it may be somewhere in all this text, but its easier to simply ask: is there a rough weight assigned to primary and secondary influence in the criteria? or is it almost all primary influence that counts? i'm just curious. i'm not asking for a math equation or something, just a rough estimate of how much secondary influence matters.

Well, the way I've done it in the past is there are two different achievements being weighed, even though it's for the same thing in of itself. What I mean is, an innovator gets ALL of the primary credit for something they created. The secondary influence is a seperate thing entirely, even though it's the same innovation they're spreading. Think of funk. James Brown gets the entire primary credit for his innovation. There's nothing "left over" because he was the guy who came up with it. How big that innovation became determines how much it's ultimately worth, which clearly varies from innovation to innovation. But with something like funk the likes of Dyke & Blazers, Sly & The Family Stone, P-Funk, even Lee Dorsey, a whole bunch of others, each get some secondary influence credit for spreading it further. Among those artists you'd have splits based on who hit with it next, who hit with it biggest and who hit with it most, giving that artist or artists the majority of the secondary influence credit with the rest being dished out in small doses. Any new facets added to it along the way would be counted as additional primary influence starting points, but for a smaller subsection of the original primary influence (meaning not as big as the first). Think of it like a family tree, there's the roots and trunk then lots and lots of branches to it plus seedlings being dropped along the way that create new trees, but the forest starts with a single tree which is the most important thing.

It sounds confusing, but you get the hang of it quickly.

Well, that works--sort of--when you're talking about a very specific technical innovation, such as the first use of sitar on a rock record, or the first use of backward sounds. As you say, just listen to every record ever released (hope you don't have to, like, hold down a job or sleep), make sure you have the correct release dates, and, as ClashWho points out, ignore the possibility that someone did it in a live concert setting first.

But when you're talking about things like style, it just doesn't work. Styles don't spring full blown from the head of Zeus; they evolve. (Contrary to the implication your last post made, Sly & The Family Stone and Parliament-Funkadelic didn't spend their entire careers making James Brown soundalikes. James Brown may have invented funk, but funk changed as these other artists built on what he did.) Let's take, for example, Janet Jackson, to whom you were assigning a lot of primary influence for "the merger of hip-hop beats to melodic R&B". How do you objectively define what a hip-hop beat is and what "melodic R&B" is? Because I'd be willing to bet a lot of money that if you pick the record where you think Janet first did that, I can find a record released earlier which reasonably meets that definition. The problem is that if we could really agree on the first record which did that, it would end up being something pretty inconsequential. Because it's not just what you do; it's the way you do it that matters.

Which is why, yes, most credit for influence goes to artists who were very popular. That's not double-counting; that's acknowledging that people are influenced by what they hear. And the fact is that there will always be artists with tons of popularity but relatively little influence (hello, Sir Elton) and artists whose influence greatly transcends their limited popularity (Velvet Underground, Afrika Bambaataa).

You have Elvis Presley as the most influential rock artist of all time, even ahead of The Beatles. But I still haven't heard you mention one specific, particular thing that Elvis did which had never been done before. And I'm not sure there is any such thing. But clearly he is, if not the most influential rock artist, certainly no lower than second. I think if we followed your rules exactly as you lay them out, Elvis wouldn't be anywhere near the top, and the number one artist would be someone we've probably barely heard of, because they happened to make the first record ever with guitar, bass, and drums as the musical lineup, or something like that.

I know what you're saying and I agree to a certain extent. But we're trying to come up with something that is doable and accurate and not simply someone's impressions of what matters and where the influence should be credited. So for something that has a definite starting point that we can find it would be foolish to NOT assign the lion's share of the influence for it, because it's the invention itself that added an entirely new element to the game. But as I've repeatedly stated in the past, there's not THAT much innovation out of thin air and so you're left with a shitload of secondary influence.

Maybe I didn't explain it well, but basically the point is there's really only going to be a few significant primary influence moments (the major innovations or new stylistic approaches), then a few smaller, more narrowly defined innovations, but then the overwhelming amount of influence as a whole will be secondary in nature. That's why if you look at the influence list I did, you see guys like Presley and the Stones, who have tons of secondary influence, doing so well. Yes, guys with essentially primary influence (Berry, Brown, VU, Bam, Johnny Otis) do extremely well, as they should for being innovators, but the biggest artists who spread the most things the widest will probably prevail. The thing is, no amount of secondary influence for a SINGLE thing will be worth more than the primary influence (innovation) of that SAME thing. That's probably the best way to put it.

