I was just thinking about the absolutely earliest music experience you have as a future extreme/heavy music listener... I mean, the first hint of enjoying heavy music, long before you're aware of anything called metal.

Do any of you remember what that was, the first music you liked as a child that bore witness of what you listen to today in terms of extreme/heavy music? Not the first rock band you bought albums by when you were twelve, but much much earlier. Are they any good today or just embarassing?

I just remembered that old song by EN VOGUE, "Free Your Mind", from 1992 (I was six years old then). Couldn't find it on youtube, but here's the video which I must've seen on Swedish national TV.
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1hp2f ... mind_music
The main riff I realise now is pretty damn wicked, I guess this is what happened when african-american soul/pop groups were influenced by pop metal & GnR. Rad clothes and surprisingly atractive ladies; I think this was one of my first proto-pubertal physical attractions, haha! Black leather capes and high heels! And the dropping vocal harmonies in the pre-chorus are great too. And the bass player is banging his dreads.

But more than any other song... QUEEN - Princes Of The Universe! My parents had the A Kind Of Magic album when I was really young, and... yes, that would be the first heavy metal song I ever heard, from the age of like... two or three. "I am Immortal - I have inside Me Blood of Kings!" That lead riff, it's sooooooo goddamn heavy! The falling wailing guitars, I think this might be the best song QUEEN ever did. "With my Sword and my Head held high!", this is what MANOWAR wants to be but they're not half the men that Freddie Mercury was, nor the riff writers.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnrXiaPVeHY
Damn, I would still count this as on eof the best songs ever, even twenty years down the road, countless hours of metal listening later! AAaaaaaaahhhh I gotta dig out that album again.

Do you guys have anything similar in the back of your memories? Would be interesting to see variations with age & countries, like local Czech or German rock bands of the eighties no-one has ever heard about or sth. I know that Tentakel P had something with GENESIS or Phil Collins from an early age...

And or course, the pseudo-occult art-pop Discordianist experiment by Bill Drummond and that other guy, the KLF - the Justified Ancients of Mu-Mu! My sister had an album, The White Room I think it was. Weird people;




http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDhZUY4rqSM

But anyway, I had no idea of this when I was 6-7 years old listening to the mysterious beats of their songs;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXEOESuiYcA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frd5YmSjjII - like a weird mix of ABSU, LAIBACH and SNAP !!! (hadn't seen this until today though)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqxtBggVsi0 - the keys around 2.20! "live from the lost continent"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apjTA2p_Wf8 - MU-MU! the sirens!

It's all gone weird... but I just thought it was cool whenI was a kid.

The first song ever in my life:

GENESIS - Mama

Back in 1983 when I was 3, everytime this was on air I turned off the lights and jumped around my parent´s living room because I enjoyed the dark mood. This is, even by today´s standards, such a goddamn dark and heavy song.

Besides, my second teddy bear was a panda, and they have become my favourite animals until I was ten or so. No kiddin´.

Oh, and my dad was doing his best in educating me with RUNNING WILD, QUEEN, JIMI HENDRIX, AC/DC, METALLICA and stuff.

Hehe Highland theme FTW! Surprisingly, they are more manly and metal than Manowar ever was . I've heard the Mama song only recently (Carnival in Coal cover). Nice song indeed

The first heavier song that I liked whas Fuel by Metalllica (I didn't really like music back then, but this was one of the songs I liked). I remember when I use to read Donald Duck comics, putting on the only 2 cassettes in the house (Metallica Load and Black album), even though I didn't like most of the songs I remember liking Through The Never also

The first two metal bands that I really enjoyed were Metallica and System of a Down. Ah, memories

Ah, Mama it was. I remember the first time I heard it, I thought... "so this is what Nine Inch Nails comes from"... Reznor has probably listened a lot to that song.

Had the same experience with Iron Maiden, in 1995 I think I found a cassette with half of the Fear Of The Dark album on it (nested between Bob Marley and Eric Clapton which I FFW'd away from), some of the songs there still are among my favourites of that band (Afraid to shoot strangers, Be Quick..., Childhood's End). Used to listen to it and play DOOM shareware, hehe.

My first Metallica experience was in 1991 I think, I saw the One video on TV, it scared me quite a lot. But when Load was released I had matured enough to get it. King Nothing, The Memory Remains, great songs.

Btw, Jaunting Head, how old are you?

It's hard to single out a particular song or band that got me started on my road. Years of alcohol and drugs have clouded my memory.

Growing up my father listened to a lot of the 60s and 70s acid rock bands; The Who, Rolling Stones, The Doors, etc. I do remember one of the earliest songs I fell in love with was Iron Butterfly's In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, so probably about the mid-80s is when I was 6 or 7. We had this ancient record player that took up almost half of a room in our house, and I would sit there and sift through all of his old records and just rock out for hours.

We had a large family, and for most of my childhood to my early teens I shared a room with my brother. My brother is 6 years older than me, so him being a teenager at this time was of course into Metallica, and the hair bands of the 80s; Poison, Warrant, Motley Crue and the like. This was also the time that MTV was on the rise, and our family finally stepped into the 90s with cable TV. I had a certain affinity for Skid Rows - Youth Gone Wild at this time. Of course my brother had all the tapes, and during the summers when school was out we would stay up until 2AM playing NES (Zelda and Blaster Master) listening to tapes.

