I tend to think "no poseur shit" is in and of itself a rather boring and poseuresque attitude.
My "first favorite band" was Metallica. From there I got into Bay Area thrash and other stuff: Megadeth, Testament, Slayer, Sepultura... From there it was death metal, mostly the usual suspects from Florida and New York: Morbid Angel, Obituary, Cannibal Corpse, Deicide, Suffocation, Immolation, etc. Swedish death metal and stuff like Bolt Thrower came next. I spent the '90s reading Metal Maniacs and listening to everything I could. Death metal remained my genre of choice -- Morbid Angel were my favorite band -- but I listened to plenty of thrash, doom, and a little bit of black metal (not mentioning all the non-metal stuff I was into; mostly industrial, some post-punk and hardcore, and so on).
It was around the later '90s that I started getting more and more into the 2nd wave black metal stuff (death metal was in a slump). And around the turn of the century, black metal was starting to get a bit weirder (recalling records by Emperor, Ulver, Borknagar, the Burzum prison albums, etc.), splintering in different directions (Ulver's Coil-inspired stuff, Emperor splitting into Peccatum and Zyklon while Ihsahn pretty much helmed Prometheus all on his own, Arcturus sounding quite epic and cheesy on The Sham Mirrors, Samael turning into dance-metal or whatever, Cradle of Filth sucking, Darkthrone just kind of on cruise control, and so on)...
There were a couple of years where I didn't listen to metal quite as obsessively -- I'd become more curious about "experimental" genres of music like free jazz, krautrock, musique concréte, noise, ambient, and all kinds of stuff you'd read about in Wire magazine. I was living in San Francisco at the time, buying records at Aquarius and Amoeba, and then Weakling's Dead as Dreams came out -- that was an extremely important record for me. It took so many things I'd come to love in recent years, Swans and noise and such, and threw it into a black metal cauldron more potent and furious than anything I'd heard ever since, say, In the Nightside Eclipse.
It wasn't too long before the French and German scenes I'm still pretty much in love with were exploding, and black metal was perhaps more vital than ever, save for when the 2nd wave was at its strongest.
And today, well, I guess you can just look at my last.fm to see where I stand.
Mostly stuff that Omni introduced me to of course, but also stuff that I was vaguely interested in for years and finally looked into in more detail. Bands like Swans, Dead Can Dance, Death in June, Sol Invictus, Rome, Elend, Queen, Kammarheit, Van der Graaf Generator, etc.
Well I had nobody to introduce this stuff to me before. All my "real" friends listen to mainstream rap, hiphop, reggaeton, and shit like that, and the people that I talk to online don't listen to too much outside of metal.
