As I was going through the playlists I have on my computer and phone, I noticed something. Almost all of the music I listen to on a regular basis is firmly in the “rock” genre. There are very few songs that don’t fall into that category, but not many. That realization was odd to me because it wasn’t always that way. There was a time when I was younger that I had an equal amount of music from multiple genres in my collection.

For example, the first two CDs I remember buying for myself were Garth Brooks’ In Pieces and Coolio’s It Takes a Thief (Hey! Fantastic Voyage is a good song! That turned out to be one of the two songs on that album that didn’t suck, but we can’t win them all).

Back then, when I was in high school, I listened to a little bit of everything. Rock? I listened to Metallica, Megadeth, Nirvana, and The Offspring. Country? I listened to Garth Brooks, John Michael Montgomery, and Alan Jackson. Rap? I listened to Snoop Dogg, Coolio, and Bone Thugs N Harmony. And many others besides these examples.

That made me wonder why I don’t listen to the other genres now.

As far as country music goes, I pretty much know the answer to that one. I will still listen to country music from the 90s now. It’s songs that are newer than that which are dicey. Especially the current country music. I live in a house with young girls who will play that stuff and I can’t handle it. Today’s country music is just pop music sung by people with southern accents. It’s horrible.

That left me to wonder about rap/hip hop/R&B.

There is a person where I work that plays newer songs in these areas and I’m forced to listen to them once or twice a week. I’m not a fan. Honestly, it all sounds the same to me. At one point she played three songs back to back to back where the artists rapped in the exact same rhythm. If they didn’t each have distinctly different voices, I would’ve sworn she had the song on repeat.

Since current music was out of the question, I went back to some of the stuff I used to listen to back in the day. As I mentioned, Coolio was a bust. Other than Fantastic Voyage and Gangsta’s Paradise, his music pretty much sucked. I’d heard a song or two of Snoop’s stuff from back then recently, so I listened to Bone instead. Overall, it was as good as I remembered it being, but that’s when I realized why I don’t listen to that genre very much anymore.

There’s a particular word that gets used a lot in rap that I don’t like. I know there’s millions of people who dislike it far more than I ever could, but I still don’t want to listen to it.

So, I guess that leaves me sticking around in the rock arena with occasional trips into 90s country.