The "Influence" Question(s).

A) I am a very big fan of Miles Davis, but nothing I do in my band would lead anyone to believe he's been an influence on me. Is it wrong for me to cite him as an influence?

B) People think I sound like Eminem. I don't like Eminem and have avoided his music whenever possible. Is it right for folks to refer to our music as having an Eminem "influence"?

C) I'm a gigantic fan of Del the Funky Homosapien, and people have said I sound kinda like him. Now am I allowed to refer to him as an influence, without the inevitable backlash?

D) My opinion is number 3, but I don't know as many musos as you all might, so I think your opinion is more important on this one.

Actually, the only time I've ever told a journalist or anyone else what our influences were is when they've ASKED ME, and then it's been met by some funny looks ('cause I say my actual "influences", as in people-I've-listened-to-whose-style-is-somewhat-present-within-my-own, rather than people-who-they-believe-I-sound-like, which amazingly match up very little).

Is this too weird away to avoid using the word "influence" but still making the point you want to make?

Positive Influence....you like and imitate
Negative Influence....you hate and avoid seeming to imitate
Genuine Influence....You reallly reallly like it
Fake Influence....you merely pretend to like it in order to get hipster cred.

When mark s, or whomever sez (rather vaguely/broadly) that "influence does not exist" they are declaiming that the word influence can be used to mean any one of the four above ideas, and therefore is too vague a word to use.

Harold Bloom to thread.

So Nick is correct technically.. But people don't usually speak that technically. e.g. "The CD cost me $15". Well, it technically cost $15.12, plus the cost of transportation, plus the time it took to purchase, plus the opportunity cost of not buying something else... But really ...

nickalicious, yr question answers itself: this word is dumb and should be stopped ? no good ever came of it

As in 'I heard a Coldplay record and was inspired to go to sleep' or 'listening to the Velvets inspired me to make dull, derivative drone rock'.

Example A)
Old way: Artist-X ldolizes Artist-Y, and thus Artist-Y is an influence on Artist-X.
New Way: Artist-Y is one of the roots of Artist-X

Example B)
Old way: Artist-X sounds similar to Artist-Y (even though Artist-X [claims] to not have heard Artist-Y) so is Artist-Y an influence
New Way: Artist-X sounds similar to Artist-Y. (NOTE THE PERIOD) Fans of Artist-Y might like Artist-X

It clearly establishes a useful/fruitful connection between the two artists while completely avoiding the use of the word "influence".

I suspect the IDNE crowd feel annoyed at the "Artist X sounds like Artist Y thus influence is in effect" idea because they hear one of the following suppositions being made:
a) "Influence" implies some sort of hierarchy. That Artist Y is automaticallu better than Artist X. (I'd call this the George Starostin Fallacy, but that would be snide.)
b) "Influence" implies that Artist Y has some magickal control over Artist X. This is of course, absurd.
c) [I have no idea. Ask mark s what c is.]
c)

But in critical terms rejecting the idea of "influence" doesn't seem to me helpful. Surely no-one would deny that had Charlie Parker died aged 14 subsequent jazz saxophonists would have sounded different. So he was influential. And I think you can say reasonably subtle and insightful things by tracing these influences. For example, when Martin Williams writes that Coltrane absorbed Parker's harmonic innovations but - unlike Coleman or Dolphy - not his rhythmic innovations, that clarifies something that had been troubling me about Coltrane but that I hadn't completely worked through.

elementes all confused up inside it: "i want to sound like person x" with "i want to be admired the way i admire person x" with "person x started this quite interesting idea but bolloxed it up: i shall show the world what to do with it"

(williams's argt only becomes a useful claim at the point where he starts defining in detail what he means: anything prior to that is just throatclearing)

I dunno.

Yes

Actually, I was always really pissed at Morrissey for telling others to be original when he himself stole lines from playwright Shelagh Delaney. Then someone pointed out that he "acknowledged" her when he put her on an album cover. So she's obviously an influence on him...or maybe he just stole her shit...or maybe he initiated incest with her on an astral plane....

I dunno. But every musical act sounds like other musical acts, except f'ed-up experimental free techno that sounds like rusty gates fornicating. Are fornicating rusty gates, then, an influence? Hell, yeah!

I mentioned Williams because I've been re-reading "The Jazz Tradition". Williams's approach is basically to identify what the great jazz innovators borrowed, partly as a first step to clarifying what is original in their work. In other words, it's a book-length study of influence. The quality of Williams's criticism completely validates this approach.

Obviously it only works because Williams has such a deep knowledge of the music, and a great ear. He goes beyond who influenced (say) Coltrane to exactly HOW they influenced Coltrane, what elements of their style he absorbed, or failed to absorb or deliberately rejected. He also looks at players whose influence we might expect to hear in Coltrane but surprisingly do not (including, btw, Dexter Gordon). As it happens he's not very keen on Coltrane and no doubt will irritate Coltrane fans but his comparison of Coltrane to Dolphy (to Coltrane's detriment) is brilliant criticism even if you disagree with it.

One of the reasons his approach works so well is because you can't identify what is original if you can't identify what is not. W is brilliant at demonstrating that innovations routinely credited to particular musicians were not their's at all - not with the intention of debunking reputations, but so that he can more scrupulously identify the real nature of an artist's originality.

Influence = we respect our elders.

These are the extremes. Influence, like most words, can't work alone. Just cos it's misused don't make it useless.

• Time Does Not Exist. Any evidence to the contrary is a hallucination.
  
• Any two Records cannot be even remotely similar because this would imply the earlier record "had an effect" on the later. Any evidence to the contrary is a sign of pretention.
  
• Britpop wouldn't/couldn't exist at all. Because Britpop's foundation (60's pop) would be inaccessible for plunder. Artists steal from those who inspire them. And the be inspired is nearly the same as being infl**nc*d. In a Non-Infl**nc*d Cosmology Britpop cannot exist because it would not be able to be "based on" ealier music.
  
• Same with every other genre and subgenre. It would be a universe where nothing artistic can be affected by anything else artistic.
  

Influence = we respect our elders.
Wellll, its a bit more complex than that, but that seems to be the core here. Or maybe we feel "compelled" to respect our elders?

These are the extremes. Influence, like most words, can't work alone. Just cos it's misused don't make it useless.
Or just because the word is too broad doesn't make NOT...EXIST.

my problem with the word is that a tremendous amount of non-thinking operates around it: if you actually put it under pressure a bit some of that non-thinking dissipates — you don't but ideas under pressue by saying "there's nothing wrong with them that a bit of fudging can't solve"

non-thinking is hardly a problem with martin williams: perhaps that's because his book could just as well (from your own description) be described as "things which are wrong with the theory of influence"

if you genuinely care about this word, treat it with respect and dread!! fight it and fuck it!! otherwise it is just throwaway gibberish (which therefore deserves to be thrown away)

to dick around

Hey, try to remember what words such as 'genuinely' and 'sorcerous' mean if you don't want complications when the pedants turn up. (I'm assuming you're doing literature here, and not just chatting.)

=> imagine how this power is actually flowing and what its purpose and costs may be

The word sounds like 'inflow', not 'outflow'. There is a reason why this is so.