Oh, I can do this!
I have a very wide variety of musical tastes. For instance, my current playlist (which has a lot more "favorite songs," as opposed to my normal playlist which just has various CDs queued up) has the following: Something Corporate, Oasis, James Blunt, Finger Eleven, The Verve Pipe, American Hi-Fi, Bowling For Soup, Metallica, Rufus Wainwright, Tool, Elliott Smith, Cursive, Shakira, Dan Bern, Imogen Heap, The Fray, Sufjan Stevens, Anna Nalick, Iron & Wine, Fountains of Wayne, KT Tunstall, Better Than Ezra, Blink 182, Jason Mraz, Regina Spektor, and Lostprophets. This list, for the most part, doesn't really matter (though it does back up my claim that I listen to a fairly wide variety of music) to the question, but I'm bored so I thought I'd list some super-awesome bands/singers anyway.
I'd say I definitely favor rock, punk (even the pop/punk stuff) for genres of choice... But my absolute favorite genre is the more modern/recent "indie folk" stuff. These are bands like Sufjan Stevens, Iron & Wine, Joshua Radin, and Elliott Smith to name a few. They each have a wide variety of sounds (well; except Joshua Radin. You either like him or you don't) which vary greatly in the scope of a single CD and even moreso if you look at each CD separately. It's truly great 'anything' music, even if it does get a bit depressing after a while. I don't really pay attention to lyrics as a message (which is odd, since a singer's voice generally completely determines my interest in a band) unless I'm adding a quote at the end of a blog post, so I can't necessarily vouch for their complexity or ingenuity or anything. Still a very awesome, if slightly underappreciated, genre.
There are only two genres of music which I avoid at all costs: rap and classical. I can't stand the lack of any real musical talent in rap songs other than recognition that Beat A sounds better than Beat B, and when you mix the two you get background tone for vocals which are almost always vulgar, violent, or simply bad. I understand a lot of people like it, it's just not my thing (along with hip-hop, though to a
slightly lesser extent). And I appreciate classical as an achievement or accomplishment, but my favorite part about music is the sound/tone of vocals. Therefore, I don't really listen to classical at all in my spare time. I'm not a big fan of country, but I can tolerate it. Especially if we're talking Johnny Cash.
It's kind of fun to keep track of my music-listening habits and trends with Last.fm too. For instance, my profile:
http://www.last.fm/user/mittense/. Really kind of neat to look at how my listening changes over time.
And while I've heard the name Rascal Flatts before, I don't think I've heard a single song by them. Unless I have and still have yet to connect the song with the name.
