IaSg14

Rather than get straight into blog posts about music, I'm gonna do a little one about myself and my musical tastes so you have a rough idea of the sort of albums I'll be listening to and writing about. If you can't be arsed to read this, it's Rock and Metal. If you want to know the different subgenres of Rock/Metal I favour, carry on good sir/mam/Mumford & Sons fan.
But first, a little about me in general.

Some of you might be wondering what IaSg stands for, although I imagine most of you don't give a shit.
It's a name I thought up years ago when I was still in school. I took the first letters of four words and added 14 at the end because I liked that number (don't ask). The four words were a sort of in-joke between me and my best friend.
I Am So Great.
It's not so much an arrogant boast but more a self-esteem boost. For a while, on different sites like Last.FM, I went by names like IASG14 or I-A-S-G but I remember having to sign up to one particular site that had both of those taken. In the end, the first combination that I was allowed to use was IaSg14. It just sort of stuck with all other websites so yeah, that's what IaSg14 is all about. And now that that boring fucking anecdote is over, I can talk more about music!

Like most kids in the UK, I grew up surrounded by shit on the radio. By the time I was old enough to remember songs by their name and band, it was getting on towards the late 90's. Grunge had pulled a Nancy Kerrigan on Metal and Britpop was a thing we all just accepted as a tolerable irritation in our lives, like mosquitoes or Confused.com adverts. Luckily for me, my Dad was a fan of 60's Rock bands. He played me songs by The Beatles, The Hollies, The Kinks, etc and I loved them.
However, when I was in Junior school, I was introduced to contemporary Pop. Granted there were some songs I liked and, every now and then, I still find myself listening to Mambo No. 5 - Lou Bega all the way through but I never really found myself a "fan" of anything. I would just listen to it and not feel unhappy. That's about as far as my taste went when I was 8 and I regret to say it carried on until I was about 16. I used to be one of the "like a bit of everything" tossers although I don't remember ever using those words to describe my tastes.
When I was in high school, I discovered the Guitar Hero series and it opened my world to a genre I'd previously disregarded like a Vince Vaughn film. The sort of music that I knew existed but wouldn't go out of my way to experience. Rock music. The game in question was Guitar Hero 3: Legends Of Rock, featuring a soundtrack with tracks such as The Seeker - The Who, Ruby - Kaiser Chiefs and Welcome To The Jungle - Guns N Roses. Those were the 3 tracks that I remember listening to before I decided that I wanted the game.

Within a year, I was playing on Expert difficulty and had bought myself a starter kit of Rock and Metal to listen to on iTunes. Scorpions, Living Colour, Blue Oyster Cult, the list goes on. It was from there that I started to listen to Rock music a lot more, buying Guitar Hero games as they came out and opening my taste to the various genres within Rock. However, it was my decision to make my own Guitar Hero setlist that really got me not just into the sound of Rock but the history of it too.
I looked into how Psychedelic Rock would go onto inspire Prog Rock and even Metal, or the decades and their most popular genres along with bands and songs that defined an era. I loved it, and I still do it just because I enjoy it so much. Years later and I'm sat at home on Spotify brushing up on the catalogues of different bands whilst other teens are out clubbing or getting STDs. I started several music related projects (which I'll probably go into another day on here) and the latest of which has been this blog. Hopefully it'll be just as decent as my others.
So what bands was/am I into? It's all well and good saying Rock over and over again but that's like saying your favourite food is Meat. The Rock I'm into is Rock from the 70's-80's, BUT I also like bands from the other decades. I tend to go off the original 50's Rock & Roll just because I dislike the Blues pattern that most of the songs tend to follow. However, 00's or 10's Rock songs can be found on my iPod, although the majority are probably from the 70's and 80's.

Whenever people ask who my favourite band is, I usually reply with several simply because I have favourite bands from different genres rather than one all-round #1 band. My favourite Metal band is Iron Maiden, my favourite Rock band is Lynyrd Skynyrd and my favourite Pop/Rock band is ELO. However, I also like Deep Purple, Saxon, Tenacious D, Judas Priest, Maximo Park, The Cult, Metallica, Rush and Motorhead, among others. So that's a snapshot of the crop of bands you can expect to see on here. Saying that, not all of my posts will be on old albums. Sure, I'll look into 80's albums every now and then but fortunately for me, the 10's seems to be the decade for revival.
We've had new albums from Black Sabbath, Rush, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Whitesnake, David Bowie, Def Leppard, Saxon, Deep Purple, Megadeth and others with more on the way so I've got plenty to discuss here and you've got plenty to read! If you have any other questions about my taste in music OR a request for me to listen to and review, feel free to leave your comment and I'll look at it as soon as possible. In fact, I should get some kind of gadget for this blog where you can type the name of a band and album for me to check out if I don't find the request fucking despicable (e.g. asking me to review Noah And The Whale's latest dreary puddle of cat piss).

