The musical odyssey continues! Don’t forget about Part 1 and Part 2.
This is another wide category, but I’ve chosen to differentiate it from Pop/Modern Rock via both age and intensity.
Classic Rock
Seemingly the gold standard for what counts as Good Music™. It’s what “kids these days” don’t appreciate, myself apparently excluded. Like with Modern Rock yesterday, it would be a bit tough to listen to all the bands and artists I like. I listen to a lot of The Fox locally. But my favorite band has to be Queen.
The guys in my immediate family seem to have a tendency to fixate on one band for some reason or another. For my dad, it was The Beatles. For my brother, U2. For me, it’s Queen. I’ll admit that Wayne’s World had something to do with me becoming aware of Queen’s music. But since then, they’ve become a mainstay of my album rotation. Even if it does occasionally get me weird looks from some of my coworkers.
Metal
DEATH TO ALL BUT METAL! Okay, not really. But the song, while crude, is amusing. I’ll admit that there’s a lot of overlap between this genre and the previous. But I happen to like a lot of classic heavy metal and hair metal. Iron Maiden. Scorpions. Quiet Riot. Metallica. Queensryche. Dethklok You get the idea.
Honestly, this section is feeling pretty short because it overlaps so much with the one above and below.
Power Metal
This is definitely a sub-genre of metal, but one I listen to quite a bit. It tends to be a bit more symphonic or melodic, often incorporating fantasy or sci-fi themes. I came across this genre while in France, as it’s much more popular in Europe than it is in the States. Some bands include Kamelot (I did get to see them in concert), Blind Guardian (they have a concept album about The Silmarillion), Epica, Nightwish, Sabaton, and more.
For me, it fills the niche of something harder but still understandable (both in melody and lyrics). When I was still doing Taekwondo, I had to put together a creative form set to music for my 3rd degree black belt test. I ended up using “The Bridge of Khazad Dum” from The Lord of the Rings because I wanted something unique that wasn’t techno (this was the early 2000s) but still had a powerful beat. If I had known about Power Metal back then, I probably would have used something more akin to this.
