To me "influential" is such a non-music-lover concern. It's a critic's concern, not a fan's. Fans don't care which bands change the course of music history. Fans care which bands have touched our hearts.
And I'm a fan. Not a critic. But I have read a lot of music criticism! And so if I am going to take a stab at a Top 5 Most Influential American Band list, I ought to at least be able to muster up a sort of jovially snide critical facade while I'm at it!
Here, then, are my Top 5 Most Influential American Bands. TIED FOR FIFTH PLACE:
5. The Ramones - begat Punk, despite being pretty dang pop about it.
5. The Supremes - tag-teamed with the Beach Boys to defend the U.S. pop charts, going toe-to-toe against the Beatles at the height of their chart-topping dominance. It goes without saying that Brian Wilson had the edge in visionary genius. It also goes without saying that visionary genius can't inspire another person to become a visionary genius. The pop formula perfected by the Supremes, on the other hand, has inspired legions of cookie-cutter wannabes right down to this day.
Influence: Not Always Benign.
5. The Velvet Underground: Not because everybody says. Because for four decades running, everbody says. The definitive/official "influential"/seminal underground rock band.
5. The Grateful Dead: I hate this band. I fu*king hate this band. Not so much for their music, which was at worst inoffensive and at best kind of catchy in a breezy way. I hate them for the scene that they left behind, which steadfastly refuses to leave, or even take a bath.
5. Van Halen: nearly single-handedly responsible for changing L.A.'s Sunset Strip scene from Eagles wannabes to solo-wanking hair rockers, setting the stage for the global ascendancy of a new generation of "metal" fans & bands (and the global resurgence of the older generation). Influence: not always benign.
Honorable Mention. P-Funk: This is just too obvious. Without P-Funk, there could never have been a Snoop Dogg.
So that's my top 5 (+ honorable mention). Actually I don't really, really like any of those bands. But they sure were influential!
10 comments:
Heck, the Allmans'd been on there ahead of Skynnrd - Nirvana'd been on there ahead of Pearl Jam!
Blink-182'd been on there ahead of Panic at the Disco.
But the point of a Top 5 List is, which one of those 5 would you have OUSTED to make room for (for instance) Pearl Jam? Was PJ more influential than any one of those bands?
The question isn't "where is this band?" The question is: where would YOU put it? And who would you kick out to put it there.
There's no way I could make up a top TEN "most influential" list composed only of bands I could be snide and dismissive about!
Think about the implications! Sheesh.
Can't do it! I can't edit, only DELETE.
"Just speculating?" All music criticism is subjective. Nobody writing for Rolling Stone or Billboard is going to come out with a peer-reviewed, tested and repeatable proof for something like this.
But subjective doesn't mean unsupported in the empty air. You lay out your choices, and you explain your reasoning. That's all there is to it; that's all there can ever be.
The picture will never be any clearer than it is now, because it won't be settling down. If we took the view that music history will soon be over, we might say we should probably wait a bit, and then judge it in its entirety. But time is not the judge. People will be the judges, and the participants.
As time passes, the influence of earlier bands will first become clearer, and then - it will wane. The mainstream will pass it by. New bands will spring up to change the course of music.
Yeah, yeah.
Wow.
I just noticed something rather striking. This whole exchange has just as much value now as it ever did!
Post a Comment