Music

Considering that I have a profound dislike for nearly all pop, rap, hip-hop, rhythm & blues, country, folk, bluegrass, gospel, swing, and big band (not to mention relegating jazz and classical to the status of elevator muzak), my musical tastes are surprisingly eclectic. If I were to map my musical favorites by similarity a la Pandora (something I am constantly doing with slightly easier-to-analyze subjects in a somewhat haphazard fashion, using Second Life as my 3D modeling tool for the purpose), the central "cloud" would be almost entirely hard rock and heavy metal, but on the periphery, you'd find such dissimilar choices as the following:

* In Extremo
* Kid Rock
* Frank Zappa
* Leslie Fish
* Megumi Hayashibara
* Natacha Atlas

And that only scratches the surface. It's worth taking a moment just to be in awe of how vast and diverse the musical field has become just within my lifetime, especially when you consider that as little as 200 years ago, it was highly unusual for most people to have any music at all in their life, unless it was their own folk singing or a local church choir. Little wonder that music and religion were closely tied together for so long; if you had never known music at all, it would have a pretty profound effect on you when you heard it for the first time. And all these years later, it's still used widely as a propaganda tool - how many movies have you gone to see in large part because of awesome music in the trailer?

I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but it's definitely impressive.