With Funk, the variances that Sly and George Clinton brought to the table had considerable primary influence of their own, as I stated, but they're never going to be worth quite as much as James Brown's original funk prototype simply because it's where the whole funk shebang started. Meanwhile, in your other example, Elvis has a good deal of primary influence though (rockabilly, power ballads, electric bass solos - I'm looking, but haven't found an earlier example than his in rock, if I do, I'd change that), and obviously in terms of cultural influence he's off the charts. So yeah, primary influence is the single biggest achievement you can get for anything, but there's not always much of it to go around and so the secondary influence is what ultimately will wind up affecting the rankings the most overall and as you state, the more popular artists have the built-in ability to achieve that more than most. As long as nobody discounts the greater credit for primary influence and the original innovation.

OH... and one last good thing about this debate is with people suggesting it's impossible to have every recording and so forth, isn't that the goal of all this? These lists, this site, these conversations? To discover as much music as humanly possible, to hear it all and understand how it evolved and how it all ties together? I think of all the four criteria we have, the way influence is credited offers the most opportunity to actually discover things you otherwise wouldn't hear or even look into.

A bass solo is a bass solo. The fact that he did one with an electric bass is not any kind of innovation. Bass solos had been around for decades already by 1957. Just because technology brought about a new more conveniant style of the instrument does not make the first solo on that new style of bass any kind of innovation.

I assume Sampson agrees, but you're missing the Rain Man bit here. Sampson is reducing many kinds of influence into "primary" and "secondary," where the first time anything is done, no matter how mundane or inevitable, it gets "primary" credit, and then any further linear development from that point gets "secondary" credit which is worth less. However "secondary" credit in major areas can still be worth more than "primary" credit in areas like electric bass solos. The important part is that everything can be neatly put into two boxes, and then you just have to argue about degree of importance for each bit of "primary" influence.

It actually sounds like it works, it just isn't adequately descriptive for some folks including myself. I would use more and different words. I can even make them sound the same just for Sampson...

Innovation
Elaboration
Combination
Propagation

Edit: ...to the evils of the world...

ROFL.......we'll see if the "Rain Man" approves.

Time for Wopner.

Is the first electric guitar solo worth as much as the first electric bass solo?

How about the first rock record have hand claps? That's something that became a huge part of rock and roll.

The hand claps on "Hound Dog" by Elvis are annoying, but I don't know if there's anything earlier that has them.

As the biggest Elvis fan on this site, I have a hard time believing that power ballads didn't exist before him.

I wasn't sure how I felt about this. Then I wondered if the first drum solo on an electronic drumkit was a big deal, and decided it probably wasn't.

Backwards sounds, yes, since that's something you can only achieve in a recording studio. But the sitar? Who knows, maybe George Harrison saw someone else use one in a rock song at a concert he attended. Or maybe he heard about the initial version of "Heart Full of Soul" that wasn't released.



Feedback is an excellent example. For the sake of argument, let's assume that The Beatles' "I Feel Fine" really is the first example of guitar feedback on record. According to Sampson's policy, The Beatles would get primary influence for being the very first to incorporate guitar feedback into rock. But the truth is that guitar feedback was all over the London concert scene by the time The Beatles recorded "I Feel Fine".

I'd say that bass solo in You're So Square is just another thing that adds to Presley's standing as the baddest man that ever lived, but I don't see it as being THAT musically important or noteworthy.

Yes, there's no question about The Beatles' high musical impact in any case. I was just using "I Saw Him Standing There" as an example. I could just have easily have used a remake of a song written by a different artist.

I'm not sure I understand your response, but if I do understand, the bolded is the most important part of it. Songwriting is an aspect of musical impact, and to be concerned with any of the circumstances of other artists doing an artist's songs is splitting hairs, whether that circumstance is whether or not it's a remake, or how much later the other artists did those songs. Is that what you're saying?

Since Elvis has very high musical impact anyway, it wouldn't score significantly in proportion to his overall musical impact. The only question is whether it scores insignificantly or not at all. GnR was covering a song that he did, and that he made famous, but that he didn't write.

I'd say that's a musical impact moment for Elvis, because GnR did the song out of a love for the version that Elvis made world famous-- although like you said,it hardly even matters; his musical impact is huge already.