u/airynothing1

There's a lot of debate in this sub and others about the relative influence of various artists. Claiming that so-and-so is "more influential than the Beatles" is an especially popular line of attack, since it's a guaranteed way to spark engagement but also (in certain cases) just defensible enough to inspire some real debate. We've probably all seen the threads about how the Velvet Underground is more influential than the Beatles, Kraftwerk is more influential than the Beatles, etc.

I tend to find these arguments a bit tedious, since they usually seem to be rooted mostly in contrarianism, and it's all so subjective anyway. (Besides, I'm a big Beatles fan.) Still, I think there's an interesting sub-debate that often comes up in these threads, about what exactly "influence" even means in this context, and how it should be measured. I'll use the Beatles vs. the Velvet Underground as an example to illustrate.

The standard pro-Beatles argument is basically as follows: The Beatles were among the first to implement or at least normalize most of the techniques and procedures that have become standard in the western pop/rock recording industry. They wrote their own songs. They treated the album as a cohesive statement (and made one of the first concept albums). They wrote for the studio rather than the stage. They popularized the use of various previously-unconventional instruments or sounds on ostensibly "rock" albums (strings, sitars, backmasking, guitar feedback). They acted as a four-person team rather than a frontman with a backing band. The list goes on. Most will concede that they weren't the absolute first group to do most of these things, but they were definitely the biggest and the one that the most people paid attention to and took cues from. Any band today where the members write their own songs, play their own instruments, and priortize albums over singles is, essentially, following in the Beatles' foosteps.

The argument for TVU, on the other hand, would basically echo the famous Eno quote about how only 1,000 people bought their first album, but all of those people started bands of their own. In other words, TVU might not have revolutionized the way the industry works in the way the Beatles did, but through the decades their sound and general vibe have completely saturated everything. If you put on a random indie rock album today, chances are it sounds more like TVU than the Beatles. In fact, a band that sounds distinctly Beatles-esque (three-part harmonies, complicate chord progressions, jangly guitars, baroque instrumentation, "psychedelic" effects) will usually be noted as such, because these techniques are still pretty atypical (and hard to pull off without sounding kitschy or derivative). On the other hand, a band that sounds Velvet-esque is barely worth remarking upon, because every band sounds like TVU to one degree or another.

I'm not here to relitigate the Beatles vs. TVU or any other specific influence battle; the above is, again, just an illustration of a larger point, about how "influence" in the arts can mean different things in different contexts. Still, I think we tend to ignore this nuance during these discussions. We talk about "influence" as one all-encompassing thing, but then switch between different kinds of influence (industrial, technical, sonic, cultural) when it suits our particular argument. Most truly influential artists will have elements of all of these, but I'd argue that few are equally influential across every sector, and some are massively influential in one area while having barely any influence in another.

What do you think?

As a speculative exercise today I was trying to put together a list of 10 albums that I consider favorites, that I feel represent my tastes well, and that aren‘t just the usual suspects praised constantly by everyone. (The idea was that these would be the choices I’d pick if were asked to do something like The Quietus’ favorite records series, even though there’s no reason I would ever be picked for something like that; vain, I know!)

I won‘t share my list here, but it struck me as I was narrowing down my choices how many artists that I probably would've picked five or ten years ago I was leaving off, and also how many of the artists I *was* picking were introduced to me through those earlier favorites, or at least were important influences on them. I left off Jeff Buckley but included Nina Simone and Leonard Cohen. I left off my teenage favorite Thrice but included Slowdive, a band I originally learned about through an interview with Thrice’s Dustin Kensrue. Almost everything on the list could be traced in this way to something else that used to be a cherished favorite of mine, until I started to get more interested in what had led there, which in turn gave me a new, even more cherished favorite.

I feel like this is a pretty typical trajectory for dedicated music fans, who are always looking to discover previously-unfamiliar things and to understand the precedents and lineages for the music they like. On the other hand, it seems a lot of people do just kind of settle on their favorites in their teens or twenties and don’t really branch out from there. And of course some “dedicated music fans“ are probably more interested in the present than the past, and are eager to discover new artists and sounds rather than dwelling on the old.

I guess if I were to shape all this into some discussion questions they would be: How much of your listening life do you spend investigating your favorites‘ favorites? How much of the music you love now did you find because it was an influence on someone else? And how many old favorites have become overshadowed for you by the things that inspired them?

(Full list in the comments)