the pernicious and silly term "influence"

This also introduces the necessary element of chance. Eg. you invite this really cool woman you work with to the party but her husband ends up dominating the event (translates as: bands who say they take their cues from X but really miss what was good about X and instead sound like all the baggage * surrounding* X)

Badly.

Yeah. If I was a musician (watch out, world!) i'd have to say my first and foremost influence would be all of y'all on ILM, obv.

I think now's the time that somebody brings up bootlegs in this discussion, but I'm not the man to do it.

I find myself in some agreement with Mark S's deliberately perverse and counter-intuitive (and thus characteristic) rejection of Influence. Why? (I am trying to outline Mark S's reasons here, by way of mine.)

1/ It's a cliche - it makes thought too easy, stops us thinking what we mean, etc - OK.

2/ More specifically, it's too passive: as though creativity etc is done by people who are vessels for something else. ie: influence removes, or diminishes agency. Sometimes that's a good thing to do, but I think Mark S suspects that we need a more dynamic (+ agential?) model of cultural connection.

More:

A/ Cultural instances echo one another. Some of this is very deliberate - some of it may be accidental. Maybe that matters, maybe not.

B/ Men and women make culture, but not in conditions of their own choosing. Could the second half of that sentence summarize why we *can't* just get rid of Influence-talk?

C/ Culture can be a matter of picking things up and transforming them, and hence trying to rewrite tradition. 'Influence' is the wrong word for that (unless understood in reverse).

D/ David Q makes records that sound to me, at different (and same) points, like David Byrne, Kurt Cobain, Elvis Costello and Mike Flowers. Presumably 'Influence' is the wrong word for *that*.

E/ Search and Destroy: THE CANTOS

But no no no authorial intention no. Artists are the last people to ask about what influenced them, all they want to talk about is what they wish they sounded like, which is another matter entirely.

Is this stance compatible with a music (popular music in all its guises, I mean) so focused on the star, the celebrity and the personality? Well, I don't want to say it's incompatible -- we've all got the freedom to approach music however the fuck we want, thank you. Maybe what I want to ask is that when not just music but musicians as well are a commodity, do issues concerning motivations, influences and intentions get necessarily get pushed to the forefront?

I love hearing strands and sounds and bits of stuff recombined and replicated from song to song. Calling those influence though seems a huge stretch and takes criticism into a realm I find very suspect and largely uninteresting, precisely because it is so artist rather than art based.

Ezra Pound invents hiphop (Canto VII, 1930)

yes yes of course the problem is that several rival meanings for the word are being used here, and attached to them radically difft deep assumptions => i still don't believe that we couldn't just do without it (eg that we can find a different — routinely used — word to replace it in ALL contexts, and that the ambiguity lost has no useful function)

INTERVIEWER: Who are your influences?
BAND SPOKESMAN: Your question is meaningless, lackey!!
I: OK oh grate one, what are your beliefs?
BS: Killing Joke and Karen Carpenter. AND THAT'S IT!!

This is a major improvement.

Honour the Fire!

Perhaps that's too easy, but in certain cases, perhaps, also not wide of the mark? One problem I have with the use of the term "influence" is that it has the active work being done by the wrong party. Surely, the one "being influenced" is doing the active work, not the thing (ie., record) that is putatively doing the "influencing". Rather than say, "Band X was influenced by classic album Y", why not say, "Band X sensitively and perceptively extracted certain aspects of classic album Y and then combined them in new and exciting ways with other extracts, original ideas, etc., to form new album Z". Records by themselves can't "influence" anybody or doing anything else for that matter - they just sit there on the shelf until someone takes them down and *listens* to them (listening being another active behavior frequently mistaken for passivity).

"Usually the only time bands really talk about their influences is when they're being interviewed."

Usually the only time bands really talk is when they're being interviewed.

I was broadly in agreement with Alex with respect to abandoning the idea of an 'artist based' concept of music, but wonder if he can elaborate on this bit (hopefully the Killing Joke mention will summon him)

"I love hearing strands and sounds and bits of stuff recombined and replicated from song to song"

What are the nature of the 'strands' that you like to hear, and how can a musical 'movement' be described without resorting to influence? (It's not that I think theres a problem, I'm just not very bright)

I think influence can be shown musicologically. This rhythm comes from here, this chord progression comes from here, etc.

lots of musicians have made music under the influence

Old ILX: not just a bunch of people going "num num num" and talking about the Manics

"Influence" as a term of musical psychology, is indeed useless. However, "influence" as a term of musical history, is one of the tools by which the musical historian gives meaning to an otherwise unrelated series of notes.

the musical historian should choose a less silly word

ugh i am embarked on a project which is requiring me to plough through 20 million extracts all using this stupid word at its worst and laziest, it is such a fucking tell

like they used to say nanotechnology would turn everything into featureless grey goo

not only is influence a good word but we should replace the word art with the word effluence

I was actually thinking about this subject this morning. As someone who writes songs, the influences I think of as most significant have more to do with methods of working. There was an appeal for me in how some people went about creating a body of work. Influences directly affecting musical materials seem to be hazier, more general, more subconscious.

