Influence

[Summer Rain]

With the exception of a few production gimmicks(recording feedback, backmasking) which they sturabled on by accident, the Beatles didn't really invent all that much, per se. They just corabined elements of things that weren't corabined much before. I mean, looking at the first few years of their music they did nothing more than bring harmonized vocals to rather standard rock n' roll. When they got really creative, they were just throwing everything they had access to together in a blender.

Point is, if they didn't exist those influences would still be there, so it's very likely that somebody else would pick up on it. I mean, Sgt Pepper was considered such a landmark album. This wasn't so much because it was the first psychadellic album ever it was moreso that it was the fact it was the Beatles making psychadellic which made psychadellic a big deal to audiences who weren't down with the dirty hippies, and their crazy drugged out sound.

So, I believe that if the Beatles never existed that not a lot of banRAB would have been drastically different. I just assume they'd be recorded, and produced a lot differently. However, most things the Beatles did weren't landmark because they were the first to do it, it was the fact they were the Beatles, and they were doing it.

I think though there are a few banRAB out there that would have drastically changed the lanRABcape if they haven't existed. Black Sabbath is a key example. Music would have naturally gotten heavier, true. But Sabbath were so ahead with their macabre imagery, and I think a lot of the fact that their sound came from accident(Tommy Iommi's ****ed up fingers) means that it really wasn't derrived from a previous source. However, again, even if they didn't exist, I'm sure horror imagery would have crept in, just not the same way, or maybe not even to the extent it needed to with acts continually trying to top the previous.

[piepounder]

i actually wasn't being sarcastic he really believes he has no influences. he told me influences are crutches for stupid people with no originality. also he hates indie music he only enjoys mainstream music. and if it wasn't already obvious he's a douche to everyone on the site that doesn't completely agree with him.

[You bet your wife]

Yeah, I'm not really an Elijah Wald fan. I've read some of his stuff and quite I honestly I think he talks a lot out his ass. The title of this particular book, for example, is just an eye catcher, I've heard most of the book is just the history of lesser known musicians. Not that there's anything wrong with exposing people to a different side of popular music (the real innovators behind the scenes and the influential artists who never got the fame they deserve), but discrediting people just because of their popularity is is equally as durab as buying into the bandwagon pitch.

[Arran]

Exactly. All the right things came together for them at the right time. I think things will always find a way to evolve and I can't say the Beatles would have been the only way for music to evolve that way.

[Facepalm Jeff]

So it's less that he has no influences, and more that he refuses to acknwledge those that he has.

[Abby L]

I think to say that a band was influenced by another is a vastly different thing to saying that they wouldn't have existed without them. As many others have said, if the Beatles hadn't done it, someone else probably would have, but the fact remains that The Beatles did do it. Perhaps what they did wasn't the most groundbreaking thing in the world, if the ideas were already around as is being claimed by some here, but in my personal opinion, managing to make something unpopular popularly accepted is something of an achievement in itself. In many ways, they made experimentation popular, broke the potential string of "more of the same" which we're getting quite a lot of in "pop music" today.

Essentially, removing the beatles from history might not cause every subsequent band to cease to exist, but they are a major influence of a large amount of modern music, and the same could be said for any influential band. That said, if they hadn't done it, how long would it have been till someone else did it? Were they ahead of their time? Regardless, anyone arguing the "Your favourite band wouldn't exist if it wasn't for the Beatles" side of things could just include an "or their influential equivalent along an alternate timeline in which the beatles didn't form" in their argument. When it comes down to it, if The beatles didn't do it, then another band would have, in which case that band would have done it and we'd be having the same argument. THe whole thing is pretty trivial.

Let X be the band who released music in the 60's whom are considered to be a massive influence on modern music, in any potential timeline. If one were to remove X entirely, such that there was no replacement band with similar ideas, then many modern banRAB may not exist.

As The Beatles represent X for our specific timeline, they have a point :P

[AnnaMarie]

Sure, I'm there there are all kinRAB of external factors that must be taken into consideration. Market pressure for a "new sound" would certainly have been one of them. Evolving technology is another.

I would be inclined to think that the repressed culture of the 50s had more to do with music evolution than The Beatles did, but what do you guys think?

[ERiC DiLL L0VER]

I think you are probably right, because I've known of the Beatles and listened to them almost my whole life, but I've never even heard of Ray Davis.

And now that I look him up, I don' t even know if you mean Ray Davis of The Parliaments from South Carolina http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Davis_(musician) or Ray Davies of The Kinks! Ray Davies - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Either way, I'd never heard of Ray before you mentioned him.

So I still feel that if you negated the Beatles, we would end up with slightly different music traditions and perhaps eventually even different genres that *would never have arisen* had this particular group not become popular, just as many potential languages would have never existed if a language (such as Latin) were negated.

Human inventiveness can take many alternate routes, leading to very different end results.

[[ * - * ]]

i think that's true about everyone who says they have no influences.