From bossa nova to EDM, and metal to jazz, the catalog of music enjoyed by Los Angeles teens is boundless.
“I feel like this year, over every other year, I've listened to a lot more genres that I wouldn't have imagined myself listening to,” said Dorsey High School junior Alison Gonzalez. While, according to Spotify Wrapped, her top artist was Bad Bunny, all of her top songs were by regional Mexican artist Ivan Cornejo.
For her it’s the “mellow vibe” of the Riverside-born 19-year-old's voice and guitar. We talked to more than a dozen Los Angeles high school students from the San Fernando Valley to the South Bay (and one in the San Jacinto Mountains). They told us about the music that wakes them up in the morning, that powers them through chores and pre-calculus homework.
But their 2023 soundtracks were about more than “vibes.” Their musical interests connected them to friends, family, language and helped them start to answer the perpetual question of who they are in the world.
Their stories offer ideas on how we all might listen to music with fresh ears.
For cleaning the house: "Así Soy" by Santa Fe Klan
For a new take on jazz: "California and Me" by Laufey
For a peppy morning: "OMG" by NewJeans
These songs and more are on the complete playlist of the students’ 2023 favorites.
Most students LAist talked to listed TikTok as one of the primary trailheads for their 2023 musical explorations.
“I hear the little viral clip of the song and then I look it up and I listen to the rest of it,” said West High School junior Jacob Benavente. “I get sent down a rabbit hole of music.”
Sometimes the algorithm reinforced what they already liked.
Dorsey High School junior Genessis Granados first heard “Light” by Korean rock band Wave To Earth from a friend. “It's a chill song,” Granados said. ”And it got viral on TikTok…so I couldn't just stop listening to it.”
But the platform is also re-surfacing much older music.
San Diego brothers Mike and Vic Fuentes formed Pierce the Veil in the aughts, but until February of this year, they hadn’t published new music since 2016. That hiatus didn’t stop people from making their 2012 track “King For A Day” blow up last year — scream-lipsyncing it into bottles of nail polish remover, cans of energy drinks, and other makeshift microphones.
San Fernando High School Senior Jocelin Mateos saw one of those clips and has since immersed herself in the alternative, emo, and punk scene.
“That was a turning point for me where I started finding what I liked in music,” Mateos said. “That was the first time I kind of connected with music in a way where I was just like blown away completely.”
Dorsey High School Senior Leo Mejia passed a head-banging, headphone-wearing stranger while walking through downtown L.A. with his mom earlier this year.
“He was like, ‘Hey man, you should listen to the song that I'm listening to,’” so Mejia started taking down the songs on his playlist, including one by Swedish death metal band Grotesque.
“I was like, ‘OK, cool. Thanks.’ And then that was it,” Mejia said.
The screaming and guitar riffs motivate him through exercise, or racing to finish homework.
“If it's due, like, in 10 minutes, then I also listen to very aggressive songs,” Mejia said. “But if it's due like the next day or [in] like a whole month, I listen to more jazz songs.” The standard “Misty” was a favorite of his this year.
About two years ago, Jesse Cordero’s grandmother bought him a baby blue record player for Christmas and he picked out ABBA’s 1979 album “Voulez-Vous” to go with it.
Chiquitita has been on repeat all year— “It's literally the best.” The rousing piano outro buoys what starts out as a song about heartbreak and sorrow.
This year, West High School senior Haruto Asami almost exclusively listened to Japanese pop.
The song “115万キロのフィルム” or “1.15 Million Kilometer Film” describes a love story through the metaphor of a film.
“With just such a short amount of time in the song, I kind of found it fascinating with how much of a story you can create out of it and how much emotion you can get out of it,” Asami said.
He’s “sufficiently fluent” in the language after taking classes through elementary and middle school. The music is a continuing education — even his parents have noticed changes in his vocabulary.
“The rest of my family actually all live in Japan,” Asami said. “Losing Japanese would be sort of losing a way of communication with [them.] I realized, like, how important it is to keep that connection.”
Fellow Torrance senior Yumiko Kasai also listened to a lot of J-pop, some contemporary and others from the ‘80s, courtesy of her mom.
“I haven't always liked the same music as my mom. Sometimes she would be listening to a song in the car, and I'd be like, ‘Can you skip it?’” Kasai said. (What teenager hasn’t said this to a parent?) “But, I think for the, like, ‘80s Japanese music, I listened to a lot of it during quarantine, so like 2020, 2021, and it kind of grew on me and it became one of my most favorite genres.”
Dorsey High School junior Genessis Orruego’s dad moved to Kansas about two years ago.
“I really missed our car rides, because we would just talk and talk, and he wouldn't, like, judge me for whatever I was talking about,” Orruego said. Often it’d be Nirvana or Bruno Mars.
According to Spotify, she listened to the 2012 Mars song “If I Knew” more than 500 times last year— that’s more than 18 hours of contemplative croning — “which is kind of scary,” Orruego said.
Orruego is part of a student band and they’re currently learning another Mars track, “Locked Out of Heaven.”
“Just to show my dad, like, ‘oh, look at the song I performed,’” Orruego said.
Music helped John Marshall High School senior Lianne Thompson navigate a challenging junior and senior year.
“I was doing stuff that I didn't like and I didn't feel like myself,” Thompson said. She’s stopped drawing, doing her homework, “peer pressure stuff.”
“I just wanted to be alone, and I wanted to just, like, focus on my peace,” Thompson said. ”It sounds very cheesy, but it worked.”
Thompson said playing guitar, saxophone, reading poetry and song lyrics, helped her reconnect to herself. She also started making electronic music and in September founded a club to collaborate with others.
“I don't want to sound too prestigious or whatever, but it kind of turned into like a big thing,” Thompson said.
Between 10 and 20 students meet Thursdays in a classroom near the Los Feliz school’s football field to share their thoughts and ideas about music production, rap, and hip hop.
She played a sample of a track inspired by English producer and DJ Fred Again.
“It makes me feel like, ‘Wow, I did that,'” Thompson said. “Making music not only inspires me to make more, but inspires me to do other stuff.”
Taj’i Draper thought rock music was terrible until he started playing drums and guitar at Dorsey High School about a year ago.
“Music, like rock and screamo and stuff, you have to have a very open mind… it isn't what you would normally, like, hear on the radio,” Draper said. “That allows you to have more of an open mind for different art forms.”
Silas Potma said his music reflects a larger appetite for the new and interesting.
“I'm always trying to like, find more things and expand my tastes,” said the Idyllwild Arts Academy sophomore. He discovered his favorite band of the year, The Garden, after an internet expedition prompted by a comment on an image Potma had saved to Pinterest.
Potma describes the genre-defiant Orange County band as “to-the-left-of-punk” with quirky sounds and lyrics like “I like cereal, but I ain't no serial killer.”
“I feel like there's maybe, like, maybe a few philosophical things in here, but it's pretty goofy most of the time,” Potma said.
This summer he saw the band live at The Observatory in Santa Ana. Twins Wyatt and Fletcher Shears performed in trademark white clown face paint in front of a larger-than-life jester puppet shambling about in the background.
“I think sometimes we think that we're really special and cool and like, unique and nobody gets us,” Potma said. “Seeing a bunch of other fans that like, are having a great time and have the same interests as you is really nice and like makes you feel more not alone.”
We asked each student interviewed for this story to recommend two songs. They also provided thoughts on some of those choices.
I joined LAist 89.3's public affairs program AirTalk to discuss this year's playlist, along with music influencer Kelsie Herzog.
