Influence
 

This is something that always gets thrown around by classic rock fanboys and sane people alike... influence. I was just on Facebook, and saw the same old "if The Beatles never came along your favorite band wouldn't exist" spiel. I'm not going to discredit The Beatles here, but if they hadn't come along, surely someone else would have that would have broken the same ground they did. I believe my favorite bands, or at least similar ones would have come along regardless of the existence of this manifestation, if you will, of musical ground being broken.

Thoughts?

I think it happens regardless of who does it. It's just a matter of the right ingredients at the right time.

Yeah but just because it would happen eventually doesn't mean you shouldn't credit those who actually did it. Certainly, if you did, many great accomplishments (setting foot on the moon for example) would have gone unappreciated.

But he said he's not discrediting them...he just doesn't agree that the same musical ground wouldn't have been broken by someone else.

Its like saying that if Alexander Graham Bell wasn't born, telephones never would have been invented and perfected. Someone would have gotten around to it eventually. But no one discredits him for his accomplishment either.

I've never been able to gage the amount of influence that one artist has on another unless it's completely obvious. I don't say that this band would have never been around hadn't this band came about. Everyone has their own sound. Though sometimes it's pretty obvious. Like in the case of Amesoeurs. They, I believe, started the Black Metal/Shoegaze sort of genre that I've been following closely. I don't know of anyone who was doing it before them, but if anyone was, I'd like to know who. That way I can listen to them/their music for long periods of time.

@ NSW

Exactly. I'd give kudos to whoever does it, as long as it is done. I respect the folks who innovate in music and move it forward into a good place, but I don't think that if it happened to be someone else then they deserve less respect. That wouldn't make sense to me at all.

x3

If it wasn't the Beatles, it would have been another group. It's not like they were the only great and innovative band out there, it's just they were discovered and others either did or didn't at all get noticed.

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.

Sure, I'm there there are all kinds 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?

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

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.

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.

i think beatles has influenced most of musician

:stupid:

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

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.

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

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.

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! :D

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.

If the Beatles hadn't existed maybe Ray Davis would have got the credit & success he deserved.

I disagree. We might assume that because we can't imagine life without them, but why does that mean it would have been figured out eventually regardless? It'd be a total butterfly effect and society would have developed in a completely different direction.

That being said, when someone is of a certain school of thought and carries that thought further, it's far more likely that eventually someone else would have carried that same thought to the point of inventing a telephone.

That's how it is with most things. People are influenced by other inventions or ideas and simply elaborate on them. So in that sense, I'm sure we'd have something very similar to the telephone (if not the telephone we all know) because Morse Code and other inventions and movements were in place and being expounded on in that time.

In regards to music, it's silly to argue that "somebody would just do it anyway" because, again, that butterfly effect would mean that it may have taken longer to happen and the musical world (and as a result, society) would have been different in many ways. So, no, your favorite band probably wouldn't exist. But you wouldn't care.

OK...if you wanna get all philosophical about it, the bolded part I would agree with. That's pretty much what I was getting at anyhow. Obviously things wouldn't have happened the exact same way, or resulted in the exact same output (whether we're talking about the telephone or your favorite band). But yeah, some variation of what we have now would surely have been conceived and expounded on.

When I read what you wrote, you're basically saying that because of the way things happened along our timeline, that only certain bands could have come up with the ideas they had to have made the type of influence we have. My question is, why wouldn't all musically inclined human beings have that capacity? Even if it were slightly different? In fact, I'm pretty sure a huge margin of a lot of creative and groundbreaking musicians existed outside the fame that catapulted the stars we know into the musical history books and created influence for future generations of musicians. How do you know that if the unknowns had gotten a lucky break like the one's we know, that they wouldn't have met or exceeded the standards we're used to?

Not to mention the fact that these musical time periods had pretty specific influences from what was happening around them. It's a pretty safe bet that out of the multitudes of musicians and bands forming at any given time, at least a few of them would be both influenced by their surroundings and lucky enough to get signed and spammed across the world in order for other people to ever refer to them as some of our most enduring influences.

I think maybe you're looking at this too specifically. No one is arguing that a specific band comprised of specific people would or would not be here had their influences been different people. The real question is, would it really matter?

I don't think it would. The spark can come from anyone. If it's bright enough, it will catch.

That's from How The Beatles destroyed Rock 'n' Roll. I haven't read the whole thing but I've read the first chapter and my father has heard the author talk before so I've heard a lot about it that way. I think it's interesting.

I guess you can read it on google books too.
How the Beatles destroyed rock 'n ... - Google Books

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.

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

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

agreed. The only way i can think of that someone could have no influences is if they'd never heard any music ever in their life, and they recreated the entire idea from scratch themselves. Otherwise, all the little hooks, riffs, style, sounds... everything that every song and tune is lodges in your head somewhere, and comes out in your music whether you like it or not.

the closest thing to that is August Rush and even he probably had influences of some sort.

I won't disagree, since it's essentially the point I was getting at.

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 dumb as buying into the bandwagon pitch.

I agree. External factors are important. For instance, now you mentioned A. Graham Bell, what about Meucci (the real inventor of the telephone?)? And then Edison, the diverse circumstances of the sound-recording inventions, etc.

And yes, we have to see the industry's pressure, according to the decade in question (for instance, now, at the "Internet Age", it is less effective, etc...). There are many things to consider.

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.

it's SOOOOOOOooooooooooooooo easy to look back on what an influential person or group did in the past and say, 'pfft yeah, i could do that, or i'm sure other people would have eventually figure it out, it seems so obvious now. they weren't THAT influential really.'


except it's never that obvious before it actually happens and it's impossible for anyone who wasn't there and an active participant in said social change to really have anything more to say than just another fart in the wind.

Right, I completely agree with that. It's the other side, the other extreme. I think I'm somewhere in the middle. I'm not going to give the Beatles all of the credit and say they're the best things that ever happened and such, especially due to the fact that what they did either would have been done or HAD been done. But I'm not going to completely disregard them as a HUGE leading influence in music at the time and music now. What they did has strongly shaped music and I completely agree with that, but there is so much more to music than the Beatles and I they're not the only influence. This isn't an argument against you, by the way, just letting out my opinion in the form of a response to your quote.

No yeah, I share the same sentiment exactly.