Impossible

I wanted my first post to be about what has been the most influential album in my life, Are You Experienced? However, as I started looking at other albums from 1967 to have something to compare to, I quickly became aware that it is impossible to talk about just that one album. I've always thought that the music I listen to now (and I'm not talking about what is on the radio, more on that in a later post) could be traced back to Hendrix, or The Beatles, or Bob Dylan. I have not changed my mind about that. What I have changed my mind about is that you can't talk about any one of these artists without the others.

Looking through my collection of 60's music I find The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, The Beach Boys and Cream, to name a few. What is not included is The Velvet Underground. So I took a quick listen. What I found was that  I probably didn't even need to listen to this band to talk about them. Their sound is already so in everything else I listen to. Lou Reed sounds like Bob Dylan to me on tracks like "Heroin" and "There She Goes Again". The feedback and distortion sounds are staples of Hendrix's playing.

Usually when I am asked the question "what does that band sound like?" I usually respond by comparing the band in question to another band. But perhaps a better, albeit more vague response, is "They sound like music." Musicians today have an entire catalog of musical history to pull from. Everyone sounds like someone else because they are all inspired by what is going on around them and what went on years before them. Its impossible to talk about one artist if they all draw from each other. It is impossible to talk about a single artist without also talking about the context in which their art was created.