First Post: Origins of my taste in music through college

Hey everyone.  Probably an emphasis on one.  Anyhow, I like a variety of entertainment.  Music, movies, books, PC games and hardware, the internet, and a smattering of other things that will come up later on that I can't predict.

Since I have been young I have been in love with music.  When I first started developing a taste in music, it was based on what I played on the piano and what tapes/CD's my dad had, so I liked classical music, rock, and 80's music.  Some of dad's stuff I liked for a while came from Harry Chapin, the Blues Brother's movie, the Hot and Heavy CD (Final Countdown, Godzilla, etc.), and of course, "Bohemian Rhapsody" (one time I spent hours playing Final Fantasy 8 on the PS One while listening to BR on loop, but that's another story).

In middle school/high school I kept with 80's music, mainly new wave, like Wang Chung, A-ha, and Alphaville, and contemporary punk rock and a few radio hits here and there.   Some of my taste was helped along by the MP3 catalog that I inherited from my cousin, who liked some of the same things as well as rock, so for a while I would have a U2 song in there perhaps. In later high school I fell in love with an indie band named Quietdrive which I still kind of follow to this day, and picked up on more popular stuff, which was a foreshadowing of thing to come, as well as electronic or techno music, most of which came from me typing "techno + ______ (something else I liked)" in search engines.

By college I was still in flux, and as youtube gave quick access to any music on the planet at a moment's notice it was easier and easier to experiment.  I stumbled onto a band named Drowning Fish, an indie punk-rock band from California which did most of their music in the early 2000's, and a rock band or two which has been disbanded since then.  My roommate loved techno/dance music and kind of got me into some of that.

Junior year, which was 2009-2010, became the defining year for me up to this point and the forseeable future.  That was when my friends and I started going out to the local bars, which were a good mix of being decent and not having overly expensive drinks.

Anyhow, when we started to go I began to notice songs like Ke$ha's "Tick Tok" and Lady Gaga, but the song which set off the chain reaction for which you will see here was Black Eyed Pea's "I Gotta Feeling," which I learned later was produced by David Guetta, who would be influential later, who actually sampled one of his own tracks on.  I couldn't stop listening to it.  That was the first song that I can remember being obsessed with because of its perfect mix of just being a good fun/party/club song.  It really didn't have anything to do with how popular the song was, spending fourteen straight weeks on top of the Billboard Hot 100 chart, and selling a record amount of digital copies.

After that, I had a Ke$ha phase, with songs like "Tik Tok," "Your love is my drug," "Take it off," and later with songs like "We R who we r" and "Blow," and loved Beyonce's "Single Ladies," and some of Lady Gaga's songs.

The rest is history, and will pick up in my top 10 of 2009, 2011, and 2012 music posts.