A prosaic interpretation of the word might be: band A liked band B, tried to write something a bit like them, then probably came up with something interesting in a different way, or if they didn't we wouldn't be talking about band A.

Mark S's crusade against 'influence' has been going on at least 20 years, as this thread shows. I'm slightly amused and touched to be reminded of it, though ultimately I'm now not especially convinced by it; at least not by recent restatements of the cause.

3 notes:

1: FWIW I am quite sympathetic to deliberate attempts to use particular words less, as an intellectual exercise to sharpen thought. (I said this above, 20 years ago.) This wouldn't make 'influence' a special case, though. All kinds of words could be affected.

2: as far as I know, the discussion has talked surprisingly little about the etymology, which presumably implies liquid and 'inflow'. A tributary influences a river, and vice versa? Is this a good metaphor for human action or not? Mark S says not, ever. I think: more likely it sometimes has been (it seems likely that a great many etymologies originally encoded something suggestive, rather than inaccurate), but has also been over-extended and this has obscured the most useful instances.

Not very helpfully for my purposes, discussions of this also always talk about 'the general sense ‘an influx, flowing matter’, also specifically (in astrology) ‘the flowing in of ethereal fluid (affecting human destiny)’'.

Here it is worth noting the parallel term 'inspiration' which clearly derives from something 'receiving a divine breath'. That breath might roughly resemble the 'ethereal fluid''.

3: related, it still seems to me (cf 2002 post) that thought around this is clouded by a conflation of what, in dull words, I may as well call 'conscious' and 'unconscious' 'influence'. This would be the distinction between eg:

"yes, on this record we tried to sound like The Ramones"

and

"without really knowing it, this late 1970s band found their sound shaped by the other music and recording techniques of the period".

It still seems to me that the latter is closer to the original sense, as in the non-conscious flow of an enveloping force (cf water) which has effects on phenomena it encounters.

Actually I add a 4th note:

4: Mark S, still furious at 'influence' after all these years, alleges that it is a piece of magical hand-waving. This kind of allegation may risk becoming what it describes, and I am not especially convinced that 'influence', specifically, is a good candidate for this category. However, again, there is, to my mind, a hint of transferrable truth in what he says, in that *some* words do indeed function like this. A major instance would be 'Modernism' (more clearly, I think, than mere 'Modern') - I have probably never seen such a magical, wish-fulfilling philosopher's stone of a word.

"people have a private insight into their own creative process; if they describe something as influence, i trust they are referring to something concrete they feel"

i think this is true and i like these types of story -- i also think they shd use other words = remain at the level of the concrete specifics of what they feel (interesting! important! sometimes!) and not just let them be smooshed up as "influence" into a pigpile of other stories without specificity (which is why we tend not to listen to them)

Influence has built-in vagueness. For example, in a chess game an unusually early advanced piece may have an influence over the entire board that both players need to take account throughout the game, but it would be tedious and impossible to put this into exact words. And it remains a (useful) shorthand term.

(In that context)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tcwz8-EfFYE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgDhlmf91pg

Jerry Lewis, The King of Comedy: "A man said--listen to me...listen to me--a man said something very profound some years ago, which I later originated."

Anticipatory Plagiarists to thread!

lolling at the image of thousands of yuppie apartments with poster prints of this in their entryway

https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/N~oAAOSwvxBd9YIA/s-l1600.jpg

Make It Progresso or Frigid People Really Make It

I think I feel about 'interesting' the way mark does about 'influence'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLdKU4JCYqg

Revolver: Both 'Roxanne' and 'Can't Stand Losing You' feature another Police hallmark: pounding out the choruses and smoothing out the verses, which Nirvana and a lot of nineties band copied.

Sting: Yes, as a matter of fact, we were trying to influence Nirvana. That was the whole idea. I said, 'I'm going to influence this band in Seattle. I know the members are only about seven years old at the moment, but still..."

sting gets it

The best comeback of his career.

influence aside, does Revolver really think the Police invented quiet/loud?

franz josef haydn said, 'i know the members are only about minus two hundred years old at the moment..."

Reminds me of a trope Marcello Carlin often uses in his writing: "Meanwhile, in East Wickham, a nine-year old Cathy Bush was listening carefully to this album..."; but he may be right! And it's certainly not absurd to think that any of Nirvana would have heard "Roxanne" or "Message in a Bottle" at 11 or 12?

It's a lot more interesting to consider the Police in relation to Nirvana than talking about "More Than a Feeling" again.

Sting actually made me laugh.

he gets it!

Clearly this old nursery rhyme is the OG quiet/loud song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fovP6lAUVP0

Sting's statement is fine and Mark S's enjoyment is agreeable, but Sting's statement does not provide any disproof whatever of the phenomenon of 'influence'.

I'd be very doubtful really that Nirvana were 'copying' The Police.

But if they were, then does the 'copy' concept (which is fine) contradict the 'influence' concept?

