A question of influence

[redcrescent]

I've a question I've been mulling over for a while now but still can't put into the right words :slanted:, and something a few people were saying over on the Radiohead thread got me thinking again - that bit about indie bands being inspired by/ripping off truly mind-bending music (or in most cases just "soft avant" (c) gek-opel) to create completely safe and unchallenging music, you know, the bands that emphatically state they are influenced by "Sun Ra, Talking Heads, Stooges, King Tubby, Albert Ayler, Beefheart, Kraftwerk, Velvets and Fela Kuti" and end up sounding EXACTLY like any other ol' indie band (as someone put it in another thread) - and the question is basically this:

At what point do the supposed influences of musicians transcend the musicians themselves and render them irrelevant to you?

I mean, once Frank Zappa leads you to his alleged sources (Stravinsky's Firebird Suite , say, or Eric Dolphy) or some time spent with Sonic Youth introduces you to the BYG-Actuel LP series, can you really go back? Can you dive headfirst into Can, the Radiophonic Workshop stuff and the INA-GRM catalog and still come back to Kid A?

I think I'd almost certainly have to say 'no' in most cases (of course, records which evoke your childhood and certain personal moments are an exception, jazz somehow being the other for me, I mean I can love both King Oliver and Dave Douglas, who are 80+ years apart, for example) but maybe someone has other thoughts. Personally I'd love to 'unlearn' sometimes and be able to go back again with completely fresh ears and zero prejudice but as in all other areas of life I tend to remember what I want to forget and vice versa.

 

[zhao]

i think in a lot of cases the name check / drop is done for its own sake, as vapid signifier of subcultural status and cool, and has shit to do with what these zombie clones make themselves.

but in cases like Stereolab or whatever, yeah, i never go back to the "gateway drugs"... trying to think of exceptions but can't really... maybe J+M Chain or something because of teenage nostalgia... but they were kind of originial in some ways.

 

[gek-opel]

I've a question I've been mulling over for a while now but still can't put into the right words :slanted:, and something a few people were saying over on the Radiohead thread got me thinking again - that bit about indie bands being inspired by/ripping off truly mind-bending music (or in most cases just "soft avant" (c) gek-opel) to create completely safe and unchallenging music, you know, the bands that emphatically state they are influenced by "Sun Ra, Talking Heads, Stooges, King Tubby, Albert Ayler, Beefheart, Kraftwerk, Velvets and Fela Kuti" and end up sounding EXACTLY like any other ol' indie band (as someone put it in another thread) - and the question is basically this:

At what point do the supposed influences of musicians transcend the musicians themselves and render them irrelevant to you?

I mean, once Frank Zappa leads you to his alleged sources (Stravinsky's Firebird Suite , say, or Eric Dolphy) or some time spent with Sonic Youth introduces you to the BYG-Actuel LP series, can you really go back? Can you dive headfirst into Can, the Radiophonic Workshop stuff and the INA-GRM catalog and still come back to Kid A?

I think I'd almost certainly have to say 'no' in most cases (of course, records which evoke your childhood and certain personal moments are an exception, jazz somehow being the other for me, I mean I can love both King Oliver and Dave Douglas, who are 80+ years apart, for example) but maybe someone has other thoughts. Personally I'd love to 'unlearn' sometimes and be able to go back again with completely fresh ears and zero prejudice but as in all other areas of life I tend to remember what I want to forget and vice versa.

There is the small matter of transcoding hard/soft-avant influence into new forms though (ie- the lyrical pop song/rock song). For example someone like Scott Walker (late era) has quite a few fairly obvious musical sources (Penderecki/Ligeti for example) but does something quite distinct with them by transcoding the microtonal dissonant string textures into a totally different format (ie a ghost of a pop song), and similarly (on the lyrical front) with his blatant Beckettian influences, but here allowing what Badiou would term Beckett's patented reduction, that drive towards the limit (of bare humanity) and applying that to the music itself... In many respects it is at the level of the pop/non-pop lyrical song that much potential remains unexplored (possibly far beyond the merely textural/rhythmic sonic).

