Serial Pioneers/Innovators

I'd certainly bring up Dr Dre, if only to provoke somebody more knowledgeable than me into a detailed refutation. From the NWA sound to G-Funk to Chronic 2001. I often see it being said that he redefined rap music three times. That's probably inaccurate.

Surely the godfathers of serial innovation were The Beatles? If only because they got there first, there can be few groups (certainly few POPULAR groups) who innovated as much as they did.

It was probably seeing the phrase 'Jazz Funk' in the first post here that made me think of them, but how about Throbbing Gristle and their subsequent offshoot/successor groups? I mean quite apart from basically inventing industrial music there's the huge and probably widely underappreciated influence on synthpop, techno, acid house - in fact electronic music in general, really - as well as all the harsh noise/soundscapes/ambient/found-sounds side of things and psychedelic rock, drone, "world music" (crappy term, but you know what I mean)...

Cereal Pioneers? Like guys who stand up to weird anarchists who don't like cereal?

Since Dissensians tend to adhere more closely to the hardcore continuum side of things, is there also a tendency here to favour 'scenius' over 'genius'? Would it be difficult, for example, to isolate a single jungle producer and say it was THEM that innovated such and such a sound?

Scenius applies much more to rock than rock-minded types like to believe.

Beatles and Bowie both operated in a context - they were listening closely to what their peers were doing, and also stuff on the fringes that they could nick and repurpose.

There's a great Bowie quote where he says something like "it doesn't matter who did something first, what matters is who did something second". Shows an awareness of his role as being a synthesist and populariser.

Which is not to say he doesn't do quite a bit of innovating now and then. But even with the Berlin trilogy it's inspired by the German stuff, which for all the quirks of the individual participants definitely has overall characteristics that are scene-y

I think the same applies to Miles Davis - he's listening very closely to what's going on at every stage in black popular music (as well as avant-gardes) - Sly, Hendrix... bit later Papa Was A Rolling Stone / Temptations cinematic soul.... he carried doing that into the Eighties, ears pricking up whenever he heard production or a melodic sensibility that seemed new or different - Scritti is one example - bizarrely he was very taken with Nik Kershaw

if you look at the history of rock, there's a flocking thing going ... suddenly there's a sound that everybody wants... grunge is a good example of that, and in a smaller way shoegaze

There's a good case for Iggy being one of the most important stylistic innovators of the late 20th century. Almost single handedly provided the template for punk, and then later (with Bowie's help) post-punk.

droid said:

There's a good case for Iggy being one of the most important stylistic innovators of the late 20th century. Almost single handedly provided the template for punk, and then later (with Bowie's help) post-punk.

Click to expand...

John lydon had a similar trajectory, albeit in a more compressed form (...bollocks to metal box)

King Tubby. Invented dub and then (arguably) digital reggae in 1984.