To me, not really.

As I've probably said all along - all these things exist and coexist, they're all fine, but in critical discourse it's better to use them thoughtfully, precisely and not excessively.

what else should I be
Synchronicity
what else should I say
every breath you take

Both 'Roxanne' and 'Can't Stand Losing You'

Those songs aren’t even really quiet-loud, they’re more slow-fast… what a bizarre thing to say that Nirvana “copied” a formula from them.

agree with both posts.

"There's a guy dropping out of UMass right now who's going to hear this record, form a band, and inspire a Seattle seven-year-old to eventually play quiet-loud-quiet"

It also reminds me of an old interview with Fellini:

"Maestro, why did you have the characters in Satyricon do such-and-such?"

"I did it so that you would ask me why!"

fellini gets it

Come to think of it, there is a strong guitar chorus effect on "Come as You Are," a direct line from Andy Summers to Kurt Cobain. And Grohl came up with the name for Foo Fighters by way of the similarly anonymous/alliterative Klark Kent, plus Copeland inducted them into the rock and roll hall of fame. No Police, maybe no "Come as You Are," and possible no Foo Fighters (at least by that name). It's science.

Speaking of John Watson, there is an amusing exchange at the beginning of The Sign of Four, where Holmes is being insufferably pompous and Watson is entirely correct. Holmes' response is pathetic:

“There is no great mystery in this matter,” he said, taking the cup of tea which I had poured out for him; “the facts appear to admit of only one explanation.”
“What! you have solved it already?”
....
"I have just found, on consulting the back files of the Times, that Major Sholto, of Upper Norwood, late of the Thirty-fourth Bombay Infantry, died upon the twenty-eighth of April, 1882.”
“I may be very obtuse, Holmes, but I fail to see what this suggests.”
“No? You surprise me. Look at it in this way, then. Captain Morstan disappears. The only person in London whom he could have visited is Major Sholto. Major Sholto denies having heard that he was in London. Four years later Sholto dies. Within a week of his death Captain Morstan’s daughter receives a valuable present, which is repeated from year to year and now culminates in a letter which describes her as a wronged woman. What wrong can it refer to except this deprivation of her father? And why should the presents begin immediately after Sholto’s death unless it is that Sholto‘s heir knows something of the mystery and desires to make compensation? Have you any alternative theory which will meet the facts?”
“But what a strange compensation! And how strangely made! Why, too, should he write a letter now, rather than six years ago? Again, the letter speaks of giving her justice. What justice can she have? It is too much to suppose that her father is still alive. There is no other injustice in her case that you know of.”
“There are difficulties; there are certainly difficulties,” said Sherlock Holmes pensively;

Damn straight there are difficulties, and Watson is entirely correct to point out that Holmes is overreaching by saying he'd pretty much cleared up the mystery, in fact the mysterious bit of the mystery remains entirely. His response really is very silly, and Watson is correct to point out elsewhere Holmes' vanity.

There's also this interesting exchange at the beginning of A Case of Identity

“My dear fellow.” said Sherlock Holmes as we sat on either side of the fire in his lodgings at Baker Street, “life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generation, and leading to the most outre results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable. “

“And yet I am not convinced of it,” I answered. “The cases which come to light in the papers are, as a rule, bald enough, and vulgar enough. We have in our police reports realism pushed to its extreme limits, and yet the result is, it must be confessed, neither fascinating nor artistic.”

Holmes here is in an enjoyably baroque and fantastical strain, and suggests he does see something magical in it all - the *outre results* of life. Watson, who is often accused of romanticism by Holmes, is enjoyably brusque in response, and again there's a lot to be said for his view.

I mentioned RLS's New Arabian Nights upthread and I really should emphasise how much of an influence they had on literary London (like Sherlock Holmes they were serialised in a London periodical). They are well worth reading. Conan Doyle was a big fan - The Pavilion on the Links (seven years before A Study in Scarlet) was one of his favourite short stories. They set the template for anything being possible in London, and the visits 'low disreputable corners and suburbia', ie beyond Camberwell. Both Machen (in his very bad, very good The Three Impostors) and Conan Doyle take its geography and cadences. The idea that the stories that emanate from the commonplace are more fantastical than those that emanate from the upper classes is here too.

fuckit rong thread.

Sounds like it fits to me!

i was actually thinking as i wrote it 'mustn't use the term influence or mark s will be after me'.

fwiw, i'm of mark's view in this extremely enjoyable thread. clearly influence can be used to describe something, a relationship, but it's not very clear about that relationship - i liked 'WHO DO YOU BELIEVE IN' far better. or the old NME or the idea of the your unofficial curriculum (I think there's even a thread). i mean i use influence a lot obv, but think it probably skates over more than it reveals, might even be considered lazy.

I am now questioning the use of "influence" everywhere I encounter it, and for that I can thank mark s., you've really had a major--ah, never mind.

“he put the ‘fluence ‘pon me”

Q: WHO DO YOU BELIEVE IN?

a: mark s

left a mark, you might say