Accidental Influence

To create staying power, a band or artist has to touch on a style that has yet to have been discovered. Some music entities become popular, sans actual originality and talent, but their fame is often short-lived. It’s the hype and trend that lifts them into super-stardom, not their talent, so their mark fails to stand as ever-lasting.

            One band that exemplifies originality channeling its way into long-lasting fame is The Beatles. After making it big in the 1960’s they used their fame and a massive amount of drugs to popularize and create a never-been-heard sound.

            “The White Album” released in 1968 is arguably their most original piece of art. It introduces a style and texture in which many aspects are still carried over in modern music.

The album as a whole is heartbreakingly beautiful. Finding elegance through depression and masking it in a blanket of contentment had been done before by the ranks of blues artists, but The Beatles perfected it for the public.

Lyrics like, “Black bird fly into the light of a dark black mind,” are not just supposed to sound pretty, that’s real deep shit. Alternative and emotional music still employs these tactics; introducing emotionally charged content, but finding a way to channel the intense imagery, not just the depression.

Most notable from “The White Album” is the often over- looked, “Revolution 9.” Not to be confused with their super-popular “Revolution,” this song for the first time combines subtle instrumentals laced with random sound clips. The eerie texture bordering on a fucked-up-fun-house mentality is more interesting than off-putting. Obviously LSD influenced and probably very heavily at that, it’s the first introduction to disjointed, almost demonic music that the Westernized culture had access to.

Some of these qualities are still employed through popular music.

Radiohead pioneered electronic music. The execution of computer-made beats and sound-clips lends to their notoriety, but they take cues from the sound originally produced by The Beatles. Take their song, “Pull Pulk, Revolving Doors” off of their album “Amnesiac.” You could lay the track right next to “Revolution 9” and recognize their parallels; sound clips coming in at varying speeds, looming instrumentals, disturbing undertones, an all-around culmination of disjointed sounds that are gently pieced together to create well-balanced music.

Another artist that showcases The Beatles’ influence is the Dj, Girl Talk. He takes upwards of 20-30 popular songs, pulls the instrumentals from the beats and lyrics then mashes each piece together with parts of other songs to create one final song. The end product is a new song created completely from the parts of a myriad of other tracks. He lays tracks that are essentially reinventions of other artistic mediums, similar to The Beatles.

You can call The Beatles the first boy band or regard them simply as music for old people, but their innovations are still paving the way for talented artists to come. Because they strayed so heavily from the expectations laid out for them, they introduced ideas that would have been otherwise ignored.

All About It

           The idea of the modern rock band has been taken over by over-produced, auto-tuned, marketable faces. Essentially, the art is being taken out of music and haphazardly replaced with monotonous teeny boppers masquerading in big kids clothing. The image and fame of these entertainers over-shadow the talent or lack thereof that they may possess.
            Popular music in 2011 has more hands in production purely for profit and creating a "marketable" sound opposed to highlighting new talent than it ever has.
            What would the history of music look like if our culture relied as much on looks and marketability back in the day as we do now? Forget The Stones, Jagger looked creepy, Elvis; his hips were too damn controversial. Ozzy; fucking satanic, no go. Janis Joplin was as far from dainty and beautiful as humanly possible for a female. Madonna was a slut. Bob Dylan sounded like a full-fledged emphysema patient.
            At a first glance these hall-of-famers weren't glittering stars, but their careers relied solely on their ability to deviate from what was naturally expected of them.
            My goal is to focus on music that was created before auto-tune and Taylor Swift; back when talent actually held some clout. I want to redirect the focus back to music that speaks for its self and doesn’t need to ride the coat tails of special effects, gimmicks or attractive young faces.
            So, my plan, go back and review albums and artists that came out before this pop music baby-boom. This generation could benefit from shifting our focus back on artists that utilized their talent and created their own sound. These artists were made popular because they made a difference in the previously paved direction of music and art.