Over the course of the history of America's popular culture, there has always existed a constant push to the surface by myriad elements in the various layers of the experimental underground. This is true of all art, whether it be fashion, painting, printing, film, photography, or music.
Accordingly, every art form has its innovators, its champions of invention. Max Ernst and Andy Warhol each contributed in his own fashion to the development of visual art, always bending the unspoken rules of their trade, constantly stretching and testing the limits of what was considered acceptable by the artistic community at large. In doing so, each artist managed to achieve a feat few are able to claim: they changed the landscape of art, pushing their medium forward. Both men, and many other inventive artists, have contributed by the originality of their works to the evolution of the field.
Music has taken a parallel path to its visual cousin, though, it can be argued, it has certainly come to have a stronger impact on the whole of popular culture. What is intriguing is how the music heard on popular radio today could never have existed without the innovations developed by talents of the experimental fringe in the past. Interestingly, even the most famous experimental composers remain largely anonymous when compared to the most marginally known of today's pop stars. And yet contemporary pop stars would be singing a different tune without the push provided by forward-thinking musicians.
John Cage (left) provides the perfect
example
for such a claim. Born
in Los Angeles in 1912, he is one of the acknowledged fathers of the
Avant Garde movement. While his name is familiar to many people,
most
have never heard even one of his works. Cage applied many
Eastern
musical philosophies to his compositions, and would come to be an
important influence on most musicians and composers in the experimental
underground after 1948, when he rose to prominence with his
composition
"Sonatas and Interludes." While most would be hard
pressed to distinguish an instance of it, Cage's work has certainly
affected the course of popular music.Click photo of John Cage for Cyberhemia musical interlude.
In 1966, John Lennon, indisputably one of the most influential figures in the course of modern popular music, met a Japanese performance artist and experimental composer named Yoko Ono. The two would marry in 1969. By the time the Beatles broke up in 1970, Ono and Lennon had written several albums worth of music bordering on the avant garde. Her influence on him is best illustrated by the sound collage of "Revolution 9," from the Beatles' 1968 "White Album." This partnership irrevocably changed the course of Lennon's work, which in turn changed what could be defined, in that era and thereafter, as popular music.
Few would dispute that the Beatles had a nearly immeasurable influence on pop culture in general in their own time, sparking trends not only in music, but also in fashion and popular philosophy. It was the Beatles who held the strongest hand in initiating the popular love affair with Indian philosophy, meditation, and music. Though John Cage had been incorporating the influence of Eastern philosophies into his compositions since the 1940's, the Beatles would ultimately bring those philosophies to the masses. How fitting then, that Ono, a student of the school of thought that John Cage had helped to breathe life into, would become arguably the most powerful influence upon John Lennon's later work with the Beatles, and the entirety of his solo compositions after 1970.
The experimental mindset of the underground has peeked above the surface at various other points in the course of popular music. In 1968, American band The Velvet Underground, famed for their collaborations with Andy Warhol, released "White Light/White Heat," a record on which songwriter John Cale added layers of noises and elements of prose to what were otherwise pop songs, though forward thinking pop songs. Cale would leave the band soon afterwards, pursuing a solo career in which he would further adopt the mindset of the Avant Garde movement. Today, Cale is still considered a pivotal figure in experimental music.
The Velvet Underground's work acted as a notable influence on a young musician from England named David Jones. Jones would himself affect the face of popular music in the early seventies. Synthesizing his influences, from the Velvet Underground to artists like experimental vocal artist Meredith Monk, who acted as one of the progenitors of the performance art movement in 1960's, Jones would rechristen himself David Bowie. Bowie would come to embody the union of rock and roll music with flamboyant theatrics. Along with one-time Velvet Underground songwriter Lou Reed, Stooges frontman Iggy Pop, and T-Rex mastermind Marc Bolan, Bowie would give birth to a genre of music known first as "glitter-rock," and later as "glam." This genre was popular in the 1970's, and though its profile has faded from the public eye, it still exists today. Meanwhile, David Bowie, by and large considered a deviant at the onset of his career, has come to be hailed in the public mindset as one of the great innovators of the past forty years.
For a few years in the late 1970's and early 1980's, New York City's music underground was dominated by an especially pioneering spirit. Where only a few years earlier punk rock had been born and made famous, now artistically minded bands would develop a briefly lived scene which has come to be known as "no-wave." The sonic experimentation of this movement would have lasting effects on the landscape of American popular music, though the popular breakthrough would come years later. Moreover, most people today are completely ignorant that this movement ever existed.
One of the most cutting figures of the no-wave era was a Pennsylvania-born composer named Glenn Branca. Branca had spent the better part of his career involved in theater productions, but his attention turned to music at the onset of the 1980's. After spending time in art-rock bands like Theoretical Girls and The Static, Branca began experimenting with compositions he had written for large electric guitar ensembles. These compositions, largely based upon his manipulation of overtones and feedback. His 1981 compositions "Symphony No. 1" and "Indeterminate Activity of Resultant Masses" would set the tone for the rest of his career (Duckworth 419). Though Branca has since moved away from the electric guitar, focusing on pieces for more traditional orchestral instruments and choral groups, his early work arguable made his greatest mark upon how the American public perceives music.
Glenn Branca hired many guitarists to take part in his performances over the years, but of these Thurston Moore and Lee Ronaldo would go on to make the largest footprints. Moore and Ronaldo, who met when playing with Branca, found common ground with regard to their musical aspirations, and soon began to collaborate, forming a band they dubbed Sonic Youth. Sonic Youth have become acknowledged as one of the bands that have most expanded the role of noise in rock music, and easily the most visible, casting a shadow of influence that stretches from innumerable ensembles in the experimental underground to bands as important and mainstream as Nirvana, the latter of which would go on to change the face of popular music in the 1990's.
"Sometimes even the slightest shift in the underground can produce lasting effects on music's mainstream," says local music fan Willie May, who writes and performs with Orgone Accumulator, a Columbia-based band influenced by the no-wave movement. "It's not always easy to trace popular music trends back to inception, but that's because the origins are often very obscure. The change is gradual, slowly seeping into the cultural consciousness. Sometimes the most inventive things are the most overlooked, but they may still have an indirect effect on the evolution of mainstream pop culture."
Today the experimental underground remains strong. A crop of innovative young bands continue to expand upon the work of thinkers past, increasing the relevance of what was once considered merely noise and its role in music. "Noise bands" like Wolf Eyes, Lightning Bolt, and Hella have built careers around playing propulsive and seemingly erratic music at ear-shattering volume, while New York-based sound-collage enthusiasts like Excepter and No-Neck Blues Band have explored the subject in more subtle fashion, incorporating elements of world and electronic music to create lush and erratic soundscapes for a dedicated cult following. The definition of what is considered "experimental" is always changing, moving away from past movements, sometimes in leaps and bounds.