That came a bit later (4th or 5th album?) and was quite hamfisted IMO. But yeah, I guess there’s a jazz influence even if it’s pretty elementary.
I was thinking earlier that Tangerine Dream are the Led Zep of electronic music, if we’re going to be silly, mostly because of their adoration by stoners everywhere.
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To be fair though Tangerine Dream were really experimental, like Zeit was one of the first ambient albums and nothing quite sounds like it still. Led Zep were innovators in having sex with underaged girls and that’s it.
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Tony Iommi was hugely influenced by Django Reinhardt, particularly after he lost his fingers.
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This is very true - a lot of the TD adoration seems to have come with their eighties albums, which are less interesting.
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Yeah, but you’re mixing up Iommi being influenced by a similarly injured guitarist and the band having jazz influence in their music. They did, but it didn’t show up until the 4th album (and Vol. 4 is still pretty straight forward), and hit fully on the 5th with songs like A National Acrobat.
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Fair point.
Are you serious? Do you really stop listening to people, the minute they say something, that doesn’t jive with your own views?
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I vote for Alan Vega of Suicide as the “Dylan”
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If we don’t look at success or fame, Alan Vega is very good choice. Great songwriter, very singular style and immediately recognizable.
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I went a step further and didn’t even open the video because I knew it would bore me to tears.
If you mean interesting lyrics/songs and electronic music this is pretty close imo…
Not always, no.
But when an arrogant, smug white Western male starts making proclamations about the “universality” of a dead white Western male without a hint of self-awareness, I tune the eff out.
How could Beethoven even be universal when all of his compositions follow western music theory? It is a silly claim to make.
Something like country blues is a lot more “universal” as it combines influences from European, African and Native American musical tradition. And that’s still only 3 continents.
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Spookily, I was editing an Alan Vega album review and sourcing pictures of Suicide at the same time as flipping tabs to this post.
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Ok. I have nothing.
Just came here to post this.
First, quantify what you are trying to compare to Bob Dylan. It makes it easier to try and find parallels in the electronic music realm. If every comparison draws the response of “They didn’t have the reach, impact, or influence of Bob Dylan!!!” then what is the purpose of trying to answer this question?
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I’m wondering where Marshall Jefferson, Frankie Knuckles, Juan Atkins, Derrick May, etc. fit in to this argument? If we’re looking at the Beatles/Stones (not mentioned yet strangely)/Dylan as having successfully translated Black music to white audiences to much greater financial success, couldn’t we see the late 80s/early 90s as a kind of repeat of this pattern? Orbital, Plastikman, Prodigy, Aphex, all those Dutch and German hard techno guys doing the same thing?
The fact that Atkins, May, and others enjoyed overseas success (in terms of broad recognition) after this “appropriation” also really reminds me of how the great electric blues musicians (interestingly also often from Chicago or Detroit) had second acts touring Europe in the later 60s and beyond.
In other words, I think it should be stressed that, while to some degree everyone “steals” from everyone else–and that this doesn’t foreclose on genuine artistic accomplishment–the group of musicians who seem to benefit least from this are Black musicians, who would probably have preferred to have had the audiences their white counterparts did over being reverently name-checked by those artists in interviews…
But that also doesn’t diminish the sincerity of Keith Richards’ or John Lennon’s appreciation for Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters, or for that matter Ritchie Hawlin’s or RDJ’s for May and Atkins. Since “history” has entered the conversation, though, we should probably acknowledge that the lineage doesn’t just go Kraftwerk --> New Order --> Prodigy/Aphex/whatever (not accusing anyone specifically here of doing that).
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Vintage musicians just sound better
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This is a bit of a hot take, but I’m not sure if I would consider house and techno purely black forms of music. The early innovators of house and techno were heavily influenced by Kraftwerk, New Order, Yellow Magic Orchestra etc. as well as disco, funk and RnB, so if you take those styles as purely black music you could argue that they took what was a white music style and made it their own. I don’t think this kind of black / white divide really exists in electronic music, at least not to the extent that it exist in blues and rock and roll. Everything happened so fast, and everyone was so influenced by each other that no one can really take the credit for truly coming up with anything on their own, or take ownership of any style of electronic music.
And I kind of disagree that black musicians have benefitted the least from electronic music. Look at the music charts now, they’re dominated by black musicians making electronic music.
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