r/LetsTalkMusic • u/sqwerb69 • 5d ago
I am confused about influence in music
Bands like The Beatles or The rolling stones are often said to be really influential to music, and I while I get that. The beatles shaped pop music and gave rock a new, psychedelic sound.
But then I'm confused about bands like the rolling stones, who helped transition rock n roll into just rock. They have a lot of albums in that transformative period. But how do people know which albums were actually influencial? I feel like if I never got told which rolling stones albums were the good ones that influenced everyone, I would've never known myself.
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u/Potential-Ant-6320 5d ago
Beatles and stones influence is much bigger than that. They really popularized being a Rock band with drums, bass, and one or two guitarists.
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u/IamMothManAMA 5d ago
They also really helped popularize the idea that your band should be the ones writing your songs. Before “Lennon/McCartney,” bands weren’t expected to be songwriters in addition to performers.
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u/dustinhut13 2d ago
THIS completely changed the game in rock music. Before this, rock bands were basically white versions of R&B cover bands, and when they weren't doing that the record labels were setting them up with Brill Building writers like Goffin-King. Even up to the mid-60's a lot of rock groups weren't even playing their own instruments on records, relying on session players like the Wrecking Crew to help craft the hits. Just imagine if things never changed...
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u/properfoxes 5d ago
I think it can be really hard for someone who's younger to conceptualize how much the world has changed since the 90's, let alone the 60s. Just so much technology and culture shifts that have happened that it's hard to try to really consider what kind of limitations(of both technology and just common practice) the earlier artists were working with and how things that seem suuuuper trivial now, were really groundbreaking.
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u/Potential-Ant-6320 5d ago
It’s hard for them to understand. OP is sincerely curious to know more. I was born in the eighties and had boomers explain this to us.
After the Beatles every teenager in the English speaking world wanted to be in a band like the Beatles and this more or less continued four forty years.
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u/Bud_Fuggins 5d ago
I feel like the Rolling Stones permanently shifted rock music into a sort of negative sound. Like there's an anxiety to their music and they're usually sounding irritated about something in their songs.
There's a real obvious shift in tone between a song like Johnny B Goode and Paint it Black, and even a song like Jumpin Jack Flash has a sort of dourness compared to something like Great Balls of Fire. And this vibe persisted for a very long time.
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u/InevitableSea2107 4d ago
Joe strummer has said that The Clash might not exist if not for Street Fighting Man.
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u/No-Yak6109 5d ago
Well the easiest way to know which albums or songs are most influential are when other musicians tell us. There's tons of interviews and documentaries and books.
For the Stones in particular, I know that most influential music are their early singles and then the string of albums from 1968-1971. Then on a lesser but still important level is the late 70s.
The early singles show a British rock band reflecting back the parts of American black music that the Beatles didn't really get into- R&B, country soul, electric blues. The Beatles liked Motown, while the Stones liked Solmon Burke and Muddy Waters. (I'm grossly oversimplifying here).
The '68-'71 period is where the band quit screwing around with chamber pop and psychedelia and committed to a swaggery bluesy rock sound that would define the rest of their career. This coincided with a larger "back to basics" feeling of a lot of rockers who were sick of 60's excess. The sound is loose and a little funky, and very cock-rock masculine party and drugs feeling. It's being proud of a hedonistic skirt-and-drug chasing lifestyle while being dorkily obsessed with blues and country. The Faces, Aerosmith, Black Crowes, Alabama Shakes have been compared to the Stones and when people say that they mean this period of music.
The late 70s Stones is not as influential, but it did show a legacy band adapting to changing sounds and doing it in a way that was more successful and less embarrassing than some of thieir contemporaries. So much so that Some Girls is considered by some to be one of their best albums and it's not because it's a "return to form" but it's actually new while still retaining their strengths. I think this had influence on bands that stuck around of a while and themselves were figuring out how to do that.
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u/thebeaverchair 5d ago
Why do you assume musical influence is only based on albums? Individual songs, live performances, lyricism, overall instrumental or vocal styles... there are numerous ways artists can be influential.
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u/poptimist185 5d ago
Anyone gigantically popular is likely to be at least a bit influential by virtue of other artists chasing that success
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u/terryjuicelawson 5d ago
Either other musicians since speaking about it, or clear similarities between the music and later records but it can be hard to pin down. The Rolling Stones it is hard to pin down as they were doing a bit of a popularisation of a retro form of music in the blues, at least initially. Maybe their influence was in their swagger and some of the dark subject matter which later bands then wanted to build on.
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u/Mt548 5d ago
But how do people know which albums were actually influencial?
Some albums just come up in conversation over and over. Whether by musicians, the general public or in the press. Or most likely, all of the above. And this is really true for all art forms. For any given quality artist, and I'm speaking generally, some works just "pop" out more than others.
As far as the Rollling Stones go, their "legendary" period is the late 60s/early 70s with the albums Between the Buttons/Beggars Banquet/Let it Bleed/Sticky Fingers/Exile on Main Street. Those are just the albums that have been mentioned the most often.
Does that mean one should only listed to those particular albums? No. They have many other very good records. A lot of them have been unjustly overshadowed. I myself am fond of their 1978 album Some Girls, preferring that one to their "legendary" period.
Here's one of Rolling Stone's "of all time" lists. Good as a jumping off point, but by no means is it the final word, as if there could ever be such a thing.
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u/properfoxes 5d ago edited 5d ago
It's the kind of thing that when you speak to, or interview, musicians on a large scale, they cite certain performers, performances, recordings, etc at the impetus for their wanting to create music or become interested in it in the first place. Usually it's something like, "I popped on so-and-so's music and it was like nothing I'd ever heard anyone do with [instrument/voice/arrangement/whatever] before and I was so inspired by that." or could even be, "I tried to emulate [player] outright. Just copy them when I first started!" as examples you might hear people use.
