[Mr Phil]

Following on from Gaz's "Most Over-Rated Band" comment (which I'd agree with) about the Beatles in another thread, and the comments that followed...

Who do you think are amongst the most influential musicians of the modern era?

While the Beatles were very very good, they essentially did one kind of thing very very well and then included enough variations in it to keep it fresh and successful for quite a long time. But that doesn't come anywhere near "Greatest Band of All Time" territory for me.

One person who popped very quickly into my head who I think has contributed far more and has taken many more risks (and pulled them off) is Damon Albarn. The whole Oasis vs Blur war pales into insignificance when you look at what either side has gone onto achieve since. Namely: More of the same tired old format vs Reinventions of style + New musical ventures varying from "world music" to hip hop and now a new opera. I think we all know who won that war now, don't we?

Albarn has managed to do all these different things without being obscure and unknown, and very often, has been very successful.

So, do you agree that the Beatles have been outstripped by Damon Albarn (who is not so universally loved), and who else comes to mind as being *influential*?

And you can interpret the word "influential" as you will. I lean more towards "direct influence on the audience" than "someone mainly known by other musicians but has reached audiences indirectly by influencing those other musicians".

[Lethal Biddle]

I don't think Albarn has been more influential that The Beatles, but I agree with what you're saying otherwise.

Other artists who, again I wouldn't say had been more influential, but hugely so & more than most people realise:

Dave Grohl:
Nirvana were hugely inspirational to a generation at the time & Foo Fighters probably equally so a handful of years later. But as well as that there's all the writing & sessioning he did with Queens Of The Stone Age & Tenacious D that fewer people know about & also all the side projects he's co-written/performed with Sonic Youth, Nine Inch Nails, Pearl Jam, Motorhead, Garbage, Killing Joke, Soul Asylum, The Prodigy, bloody loads of people.

Funnily enough, he's said before that The Beatles were one of the biggest influences on him, so perhaps they even deserve some credit for second hand influences there!


Joe Satriani:
Inspiration to loads of professional guitarists & has a 20 album discography spanning over 25 years. For the first however many years he was also a guitar teacher & single handedly tought Steve Vai & Kirk Hammett to play.
On top of all his own solo stuff he's done loads of blues compilations & set up the annual G3 blues rock tour. Which is considered to be one of the foremost annual displays of collected guitar skill in the world. Because it is.
He got quite influencial with Ibanez guitars & has several of his own signature series now, I think he might be on their board too. And he helped set up a childrens musical charity that gives away tens of thousands of dollars of free instruments to underprivelidged kids every year.
He played lead guitar for Mick Jaggers' "solo" work, was lead for all of Deep Purple's live performances for a while & was the session lead for a bunch of Alice Cooper & Blue Oyster Cult albums. As well as countless other jam sessions & duets with dozens of other guitarists. Oh, including Van Halen.
I'd say he's the greatest living guitarist.

[joinee_doug]

Well, I guess I’m not quite sure what you mean when you say “modern era”. And for that matter, what you mean when you say “music”. From your example, it appears that it means “’Rock’ (however loosely defined) of the last twenty years”(?). The Beatles started out stealing from the rock & roll that came before them, the same way that the Rolling Stones started out stealing from the blues. The difference was that the Beatles changed it up after a few years and began picking up things from a wider variety of sources and mishmashing them together successfully (Beach Boys, Indian, classical, ‘experimental’, etc.), where the Stones kept going back to the same or neighboring wells for their inspiration (not unsuccessfully). I’m not really familiar with Albarn’s work (other than “Song 2” and I used to have the first Gorillaz) and it’d be pretty far-fetched to call Oasis (decent band they might be) “influential” at all, really. But the more recent a band is, they have a wider variety of stuff to pick and choose from. That is, no band formed their sound without predecessors to borrow from.