I've not listened to my Radiohead albums in quite a while though I would admit!

 

[shudder]

a very good question. I was actually thinking of posting a similar thread!

As gek and zhao point out, there's really a wide range of ways that a group can be influenced. You've got something like a spectrum from the total name-drop for cred to the "transcoding" of scott walker

What's interesting to me is figuring out where to slot something as solidly middlebrow as Radiohead. I think quite obviously they're not part of the name-dropping for cred team. In fact, I really do think they often take some quite disparate source material and do something like walker's "transcoding", using something quite "out", and creatively putting in a song-context (e.g. using the Messiaen chords from the Quartet for the End of Time in Pyramid Song). Yet, they get hated-on like a mother. I think the hate-on-because-of-influence-wearing-on-sleeve might not be totally justified in their case (which is not to say that there aren't other legitimate hate-on reasons, more likely having to do with po-facedness)...

 

[gek-opel]

Ahuh, and the Paul Lansky sample meets minimal industrial garage of idioteque is original enough too. My real beef with them around this time was that they were too eclectic, without settling into a single coherent sound (especially in terms of engineering- good albums for me feature a single sense of sound-space... decisions about how vocals are mixed, reverbs, how instruments are represented as existing inside 3d sound space etc-- around Kid A each track sounds like it was recorded in a different studio with a different producer almost). They also fall between two possible legitimate song forms- either properly organised songs with different sections, or less organised more long form exercises in slow transformative processes- weirdly they end sounding a lot of the time like series of short jams, never stretching out as I feel they should, or never approaching a more thought-out pop-like structure. This to me is largely due to laziness, and their more recent material is even worse on this score...

 

[redcrescent]

Thanks for the responses, I love some of the concepts mentioned, i.e. "gateway drugs", "transcoding"... fantastic stuff!

Scott Walker is a really great example of how it should be done, though its very hard to keep up with him I find - I dunno about you but his music is dense to the point of impenetrability for me, I actually think it gets stranger every time I listen. The fact he only releases an album per decade is actually very considerate of him, but I don't think I'll have figured out the first thing about the Drift by 2016.

The idea of stripping down something to its gleaming bare (pop?) bones is a very appealing one to me - conversely, taking a simple tune every child knows and blasting it into the stratosphere, like Coltrane does with a show tune like Chim Chim Cheree or My Favorite Things, is equally captivating. I think it's just about taking the pulse and feel of a tune and seeing how far you can stretch it without breaking.

I really haven't spent much time listening to Radiohead so my opinion doesn't count, but their more adventurous moves don't seem to really please anybody, do they?

(But hey - didn't Kid A break at #1 all over the place and win a half ton of awards? That does not look like a failed attempt at commercial suicide.)

 

[sing_minimal]

i like to hear influences in music..there's lots of ways you can hear these influences, but not all are good obviously. to me it all depends what artists do with these influences, how they use them.. they need to be subtle, but still i must feel them in some way. i like to think i can tell a difference and the idea behind it haha. but generally, if they do something in a way i can appreciate i won't stop listening to them and focus only on influences. though now when i think about it - i pretty much am only interested in music you can hear influences in.. i can't remember any bands that would take me back to their influences and make me stop listening to them because originals were better (not sure if i understand right), though in the past that maybe was the case. so to sum it up - it all depends on whether something strikes me as interesting or not : )

 

[TeN]

to answer your question - most definitely

I think there's something to be said for incorporating avant-garde musical ideas into pop music, and doing so can in and of itself be "challenging"

using Radiohead as an example, there's certain songs - "The National Anthem" and "Idoteque" for example - where they do a great job of melding pop hooks with "experimentalism." but there's other songs - "Hunting Bears" and "Treefingers" for example - attempt to be avant-garde in their own right, without any attempt to be pop songs. but because what they were trying to do had already been done, it comes off sounding derivative.

not to mention that many times I enjoy avant-pop/rock groups more than their influences... sometimes I don't want challenging, sometime I just want to dance