Biggest impact artist

      I think it was in Tuesday's class when Mr. A  asked each person which artist has had the biggest impact on us or was the most important (I don't recall exactly what he asked but it was along those lines). As people answered I thought and went through several artists and bands trying to decide which one was the most important, throughout this process one name kept coming up no matter how much I dismissed it until I decided to embrace it and give more thought to this reoccurring name until the realization of its importance and significance overcame me as I answered almost by reflex "Dan Black".
        
          What I realized was that Dan Black and his music was my kickoff artist where I became more actively aware of the presence/idea of finding new music or better put, discovering music new to you and the idea of finding and actively looking for music, conducting research. Essentially the beginning of my musical awakening and drastic change in the way I viewed/listened to music compared to before where I definitely listened to music (and a lot), but only listened to stuff that I knew from the radio, my parents listened to, or my brother showed me, in other words I got almost all my music from people I knew and even then I never acquired much depth of knowledge with any artist because looking deeper and listening to full albums was something of a result of Dan Black.
         
           They way I came about knowing of Dan Black is peculiar because he was more or less my first individual musical discovery as result of having listened to a Cudi track that (to me at the time featured Dan Black but later came to realize that it was Dan Black's track which recorded a version with Cudi) anyway eventually I clicked on Dan's name which took me to his music and resulted in me starting to find my own music. So then I began to more actively listen to music and its elements as well as actively looking for new music, one example of this is a playlist I made for my youtube account that's titled "music research"  that features various artists of different genres that I came across while on youtube and put them in this playlist to remind me of the exact aspect I liked and go deeper and conduct research on the artist, I still use this playlist and add songs to it to check later, it's definitely a good tool. Another form is when I mistype an artist or for some other reason a different artist comes up, I click on it and give it a listen and its taught me to take chances listening to anything that appears especially mistakes from typing because I've found some great stuff I would've missed otherwise.
      
       I've found that Dan Black has definitely been the most significantly important artist to me not just because of his music (which is really good) but what resulted from finding it and how it continues to influence the way I discover new music and how I listen everything in general to this day.