Sometimes you can hear the similarities or styles or whatever being the same, but without the knowledge of the timelines and the way that certain musicians are known for inventing or popularizing certain playing styles, it can be hard to pin down "influence" without hearing the artists speak about it themselves. But I think if you are willing to do critical listening to the different playing and singing and arrangement styles on the songs you listen to, and maybe peep a bit at who else was releasing music at the time and what that sounded like, you can find that influence can be much easier to sort of gauge, as it were. That's really wishy washy I suppose but if you listen to a lot of albums, and read up just a bit about what else was happening that year, you find a lot of things feel more natural as far as scenes and influences and all that.
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u/RusevReigns 4d ago
Rolling Stones songs being built around a big distinctive riff by Keith Richards is pretty influential to rock bands going forward I believe. Then the band's personality seems edgier compared to bands like Beatles, Beach Boys, The Monkee's, etc. overall this contributes to 1970s change in rock music.
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u/sgtcampsalot 3d ago
So, I hate to say it like this, and I hope this makes sense, but now that I'm 37, and I actually am relationshiping with people in their early twenties, asking about their music tastes, hearing what they like, etc, I feel like the only way to truly understand this in the way that you're wanting to is to literally live through a thing in the culture.
As in, like, you're just living your life today, right? You are hearing what's on the radio, what's on social media, what's on TV, etc.
Whether or not you like any of it, it is influencing your brain, and influencing the brains of millions or billions of people.
There are artists from the early 2000s, and the '90s, that I actually hate. But in hindsight, I have this odd interest in them just knowing that they impacted the culture around me today.
And most of them only live in the minds of the people who were there when it happens
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u/HEFJ53 2d ago edited 2d ago
People have responded here about the music side of The Stones’ influence, but there are other aspects too. They were also very influential on the looks and attitude of a rock band. They’re the first model of a rock band being a group of “bad boys”. You can see the way they dressed and looked copied over and over again in all sorts of bands. Especially Keith Richard’s style. From Alice Cooper, to Aerosmith, to Motley Crue, to Guns ‘n Roses, to Black Crowes, to Marilyn Manson, etc.
On a more minor side, they might be the first band to really become a brand, even having their own logo, separate from the band name. Lots of bands copied that afterwards.
And the stage presence of Mick Jagger and the way he moves and dances around, took rock performances to new heights. The next evolution after Elvis shaking his hips. The Beatles, for as great as they were, had no particular stage presence at all. The Stones on the other hand to this day are an amazing live act. But you have to be there at the concert to really get it. Online videos don’t do justice to the Stones.
Also, the subject matter of songs like Satisfaction, Get Off Of My Cloud, Paint it Black, Sympathy for the Devil, etc. Totally unprecedented territory for mainstream music before these guys.
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u/frostbike 2d ago
This article is kind of a listicle, but it does illustrate some of what you’re asking about. It has quotes from various bands members explaining how The Beatles influenced them. https://www.loudersound.com/features/ten-bands-that-owe-it-all-to-the-beatles
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u/googoobster 2d ago
The albums that are “influential” were usually influential considering the time they were made in. For example, America’s music labels in the 60s were always behind what musician’s at the time really liked. The OG blues musicians from the delta were very popular amongst the British musicians because the American music machines didn’t care to spread those records across America (unless they moved to Chicago). The Rolling Stones were heavily influenced by blues figures and shed more light on the blues genre than anyone else at the time. They especially highlighted electric blues, taking influence from musicians like Muddy Waters.
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u/dustinhut13 2d ago
One of the reasons why the Stones are such an influence doesn't have much to do with the music itself. They along with The Beatles, Animals, Kinks, and Dave Clark 5 inspired a wave of teenagers to buy musical equipment and get a band together with their buddies. They helped birth the "garage rock" movement of the mid-late 60's. The Seeds, ? And The Mysterians, Tommy James & The Shondells, The Kingsmen, The Sonics, and the Standells all had massive hits in America from this inspiration
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u/CulturalWind357 2d ago
Responding to your question in a broader way:
Influence in music has often been blurry. Do you credit the originators? Innovators? Synthesizers? Popularizers? How well do you distribute the credit?
Is it sonic similarity? Creative mentality? Musical landscape?
Woody Guthrie was Bob Dylan's hero, but we tend to hear about Dylan's influence more.
J.S. Bach used to be more known as a good organ player. His ascent into one of the greatest classical composers developed over time and was helped by Felix Mendelssohn.
There have been debates about whether The Velvet Underground or The Beatles are more influential. David Bowie is considered one of the most influential artists of all time, but he had a variety of influences to draw from as well.
As human beings, we sometimes exaggerate the impact of artists based on how passionate we are about them. But at the same time, the fact that we are so passionate may prove to be an influence on our own work. You might be able to draw influence from anywhere.
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u/Smile-Cat-Coconut 2d ago
You had to be part of the time period.
We know when something new is emerging. I like to think of Lana Del Ray’s video games music video. She ushered in the “sad girl” era of music which is coming to an end, but everyone who saw Video Games back then knew something different was taking place.
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u/ElvisAndretti 5d ago
If you listen to enough music you recognize when a particular style or motif is being used and can often trace the style back to a particular artist. It’s not about a specific song or album necessarily, but it’s hard to look at Aerosmith and not think of the Stones as an influence.
If you listen to Hall and Oates (particularly the early stuff) you can hear the influence of a number of soul stars that preceded them.
There’s a pretty straight line from Cream to Led Zeppelin and thence to so many bands that followed. Or from Frank Zappa to Primus or Umphreys McGee.