Then it was a couple years after that that the Seattle grunge music started becoming popular, and that's when I started headbanging.

I really started to discover music on my own in my early teens. I don't know if it was the psychology of being a middle kid in a large family or what, but I was always looking for something more "extreme" in my music. The first thing I started listening to on my own was punk like NOFX and Rancid, but I was still listening to more mainstream "extreme" metal like White Zombie, Alice Cooper etc., which along with the rise of the internet and the world wide web led me to discover extreme metal. I think I got lucky and found a lot of chat rooms on the web full of people that were in bands and ran distros/mags at the time, and for some reason they were all happy to let me into their tape trading circles, even though I had none to trade of my own at first. The first tape I ever got was a dub of Emperor - In the Nightside Eclipse, and I immediately scoured every CD store nearby until I found it on CD to buy for myself. As soon as I heard the intro to Cosmic Keys... I knew I had found what I was looking for! And the rest is history I guess.

Interestin! Thanks for the replies all of y'all.

I think video games should be mentioned as early headstarts into heavy metal - I mentioned Doom, you mentioned Blaster Master, for example. Mega Man II and Shadowgate - epic, fast, mysterious, all that I want from my metal! Well, perhaps not all, but a lot of my esthetic values could/can/should be derived from the NES and PC games of my youth. Oh the nostalgia.

The very first song I remember is Gasolin' - Rabalderstræde which is hard rock from the 70s. My father told me that I was crazy about this song at age 3.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BF9QETcSMaQ

For most of my childhood I did not have any particular taste in music. I would listen to whatever was on the radio, and in the 90s that was primarily eurodance. So I listened to Corona, 2 Unlimited, DJ Alligator, and so on. Then, by chance, I discovered a radio program on one of the national radio stations which was on every day from 19 to 21, covering a genre each day of the week. Monday was metal. Extreme metal. I had never heard anything like this before but I was hooked instantly. I had no idea what I was listening to but I knew I liked it. I began taping the shows and some of the earliest songs I recall include Darkthrone - Sunrise Over Locus Mortis, Count Raven - Jen, Diabolical Masquerade - Blackheim's Quest To Bring Back The Stolen Autumn and Confessor - Eve Of Salvation. Many of the songs from back then remain my favourites today but unfortunately I would often edit out details such as artist and title, which is why I am still trying to identify some of these songs.
http://www.avantgarde-metal.com/forum/v ... php?t=1210

Yay!

I'm 19 winters old. That's why I'm asking for so many suggestions (young, impatient and curious hehe)

Btw my mom told me that in my early childhood I loved The Prodigy. Don't know if they count as heavy, since they are electronic, but wouldn't call them light either. Now, more than a decade later, I listen to them again. Great band

Yep, THE PRODIGY are great. When in 1992-93 I started to discover an own musical identity they were amongst the bands I liked, and still are.

And so is BJÖRK, with "Human Behaviour" enchanting me first on MTV due to its strangeness.

THE PRODIGY were a killer. Especially the first two albums. And if Music For The Jilted Generation isn't heavy, I don't know what is. Dark too, the cover and the last couple of tracks. Saw the video for No Limit a few weeks ago... so '90s I thought it would implode! British electronic music turned dark rock. Voodoo People with it's riff could probably also be considered one of the first heavy riffs I liked.



Wow! Cool way of being introduced to metal! Was that in Denmark? Since you mentioned Gasolin, would't think anyone outside Scandinavia listens to them...
I remember hearing a clip from a live show with DARK FUNERAL in 1996 I think, on national radio broadcast. Didn't understand a thing, it was all blastbeats, but I recall my older sister (who got me into techno & the Prodigy) commenting that they sounded like machine-guns. That's pretty much the idea I've had of blast beats from the day I started listening to it, haha...

I gotta get hold of those first two albums again. Experience was a freak-out for eight year old me.

My musical evolution was probably a bit stunned from the fact that my sis' kept away from rock music the first half of the 1990's, staying with German rave and British techno... I do remember that I liked Kula Shaker and Babylon Zoo though, but then we're in 1997 when I was discovering Metallica and Rammstein and Manson et c. The "real deal" so to speak before extreme metal a few years later.

Anyone else got some nice nostalgia to share?

Heh, to this day I love trolling Youtube to find clips of the old school NES game music... Blaster Master, Faxanadu, Zelda, Rygar, and of course METROID. The Norfair theme from Super Metroid still sends shivers down my spine.

One of my old friends, coincidentally the guy that got me into avant-garde, had a solo project that was deeply influenced by the old 8-bit midi music. I wish I still had some of his material, it was pretty amazing stuff.

Edit-Hah! He has his entire demo available for download from a link on his Myspace site: http://www.myspace.com/sytraxia

Yes, it was on the Danish P3 and it ran for 2-3 years. The metal show was cut down to half an hour at some point, though. Still, it managed to introduce me to most of my favourite bands today. I made contact to the host some years ago but he did not have the playlists. Currently I am waiting for the national Danish tv & radio station to digitize all their material from the past 30-odd years so I can hear all the shows again but goddamnit they are slow.