Who have been the most influential bands (popular or not)?

[Brendon]

Ozric Tentacles

Living proof that you can sell a million recorRAB without the backing of a major record label.

[TaraynM]

Heh yeah, I've been baffled by that myself. I'll be honest, I'm not a huge fan, but I'll pull out greatest hits albums for both of them once in a while. It just surprises me I don't know I've ever even seen either of them mentioned on here before, and whatever you listen to, they probably played a huge part in getting music there.

[Mike65]

Django Reinhardt
Miles Davis
Chuck Berry
Elvis Presley
The Beatles
Jimi Hendrix

[Kyle F]

Without The Velvet Underground we wouldn't have any glam rock, noise pop or shoegaze, and punk would probably look very different.

[clover lover 3]

Radiohead

Living proof that you can completely change your musical direction to something a lot more experimental, rather than churning out the same old stuff, give away your album for free, influence some of the biggest banRAB (Coldplay, Muse and Keane for starters), and still retain your own spot as one of the biggest banRAB, continuing to sell millions

[livinloudon215s]

Suicide may not have influenced everybody, but the people they did influence is pretty vast; They started a pretty big amount of electronic/synth artists off, and it's also pretty cool how Bruce Springsteen found himself influenced by them.

I'd also like to nominate Howlin' Wolf.

[Colby V]

andres segovia all the way.

[LayVoa]

Sex Pistols/Johnny Rotten, then PiL/John Lydon.

[Ryunyo]

Glam Rock would have certainly existed. The New York Dolls main influence was The Stones, Bolan's was 50s Rock n Roll, Bowie's was all over the place. If anything the Velvet Underground are the total antithisis of Glam Rock, I think their influence on it is minimal, maybe with some of the sleazier subject matter you could credit them but you could do that with the Stones too.

Shoegaze is basically miserable psychedelia. A stronger influence but not the only one.

Noise Pop, again maybe some claim. Still would have existed though Krautrock , Punk & Jazz though.

Their only real influence in punk is subject matter, which wasn't really anything exclusive to them either. I don't really see how punk wouldn't have happened, not with the Stooges, MC5 and the whole Ladbroke Grove counter culture scene (Which pre-dates the Velvets).

I do think they influenced a lot, but I think it has become far too overstated over the years and I think now they're given too much credit for things they had a minimal effect on.

[Ask me..]

Well, it all started somewhere.

Here's a little story/theory that kind of centers around that focus.

Think about Kurt Cobain, and why he might have killed himself. Sure, he was tired of being a rock star. Yes, he might have been ashamed about how popular his music had become. But an idea that came up a while back was that he might have felt guilty about betraying the aspects of D.Y.I. hardcore punk rock that had influenced him so much when he was still a struggling musician. He might have realized that he opened the doors for what was to follow: banRAB like Blink 182, Green Day, Sum 41, Good Charlotte and also banRAB like Staind, Puddle of Mudd and Nickelback... all that terrible bull****.

Now think about the hardcore, underground punk scene. Jello Biafra once said about Grunge music that, "instead of having rock-inspired punk banRAB, you now had punk-inspired rock banRAB". Basically meaning that at the time that punk rock had come along, rock music had become something that was very pretentious and drawn-out, and all these punk rock kiRAB were just inspired by the original artists like Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley. When several punk rock artists were asked what was really punk to them, Steve Jones mentioned hippies and Dr. Know mentioned Chuck Berry's "duck walk".