I had a dream this morning after I came back from dancing to ultra stark techno music all night, surrounded by a seam of bodies, and bathed in psychedlic lights. It involved swapping lists of innovative names, all written in green with felt pens which melted after the ink touched the paper. Someone was shouting in the background that it was not true, we were all wrong, and there is nothing but bodily impact to sound. The voice was that of James Brown, who then sat down and took a puff off his cigarette, while a line of occupied chairs carried on dreaming. WHOO!!

Trip-hop?

Weren't Portishead considered the front-runners of this mid-90's craze.

I can't help but feel that it's a consequence of getting older to be able to hear precedents to most music. Especially if you listen to a lot of it. When I was younger, something like Radiohead or Placebo (or Prolapse, Urusei Yatsura, Arab Strap etc) were completely unprecendented to me. It depends on what you mean by innovative. Has anyone ever really sounded like Arab Strap? Early Slipknot, Korn, RATM records blew a lot of people's minds at the time. I could happily put forward an argument saying that Korn's influence was so massive that people forget now that simply no-one did that in metal before Korn. Personally, I like them now, but I didn't at the time. I wouldn't ever seriously say they were that innovative, but in terms of did they blow a lot of people's minds - yes, yes they did. They also had precedents. You get older, you hear these precedents more easily.

Playing to the audience a bit more - does anyone else do what Philip Jeck does? What about Ground Zero? Fushitususha? Were Franco's TPOK jazz epoch-defining or just a great band? Alvo Noto? Has anyone really ever done what Oum Kalsoum does? Or Jacques Brél? I think if you want to hear innovation in music you will, but if you don't, it's not really that important.

I was thinking about him and this thread. Is he innovative? Do I care? Is he great? Very. Does anyone do what he does, the way he does it? Nope, even though others use similar ways of working and are excellent at what they do. Do I think Jeck cares about being innovative? Strongly doubt it.

Well, precisely. He'll never capture the world's imagination, and I can't agree more that it makes absolutely no difference to anything if he is or isn't innovative. But I don't think anyone else does it, and I wouldn't care if I was proved wrong.

I quite like a lot of music that has absolutely no decent reason to be listened to. As you know, I really like Gene, who are shit in almost every way, except the way in which they made tunes I like. Innovative is just an un-arguable and impossible category.

drum n bass? grime? dubstep? garage (2 step)?

To an extent, that's true. But I would consider Radiohead an innovator for the way they got their music to become popular, and not so much for a solely musical reason. They did a very strange turn-around, and as a massively popular rock band, I think that's where the innovation comes in. It has to do with perception as much as music.

That said, even their transition is not unprecedented, but it did change things. The effect is perhaps what we look at, and not even so much what the band is actually doing.

And I don't mean to defend Radiohead too much here. I like them, but I'm not saying they're genius or anything.

The answer is all in the records. Radiohead innovated nothing, I don't get why people seem to think they have. All this giving records away for free is a lot of bullshit, 'cause they have enough money not to need anyone buying them in the first place, what with all the revenue they generate with gigs and merchandise.

it's probably more to do with the age you heard it at that anything else, i mean when i was 18 or 20 i came across music that sounded like nothing i'd heard before much more frequently that i do now aged 29.
although, in the last 10 years i would say there hasn't been as much progression in music as there had been in previous decades. but then i don't know if it's realistic to expect things to keep progressing at the rate they had been since the 50s either.

But the point was that they ended up making more money off the record alone. Nine Inch Nails did the same thing, and still hit the charts (#13) with that album, regardless of merchandise. The innovation isn't in giving the music away, it's in dissecting profits.

Which I think is a moot point for anyone not already passing millions of records, but it pulled at the hair of major labels. It was innovative for pop music, which is still prone to innovation if it doesn't apply as much to submarkets.

A band whose music becomes popular is innovative?!
It has already been done before..

I can hear a lot of influences in Radiohead's music ( Magazine, The Smiths ), but nothing personnal.

I think this is a fair point. Innovation never stops, but it might not always be travelling at full pelt everywhere. I doubt that rock wll ever go through a similar period of development as the one it had between the mid 50s and mid 60s, when in less than ten years it progressed from Buddy Holly's That'll Be the Day to The Beatles' Tomorrow Never Knows.

Rock is a relatively old style now and so a large bulk of major innovation has moved into other younger styles that offer more scope for real invention. I think this is largely because styles such as Grime or whatever aren't fully formed yet. There's more room to play than there is within a style over half a century old that has already had its fair share of revolutions.

In that sense, Rock is like America or Europe. It'll always provide a sense of reassurance by being around in some form or another. It's just that we'll increasingly wonder why, and as such expect less and less from it as time goes on, safe in the knowledge that more interesting things are taking place elsewhere.

No, for the way they became popular.

Essentially, Sonic Youth didn't do anything new either, but they brought it out in a new way. If you base "innovation" on completely new ideas, then it becomes extremely limited. Intentionally working their way up the charts as a standard act, then turning around and pulling in ideas that were unconventional for popular music is innovative. Kid A was nothing new in a musical sense, but it was incorporated in a very new way, into popular pop/rock. Like most forms of innovation, it was simply a mixing of existing ideas.

The way "innovation" is defined in the original post is impractical, as I don't think I could find anything innovative period.

i was also going to say that swans might not have sounded to revolutionary if you'd heard beirut slump first, etc... it's all about context.

Drum & bass is derived from Jungle, and Jungle was pioneered by Fabio & Grooverider in the late 80's. Jungle was a hybrid of hardcore techno, ragga and dancehall.

The other three all have their roots in drum & bass or 80's house.

Although, drum & bass was a huge leap forward and is probably one of the evolutionary steps I mentioned earlier.

Another example was a busker I saw in Brighton just before xmas. He was playing a ukelele and was accompanied by a Gameboy and loads of effects. He went by the name of Jelly Ape and I'd never heard anything like it before.

I am beginning to see that there has been some innovation in the last decade or so, although considering the number of bands and artists around and the relative ease of getting their music to the masses, it seems to be pretty limited.

I'd like to thank all those who took the time to make recommendations.

Thanks for the info on Beirut Slump!
Although they were not quite as overpowering as Swans, I can see the similarity.

Just wanted to chime in and say slipknot's self-titled album is about a thousand times more innovative than anything Radiohead has ever done.

hey the so innovative eighties have their roots in the past too..
theres no innovation, just constant evolution, you might not notice it, i certainly do...

well i use the terms drum n bass and jungle interchangeably, and this is the first i've heard of it existing in the 80s.

but anyway, this is the point, nothing sounds that unprecedented if you are aware of it's influences, which isn't to say that the musical developements that people are citing are trivial or not worthy of remark, but merely that they are all quite natural if looked at in the light of their influences.

besgt post of the thread
even sheonberg said that dedocophony was not a deconstruction of harmony, but an evolution of it (and bartok felt the dsame way if i remember correctly)