I do think that the Beatles are somewhat overrated – but kind of in the same way that made somebody like Fatboy Slim so successful. Slim has/had a wonderful ear for taking a variety of other peoples’ work and fitting it together and making it a fresh sum of the parts. The Beatles’ reputation benefits from their reputation, the same way that U2’s does today. And I think the Beatles benefited from being in the right place at the right time, kind of a cheerful sign in a decade that was a downer much of the time (assassinations, war, racial problems, poverty, etc – not that those ever left us). Four smiley lads in their twenties with the media of the world hanging on their every word, scholars studying their words and music, everyone from tiny tots to greying grannies tapping their toes to the Fab Four…But I think you’d have a hard time finding someone outside of Albarn’s fanbase that could even tell you very much about him, other than maybe that he was in Blur or Gorillaz.
So, while the Beatles are overrated, they did change the course that the stream of rock and roll was taking. Twenty five or thirty years later, Albarn (or anyone, really) may have also changed it, but by then the stream had forked off several dozen times and his impact is much less felt And the Fabs provided a massive boost to Britain’s economy – overnight, England’s image went from fat old dour MPs and bankers to Carnaby Street dollybirds and young hipsters with long hair and guitars. So, beyond musically (and perhaps moreso than musically) the lads influenced us socially.

So who are the most influential musicians of the modern era? Here’s mine:
Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and others – added improvisation to jazz, so that you’d never hear a tune played the same twice
Hank Williams - he wasn’t called the Hillbilly Shakespeare for nothing; he mixed traditional folk and blues and modernized them, made the new lyrics clever and relatable and something you could have a good (or miserable) time to.
Bo Diddley - not only did he keep a stripped-down sound, he added a sense of humor and used several rarely-seen components, like fuzz guitar and front-line female guitarists; his bandmates were not just sidemen but equals in his performances
James Brown – put sex in music (implicitly, of course).
Link Wray – down and dirty guitar in a time that favored the sounds of Fabian, Pat Boone, and the Kingston Trio. Heavy influence on other grass-roots bands like the Sonics, who influenced bands like the Stooges. a heavy influence on first generation punk. Possibly all due to a hole in the speaker of his amp.
And then, to a lesser degree, people like Elvis or Sinatra or the Stones , who, due to their massive popularity, generated scads of copycats - an influence that didn't necessarily further innovation as much.
Perhaps I’ve said too much.

(Just looked at my post and saw that my "modern era" extends back 50 to 70 years. So I guess I'm more of a big-picture person. )

ed'didly to add bo diddley - don't know how i missed him

This post has been edited by joinee_doug: 14 November 2011 - 03:56 PM

[Rachel Rose]

There are too many artists who have influenced modern music to name only one.

I thought much of the Beatles music was brilliant.

I think Albarn has written amazing music and lyrics. Tongue-in-cheek topical tunes that get a deeper message across.

And, I adore this piece he co-wrote with Michael Nyman for Ravenous. It was Albarn's idea to use period instruments. I love the entire melody but it really grips me at 1:48 and I often cry, it's so stirring. http://www.youtube.c...h?v=wgxMPlemyLk


For guitar work I'd choose Ritchie Blackmore. Or Chuck Berry.

[GJ Drought]

The manic street preachers.

[Joinee Simitebrong]

I'm forever stunned by anyone suggesting The Beatles are overrated. The temerity! They're massively, grotesquely, obscenely underrated. In particular Paul McCartney, who I would suggest is the single most important figure in the history of music. Above Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Duke Ellington, Cole Porter, Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters, Bob Dylan, anyone, and by quite a distance too. The Beatles didn't just do one thing very well. They did almost everything! And brilliantly. The scope and breadth and imagination in their music is staggering. I could go on all night about them!

As for Damon Albarn; I can't really go with it. Yes he's made diverse music but (to me) most of it is quite derivative and leaves me bored. I'm fan of Blur - some fabulous pop songs with good melodies and witty lyrics - and Gorillaz have several decent songs but The Good... etc were rubbish and pointless. Supergroup? Write a good song before you call yourselves that! Monkey was at least musically quite interesting, in a technical sense, but so? It didn't grab me.

