Influence: a category error?

Sometimes comparison can be influence. A lot of the time, it is not. This is what many forget.

― Nathalie, Sunday, 21 April 2002 00:00 (11 years ago) Permalink

infinite as adj = another cat.err.

― mark s, Sunday, 21 April 2002 00:00 (11 years ago) Permalink

On beefheart thread, mark cited greil m saying that the clash were influenced by TMR, and, as i recall, a clash member (Strummer?) said something like 'I've been listening to this album for years'.

But I've never enjoyed the Clash and i can't see the influence of TMR on it.

I think beefheart has been inspiring because his music is unique and any band would I'm sure love to make music with that quality but surely a band/individual will be influenced by everything that they hear.

― Julio Desouza, Sunday, 21 April 2002 00:00 (11 years ago) Permalink

I just looked at the last sentence i wrote. It reminded me of a matthew shipp interview i read where he said (when asked abt Cecil T's influence) that he tried to shut it out (though of course he liked him etc..), that he hadn't listened to him in twenty years (details are a bit fuzzy).

I wondered how he could do that (shut it out, that is)?

― Julio Desouza, Sunday, 21 April 2002 00:00 (11 years ago) Permalink

"influenced by everything that they hear" = the word is basically useless

cf: "i use the word 'red' to mean every colour, visible or invisible"

― mark s, Sunday, 21 April 2002 00:00 (11 years ago) Permalink

Well, let's take a better example.

Derek bailey's guitar playing. Mark, don't you think his playing has given players such as S. Jaworzyn, Masayuki Takayanagi, Chadbourne, starting points when they tried to develop their own way of improvising on the guitar.

''"influenced by everything that they hear" = the word is basically useless cf: "i use the word 'red' to mean every colour, visible or invisible"''

I take your point abt my previous post but there are certain things you can trace.

― Julio Desouza, Sunday, 21 April 2002 00:00 (11 years ago) Permalink

Right, Mark, you lazy man. You've heard some things and kinds of things more than others, haven't you?

― Josh, Sunday, 21 April 2002 00:00 (11 years ago) Permalink

I've seen more of some colors than others.

― Sterling Clover, Sunday, 21 April 2002 00:00 (11 years ago) Permalink

I expect so Josh: it's hard to say. Maybe two things that sound alike are different: how d'you compare them? Maybe you just think they sound alike because you did the same sequence of things to queue them up.

― mark s, Sunday, 21 April 2002 00:00 (11 years ago) Permalink

Sinker: with your ears and your brain?

― Sterling Clover, Sunday, 21 April 2002 00:00 (11 years ago) Permalink

I think Mark S's posts are most influenced by:

a) Spicy Beef Jerky snacks

b) Cough Syrup

c) Airplane Glue

d) Other ____________

― Alex in SF, Tuesday, 23 April 2002 00:00 (11 years ago) Permalink

when you compare two objects, you can put them side by side: you can never do this with sound... hence the mechanism of "queuing up the experience" has undue influence??

― mark s, Tuesday, 23 April 2002 00:00 (11 years ago) Permalink

I fail to comprehend why comparing the influence of something visual is any different than something aural. You can't actually look at two things at EXACTLY the same time either--inevitably your attention would have to be focused on one or the other at any given moment.

― Alex in SF, Tuesday, 23 April 2002 00:00 (11 years ago) Permalink

are sensory memories just interchangeable? that seems a big leap... a large part of "classical" music analysis is visual rather than aural (eg you compare the scores). When I'm checking whether a feature in Cr*fts has scanned properly, I can do a word by word using my fingers: yes, an element of memory, and yes the inability to see two things at once, intervenes... but surely there is no equivalent for music (well, yes, there's score reading, or matching of sonic trace or the ones and zeros in the soundbyte: but these are essentially visual not aural processes...)

what i'm getting at here is that influence is far more a pre- emptive declaration on the part of the artist, than an empirical evaluation on the part of the listener (eg if we adopted el presidente's distinction on the "is courtney mad?" thread, his hard-and-fast distinction between the work and the media storm, then "influence" belongs to the media-storm NOT the work)

for what it's worth, i don't believe MY position on "influence", but i don't really understand everyone else's: what the word means seems to slip around all over the place... it's way too big and general.

Part of my problem: If someone asked me who *I* was "influenced" by I have no idea what I'm supposed to be saying. Who do I think I read like? Who defines the area I think I'm working in? Whose work am I continuing? Whose work am I challenging? Whose little phrases do I like to steal? Who do I want to fight? Who do I want to fuck? Who do I want to schmooze? D'you mean conscious or unconscious influence?

I like the idea that it's a vector for a necessary argument with the reader/listener: I say "I'm influenced by x", my reader says "No, you're influenced by y" and out of that dissonance comes the actual valuable bit of what I do. (=> any case where musician and listener AGREE on influence = music of no worth...?)

― mark s, Tuesday, 23 April 2002 00:00 (11 years ago) Permalink

I definitely agree that influence is a slippery elusive term. On the one hand the subjective listener based model should (as always) be the only one that matters, but on the other hand the listener can't be sure that this is the result of "real" influence from artist to artist or simply a coincidence. The "influenced" artist may have never heard "influencing" artist. The artist model is also suspect, because if the listener is incapable of hearing the "influence" does who the artist says he is influenced by really matter? I think the argument is necessary and I can't see attaching much weight to either point of except for the sake of arguing (which is all the fun).

I do think this critical complication applies to all art, or anything which was created with an audience in mind, be it visual, aural, sensual, whatever. Interesting question raised by Mark's post: Is direct copying (or scanning) with a machine influence?

― Alex in SF, Tuesday, 23 April 2002 00:00 (11 years ago) Permalink

I originally posted this on the "35-minute album" thread, but it probably fits in better here, so:

Similarity (however narrowly or broadly construed) is a necessary but not sufficient condition of "influence". "Influence" can be defined as relationship between two artists, X and Y, such that "X influenced Y", if two conditions are satisfied: (1) Y is similar to X and vice versa (similarity being commutative), and (2) X predates Y and some plausible chain of events can be postulated such that Y was aware of X (or of another artist, Z, who was aware of X, or of a chain leading back to X). Without the second condition, "influence" cannot be said to have occurred. For instance, let us say that anthropologists discover a tribe of pygmies who have had no contact whatsoever with any person outside of their tribe for the past 50 years, and let us further say that in the culture of this tribe there is a form of music which sounds practically identical to Barry Manilow's second album. Would anyone dare to say that the pygmy music was "influenced" by Barry Manilow? Of course not. Therefore, similarity is not sufficient condition for "influence".

The preceding paragraph is only an attempt to define what critics generally mean when they use the term "influence". It should not be interpreted as a defense of the usefulness or meaningfulness of said term. I think both conditions of the definition are vulnerable to attack. Regarding condition 1: isn't it possible for X to be influenced by Y, even if X and Y are not similar? For instance, perhaps a leftist punk band could have been influenced by the vapidity of Britney Spear's latest album to release something diametrically opposed to it. Regarding condition 2: isn't this notion of a "chain" of influencing events often unproveable, and therefore problematic. Furthermore, since it is exterior to the content of the music itself, shouldn't it be dismissed as the province of psychologists or biographers, and not fit for the critic's attention?

― o. nate, Thursday, 25 April 2002 00:00 (11 years ago) Permalink