Stone Birds

i actually know a few people that saw they are not influenced by anybody at all, they say they're completely original...

here's an example of this kind of person (he says he has no influences...)
ben crea's Drop the Bass: Nightclub City Original Song Contest Submission - Indaba Music
Find People. Make Music. Online - Indaba Music

__________________

[Link removed by mod, no advertising] ... Damn those mods are always gettin ya :)

CanwllCorfe

That sounds like what I'd say. I'm more influenced by genres than by individual artists. Though I would mention artists I enjoy listening to.

__________________
Your eyes were never yet let in to see the majesty and riches of the mind, but dwell in darkness; for your God is blind.

Freebase Dali

Sure sounds like he's influenced by the entire Electro trend, because that entire song is nothing I haven't heard before.

I do realize you were probably being sarcastic. I just wanted to further support your case.

frezza

i think beatles has influenced most of musician

Violent & Funky

__________________
http://www.last.fm/user/ohio0808

sometimes I don't thrill you
sometimes I think I'll kill you
just don't let me fuck up will you
'cause when I need a friend it's still you

Dirty

I'm sure there is some bands that would still be the same without the Beatles. But I think a lot of bands were either directly fans of them or were influenced by bands who got their style and identity from the beatles influence

Ska Lagos Jew Sun Ra

With the exception of a few production gimmicks(recording feedback, backmasking) which they stumbled on by accident, the Beatles didn't really invent all that much, per se. They just combined elements of things that weren't combined 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 bands 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 bands out there that would have drastically changed the landscape 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.

MoonlitSunshine

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 bands may not exist.

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

__________________
"I found it eventually, at the bottom of a locker in a disused laboratory, with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard". Ever thought of going into Advertising?"

- Arthur Dent

Ska Lagos Jew Sun Ra

Exactly what I love the Beatles for. Right at the moment where they could have just started ****ting in a bag and selling it to people, they tried new things, and took big risks.

However, I think one thing that can be pointed out that even if Revolver was when Beatles started bridging into new styles it was Sgt Pepper when they decided to completely throw out the rulebook, and write music that sounds like nothing they did before basing it off of a multitude of genres that may seem foreign to them. However, I'm not sure if it's common knowledge or not, but the inspiration for Sgt Pepper was Frank Zappa's "Freak Out!".

Personally, I don't think the albums are really that similiar. However, the concept of densly mixing multiple genres, and formula breaking experimentation is something they both shared. The Mothers for many reasons would never be the pop darlings the Beatles where, however, it's not completely impossible that any other major band would pick up an album like Freak Out!, and make it what the final phase of the Beatles was. Zappa, not being a Beatles fan, would have existed regardless of the Beatles.

So, it's very likely that if they wouldn't have done it, somebody else might have. Not to say though, that like how Freak Out and Sgt Pepper differ, they wouldn't have done it in a different way changing the course of music in general. Still, I don't think it would really effect the existence of bands, or the concept of there being at least one or two pop bands breaking the mold, and really doing something significant.

Then again, as stated, that's not really going to be happening again anytime soon. However, You have to remember, the conditioning for the pop music industry was way less systematic than it is today, and when guys like Jimi Hendrix came out people felt comfortable enough to actual accept something that drastically different, mainstream musicians had to actually take heed.

VEGANGELICA

I disagree with those in this thread who say that the course of music evolution would not change if the Beatles had never existed.

Whenever people hear music, they are altered, even if only slightly, which will impact the music they create and the way they react when they hear other music. So, if you negate the Beatles, then you would end up with slightly different music traditions. There might even end up being different genres eventually that *would never have arisen* had a particular group not become popular.

Here is an analogy from another area of human creativity: languages.

Out of the infinite number of different languages that *could* emerge, only some have been developed (due to a mixture of history and human brain abilities). If Latin (a metaphor for The Beatles) never arose, we would all be speaking and communicating here, but using a different language, and perhaps a radically different one. Perhaps Chinese!

I feel a music group can have a big effect on the future developments within music. It is not a given that all possible music genres will be created and blossom, just as there are many potential languages that *will never exist.*

I agree that if there were no replacement band with similar ideas, then many modern bands would be very different.

But even though there were music trends and ideas that gave rise to the Beatles and that would have continued even if the Beatles had never formed, I'd still say the modern world of music would have been different without the Beatles, their unique songs, and their impact on popular culture and musical preferences.

How different would music be now if the Beatles had never existed? I think it might be like the difference between a city in Germany and a city in the United States.

I still remember landing in Hamburg for the first time and walking down a street, amazed. They had much of what we had in the U.S., but everything was slightly different: the road signs, the pedestrian signals, the cross walk stripes, the shapes of windows in houses. And there were a few more radical differences, too: graveyards I visited in Germany were lovely, intricate places full of trees and shrubs and real flowers; in the U.S., they are usually flat, grassy, sterile areas devoid of life except for some oaks among the gravestones decorated with plastic bouquets.

A history without the Beatles could have changed the current music scene as much as the difference between a German and a U.S. graveyard.

__________________