As I would consider "Modern Era" anything 80s onward. Most influential, for better or worse, a few names spring to mind:

The Cure
Michael Jackson
Pet Shop Boys (honourable mention for Gary Numan)
Nirvana (or Pixies, who had their sound stolen and made much better)
The Prodigy
N.W.A. (Dr Dre)
The Fugees (Wyclef/Lauryn Hill)
Radiohead
Jay-Z
Coldplay

I'm not necessarily saying I'm a fan of all those I've mentioned.

[HJCotW Spacemonkey]

Joinee Simitebrong, on 12 November 2011 - 04:35 PM, said:

I'm forever stunned by anyone suggesting The Beatles are overrated. The temerity! They're massively, grotesquely, obscenely underrated. In particular Paul McCartney, who I would suggest is the single most important figure in the history of music. Above Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Duke Ellington, Cole Porter, Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters, Bob Dylan, anyone, and by quite a distance too.

In my nigh on thirty years on this planet, I have heard some huge exaggerations, and I can say, without a shadow of a doubt, that this, particularly the highlighted part, is the absolute biggest. I'm actually quite staggered by it.

MoT
HJCotW

[Gaz]

I take it Si hasn't heard the Frog Chorus?

[PJ Hannah B-R]

HJCotW Spacemonkey, on 12 November 2011 - 10:34 PM, said:

In my nigh on thirty years on this planet, I have heard some huge exaggerations, and I can say, without a shadow of a doubt, that this, particularly the highlighted part, is the absolute biggest. I'm actually quite staggered by it.

MoT
HJCotW

It actually made me gasp then spit.

[Chairman 'Jamin]

Most influential? I'd have to argue (strongly) that more influential than either to the development of music of the modern era (rather than the continuation of the blues/rock and roll of a former age), I'd have to look at the likes of Kraftwerk, The Sex Pistols and The Sugar Hill Gang, each of whom used their music to develop their own youth culture and to change what was happening about them (musical).

If you're looking at the music industry in terms of commercial success, the most influential would be Simon Cowel and/or Pete Waterman. I don't like either of these gent very much, but their influence on what is played on the radio today is MASSIVE.

If you're looking at what made new sounds happen in the uk, you need look no further than John Peel - the man is the closest thing to the god of new music to ever grace this lump of rock.

If you're talking about who you like from the past, you're not answering the question and being a bit of a #!$&.

[Neil Diamond]

Joinee Simitebrong, on 12 November 2011 - 04:35 PM, said:

Paul McCartney, who I would suggest is the single most important figure in the history of music

I'd argue that he wasn't even the most important figure in the history of The Beatles!

[PJ Stevie G]

Neil Diamond, on 13 November 2011 - 09:23 PM, said:

I'd argue that he wasn't even the most important figure in the history of The Beatles!

Indeed not. I mean, did Paul ever narrate Thomas the Tank Engine?

[HJCotW Spacemonkey]

Gaz, on 13 November 2011 - 05:20 PM, said:

I take it Si hasn't heard the Frog Chorus?

The best thing McCartney ever did

MoT
HJCotW

[Golden Judas]

Tis a redundant question to me. Everyone has their own tastes and they will always believe that certain folk influenced the music they love more than others.

For me bands like The MC5 who were THE Punk forefathers-White Black Panthers in 60's America?Total Anti-Establishment=Punk.
Alice Cooper was the man that gave us the stage as more than just singing the songs, it gave us it as theatre-and how many singers/bands do that live now??
Bjork?
Dinosaur Jnr?
The Ramones-Masters of the three chord tune.As far as I can tell all singles were recorded over 3 and half mins at a minimum before then.
Phil Spector?Without his studio influences would there be a Rubber Soul,Pet Sounds....etc
Black Sabbath-the Dark Lords of Heavy Metal

Then there's certain albums, not necessarily from massively 'influential' bands but who recorded a single moment of genius.Pet Sounds.Jagged Little Pill?(how many female singer sonwriters came fae that album?),Etc.

It's an endless circle pit of influential musicians out there bouncing off each other.And always has been.
Tis why I have little time for pap music.Same old regurgitated guff time and time again.

This post has been edited by Golden Judas: 22 November 2011 - 12:48 PM