And with that, be seeing you!

Overture

If you would describe your taste in music as "a little bit of everything", fuck off now.
Seriously, just fuck off.
Hit the Back button or the Close button or I don't care, just go toddling back to your Facebook page and carry on posting updates about where you and your "bezzy mates" are going during the holidays along with several hundred pictures of yourself dressed like a shop floor mannequin or fratboy prick and don't come back until you learn the meaning of what you've just said.
There are so many genres AND subgenres in the world of Music that claiming to listen to "a little bit of everything" is like saying you've been everywhere on planet Earth, including the upper atmosphere and crushing depths of the ocean floor. You fucking haven't. What you're trying to say is you listen to a little bit of 'anything' and that if there's a song you enjoy on the radio, regardless of whether it's Rock/Jazz/Techno/etc, you'll listen to it.

Besides, most of the time when people say that, they immediately follow it with "...but mostly chart, dance, hip-hop or anything with a good beat". These are the same people who probably go onto Twitter and ask who famous people in the trending topics are, forgetting that they're less than a couple of clicks away from the Internet's most famous search engine on the world's biggest information database. But discussing the intellectual mechanics of dumbasses can wait for now.
So, here you are! My blog.
Simply put, this is a place for carefully constructed thoughts and opinions on different albums, setlists, compilations and other musical collections out there written by some guy on Twitter you might already follow but largely ignore due to all his tweets about Guitar Hero and, well, music...along with Virgin Media, Steve Wright and just about anything else that's pissing him off.
If you're an avid reader of my 140-character ramblings, first of all thank you. Second of all, you should understand how I write by now. Usually with frustration, foul language, similes and cultural references. This blog is yet another receptacle for these wordstreams but this time, it'll be focused almost entirely on music. Once in a while, I may get bored and post about a film or something. Who knows, maybe I'll be so engrossed in my own life that I'll just stop posting on here and move onto another project, abandoning this little blog like a childhood toy in the attic.
However, the majority of my posts will concern my thoughts on songs and why I enjoy/despise them.

Few things I'd like to get right off the bat, though.
1) This blog is the work of someone highly opinionated and, by most accounts, pretty fucking stressy. I will most likely write some utter shite in a fit of rage but I also believe I have the ability to calm down and type pieces worth reading if you too are into your Rock music. Also, lightly touched upon but not outright explained, all the posts presented on this blog will be opinions unless otherwise stated.
2) The people I'm writing for are ones who are ideally into Rock, Hard Rock, Classic Rock, Metal and other various Rock subgenres popular through the 1960s to the 1990s, with a few posts on 00s and 10s material. Remember that little mini-rant at the start of this post? It wasn't just a wee taster of my ranting style for newcomers. It was in order to clear out the contemporary pop loving tween-tosspots who wouldn't know Hendrix from Blackmore.
3) I will not be reviewing music, depending on your definition of a 'review'. Personally, I think a review is supposed to be non-biased and informative on a relatively neutral level. As soon as you have pre-conceived tastes towards a genre or even the product you're reviewing that manage to worm themselves into your final critique, you've written a reaction instead.
So what am I going to be typing up? Well, that depends on the nature of my post. If I'm talking about a certain album, I'll probably list the tracks and type up a little bit about each one with my thoughts on each in my own brand of informal wordplay. It's hard to explain without actually having any posts to use as an example but if you revisit this blog in the near future, I'm sure you'll see what I mean.
4) Feedback is welcomed. If you agree with what I say, post a comment about the tracks you liked/disliked. If you disagree with my thoughts, post your opinions for me to think about. If you're a cunt sending spam or abuse, it'll give me something to mock after I stop laughing at your piss poor attempt at "trolling" and the subatomic size your cock must be if you feel it necessary to waste your time trying to get an irritated reaction from someone who would literally not give a single toss if you fell eyeball first onto an upright sharpened pencil.

With that settled, I hope you enjoy reading my blog as much as I enjoy writing for it...and I hope to Christ that I enjoy writing thoughts on music as much as I enjoy listening to it. Be seeing you!