I'm not really sure if my musical tastes define me.. As I am very hard to figure out as it is.. I listen to a broad range of music, having personal favorites at certain ages..
Classic Rock from late 70's/80's / pop 80's definitely. The only band I've collected more than one CD for is Van Halen tho.. Usually I like just a few songs of any group here and there, and a lot of top 100 singles, etc.. Also like a few Jimmi Hendrix songs. Fleetwood Mac, etc.
Blondie, Van Halen, Led Zepplin, Pink Floyd, The Alan Parsons Project, The Cars, Genesis, Men at Work (box art for Cargo was cool whenI was little), KISS. The Bengals, Electric Light Orchestra (E.L.O), some Madonna, Styx.
Some early/mid 90's rap, a lot I grew up with liking at the time and keep around because it is sentimental to me. Snoop Doggy Dog, Cypress Hill, Wu Tang Clan, Kriss Kross, Bone Thugs 'N Harmony, Queen Latifa, a couple early 2Pac songs, Beastie Boys (kind of hard to categorize them, lol), Onyx. 69 Boys
Some 90's Alternative /mainstream rock/ 90s pop/misc Mostly what I listened to through my teens... God my sister had a HUGE collection, can't even remember all her shit.. didn't like much tho..
Offspring, Silverchair, Garbage, Green Day, Ace of Base, Real McCoy, White Town, Rage Against the Machine, a few songs from Bush - KoRn.. Fear Factory, KMFDM, Junkie XL Gravity Kills... Weezer. There are a few others but I can't recall them at the moment for some reason..
I used to hate my dads shit when I was a kid.. Then when I turned 18 it became another story. Still teases me about the "coon tunes/rap crap" though, lol.
I got into most of my 90's tastes as a teen because that was "the cool stuff to listen to" my sisters good looking friends listened to it, it had lots of guitars and sounded "heavy" and all thaT.. I was one of those quiet, serious, play it loud, dark depressing kind of people then I guess.. Plus I had a very rough childhood & adolescence, so I guess I comformed to the mold...lol I think they call that shit "emo" these days... Thankfully we didn't have the gay hair and makeup back then.. I dressed more like a grunge kid would.. unkempt hair, loose (but not black ass hanging down my ankles) baggy jeans and shirt, with flanel... I had one flanel shirt I always wore.. it was perfect, not heavy at all but kept me warm. It was long, and long sleeved, and I wore it everywhere like an over-shirt or over-coat of sorts Went great whether I had on jeans or khakis.
I stopped listening to most of the new shit in those categories after the 90's ended.. I hate music today with very few exceptions. It's all crap.. manufactured horse shit made to sell CD's and tickets to little whorey teeny boppers and their whored out mothers who had them when they were only 15 or whatever.
Right now I am heavy into Electronic music I guess.. Not totally into the mainstream Euro-shit or the happy feel good type stuff.. But I listen to many of the channels on DI.FM. I also listen to a lot of MODs ("computer music") and sids.. I have extensive MOD and SID collections spanning many gigabytes each. I also have a lot of old school game music dumps & rips.. NES, SNES, Genesis, Arcade games, PlayStation, etc..
As far as pure electronic goes.. I listen to Trance, Goa-Trance (I think what its called), techno, epic trance, hard dance... I just stay away from the totally happy dance/feel good mainsteam sounding shit. I like long repetitive riffs based on lower notes, and strings, and various cool sounding KEYS that aren't the standard you hear in every song.
I actually have copies of Fruity Loops Studio, Cakewalk Project 5 version 2, Orion Platinum (almost bought Plat a few times.. great and easy to learn/use), tons of sample libraries from professional quality shit, to sound font and wave packs.. I've tried real hard to get serious because I have a lot of ideas in my heads that I know would turn into GREAT songs if I could just GET THEM OUT and into the tracker.. However no matter how hard I've tried with my limited free time I can't seen to develop a "knack" for holding rhythm and memorizing note pitches so I can rapidly create good sounding stuff.. As a result I compose slow and have to play around with key assignments one note at a time and by then I've lost the idea or pattern I was going for and I'm back at the beginning...
I have thought about buying a MIDI keyboard and maybe trying to learn to plays the keys, through piano lessons first and then expanding.. But I can't bring myself to it, partly because I don't want to go through the effort and still fail, and partly because if I do fail I don't want to have blown a ton of cash. If I knew it would turn out well and I could do it, I'd put some money down for it, cause then I have the potential to make that money back... but I digress..
Lastly, I have always loved game music..and that's what finally pushed me over into the mainstream electronic music.. However nothing can replace the primitive gurgles, beeps, boops, clicks, punches, and other classic game/synth music sounds, especially the Commodore 64's SID chip.. C64 & various gameboys have some of the SWEETEST arpeggios & other unique sounds you just won't find on other hardware. Part of my goal in getting into Softsynth tracking programs was to remix game tunes in my own visions, and do original songs on plugins based on the old chip tech, and also mixing the old and new sounds together to make more cool sounding stuff.
That about covers my relationship with music..