Been There, Heard That

There are a lot of new music styles out there that are pretty novel. There is also a bit of music history that was written well before anyone really took notice. Some catalogs were originally thought to defy everything written before it, but -it turns out- was actually just something already in the air.
While we now know that punk actually started in Seattle in 1965 with The Sonics' Here Are the Sonics LP,

…and later formalized in Detroit through MC5 and The Stooges in 1968,

…many don't know speed metal actually began in Belgium, thanks to the band Blast in 1973, when they released their 7 inch single "Damned Flame" / "Hope" (on Majestic Records).

The German krautrock band Can released an awesome post-punk/no-wave song on 1969's Monster Movie, which predated post-punk and no-wave by years.

Though it's now thought to be common knowledge, many industrial music-heads still don't know that the work of Nurse With Wound was clearly established by the French school of musique concrète, and pioneered by the likes of composers Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry.

Would it surprise fans of early-Coil, and early-Current 93 that Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page already set the groundwork for something very similar in 1973 as the soundtrack for Kenneth Anger's short film Lucifer Rising?

Everyone in the power electronics / harsh noise wall genre might throw themselves into a fit after discovering Frank Zappa did it first on The Mothers of Invention's 1970 LP, Weasels Ripped My Flesh.

The blueprints for synthpop were laid down by an American jazz pianist a decade before it took off in the UK. A composer with the unfortunate name of Dick Hyman wrote tracks like "The Moog and Me" on his 1969 classic LP The Electric Eclectics Of Dick Hyman (released on Command Records).

It is believed that rap music began by toasting at parties in the late 70s Bronx borough of New York City, but the fact is that it probably began way before that, and the first raps on record were across the river in Harlem on the Douglas Poetry label in 1970 with The Last Poets' self-titled release.

Now, don't get discouraged by this history lesson. I'm not trying to say that there is nothing original out there, it's just that -if you are being creative- you may have to remember what Isaac Newton once said: "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." Don't let all this stop you. Just start climbing.

A. Souto, 2017

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