded music. She liked people singing live - Scottish songs she knew - and, weirdly, "The Good Ship Lollipop" by Shirley Temple. She liked songs on Top of the Pops if she could understand what people were saying, intonation and stuff. She failed to see any merit in popular music though, except that maybe people would recite the lyrics to themselves in the way she recited poetry to herself.

My dad liked the Inkspots and Ella Fitzgerald, and Glenn Miller. "Don't sit under the apple tree".
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
my dad had a small (well, by today's standards) but perfectly formed record collection that I inherited. My favourites were Mahavishnu Orchestra's first two LPs, lots of Leonard Cohen, a battered copy of Pink Floyds Relics, the b&w cover of which he'd coloured in with felt tips, and Bob Dylan's 'The times they are a changing' into which he'd inserted his own pencil drawing of the front cover - lovely things. He also liked a bit of dodgy prog rock though, and I rather shamefully sold his 1st edition copy of 'In the court of the crimson king' for £100 when i was skint at university (sorry dad, I kept the rest though!).

But I mostly remember the b2b double header C90s that got rinsed in the car, taped from his mates.

The Cramps 'Psychedelic jungle'/Talking heads 'Remain in light'
The Doors 'Soft Parade'/Rolling Stones 1st LP
Sgt Pepper/Abbey Road
Captain Beefhart 'Clear Spot'/Spirit's 1st album
Ziggy Stardust/Aladdin Sane
Astral Weeks/Moondance
some brilliant post-punk era mixtape his mate made him with stuff like gang of four, Siouxie & the banshees, Joy division, Comsat Angels, Patti smith, XTC, magazine, Iggy pop.

My Mam on the other hand absolutely detests Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, has never bought any records, but seems to know all the words to every 60s pop song ever released.

Was also lucky enough to have an older sister who went through a phase of going to raves in 1991/92 so i used to nick tapes off her and her nutty raver boyfriend at the time (who i thought was incredibly cool at the impressionable age of 10).

Bless em all <3
 

CrowleyHead

Well-known member
Mom was a lot of contemporary 90s pop and some brief spells of nostalgia where she listened to a lot of 50s-60s girl group sort of stuff ("Johnny Angel", "Will You Love Me Tomorrow" etc.), Abba, Billy Joel, things of that nature.

Dad was...
  • Jaco Pastorius & his era Weather Report
  • Prince
  • Late 80s, early 90s rap (Eric B. & Rakim, Wu-Tang, Public Enemy, Big Pun, Kool G. Rap, Brand Nubian)
  • The Carpenters
  • Sarah Vaughn
  • Duke Ellington
  • Sun-Ra
  • Late 90s-Early 00s 'Alternative' (Radiohead, Portishead, Bjork, Kosheen, Zero 7)
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
People have parents who know what hip hop is, never mind listen to it? That tickles me.

My Dad loves classical music, loathes everything else. The only known exceptions to this rule were when he once under extreme duress admitted that the Beatles were 'not too bad', and surprisingly he once declared that he quite liked Don McLean's 'American Pie', which is the only spontaneous positive reaction he has ever had to popular music.

My Mum had some early Beatles LPs in good nick and she liked ABBA.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
These lists tend to reveal a lot about the age of the parents in question - and thus the dissensus posters' too. Wonder what any future child would say about me...
 

Leo

Well-known member
my mom would always complain about my music buying ("you bought more records? don't you already have enough?"), but there was one time when i walked into the kitchen and she was tapping her toe to a ramones album i was playing in my bedroom while she was chopping veggies.
 

mistersloane

heavy heavy monster sound
People have parents who know what hip hop is, never mind listen to it? That tickles me.

My Dad loves classical music, loathes everything else. The only known exceptions to this rule were when he once under extreme duress admitted that the Beatles were 'not too bad', and surprisingly he once declared that he quite liked Don McLean's 'American Pie', which is the only spontaneous positive reaction he has ever had to popular music.

My Mum had some early Beatles LPs in good nick and she liked ABBA.

Your Dad at the Patricide gig in Berlin will remain with me forever as genuinely something wonderful. I guess it doesn't matter if he felt the same, but for me it was one of the many amazing things about that night.
 

mistersloane

heavy heavy monster sound
These lists tend to reveal a lot about the age of the parents in question - and thus the dissensus posters' too. Wonder what any future child would say about me...

My parents were 40 when they had me. I still cant imagine what it was like to have young parents, even having been exposed to them, repeatedly lol
 

datwun

Well-known member
My mum has quite an acclectic/weird but definitely uncool taste in music. Lots of soundtracks, Yes, Scritti-Politti, Bod Dylan. But what we (me and my brothers and sisters) got growing up was lots of campy 60s pop complations in the car and lots of vocal jazz.

My dad was a punk and has a great record collection, but when I was old enough to start getting into music (10-13ish), his midlife crisis had well and truly started and he was mostly into crappy Ibiza dance complaitions, The Roots, and some good stuff like Basement Jaxx, which he took me to see as my first gig!

He still likes to keep current though and always hits me up for new music:
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The new thing he does is drive around listening to Rinse FM and shazaming tunes he likes.
 
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paolo

Mechanical phantoms
My parents like some of the more 'tasteful' stuff that I'm into (I think they own a Burial album)
 

craner

Beast of Burden
The soundtrack to my Legotown Years, courtesy of my mother, mostly consisted of: Sade, Matt Bianco, Alison Moyet's Alf, Chris Rea's On the Beach, the soundtrack to Heartburn, 'You and Me Tonight' by Aurra and 'Night Birds' by Shakatak. My father was a hipster like Luka's so that list would be really boring.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
My father has an original gatefold copy of Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz which he brought on import when he was still in school.
 

Leo

Well-known member
these posts blow my mind. my parents were older when i was born (and i'm probably one of the older dissensians), so i can't imagine having parents who had the slightest interest or clue about music.

so how did that play out in the natural context of kids rejecting their parents interests and values? did you bond over music? did they share their music, did they encourage your learning about it, and did you appreciate and enjoy at the time? or did you rebel against it (even if you came to appreciate it later in life)?
 
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