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Whatever people's personal view of Radiohead is, they remain an interesting band in their own right. I wouldn't say they 'invented' a new way of playing Rock, but then I wouldn't say SY did either. I think both bands perfected a direction touched at by other bands that ultimately lacked their ambition. To begin with, SY were never doing anything all that radically different from, say, Live Skull. The difference is that Live Skull would've never had the ambition (either in terms of their creative or commercial imagination) to push things forward enough to create something like Daydream Nation. I don't know much about the bands that Radiohead progressed beyond, but I'm sure the same would stand - at least in terms of an album like OK Computer or Kid A.
I think another quite unique aspect of SY is the way in which they've so consistently managed to intersect with cutting edge areas of fashion and art. Certainly this isn't something bands like U2, or even Radiohead can boast. Although there are countless bands that have. The Beatles were great at it, but ultimately had too short a career to compare with SY's. Ditto The Sex Pistols and The Velvets. The Stones obviously had a great sense of what was going on around them (especially in areas of fashion), but this only really lasted up until the mid 70s. Ditto The Who up to around 1966. Bowie's an obvious case but by the 80s he'd pretty much abandoned any interest in incorporating his interest in the arts into his actual music (effectively treating it as a seperate hobby). Roxy Music are another obvious one, but that seemed more confined to their early period. Pink Floyd, despite their ineluctable 'artiness' seem never to have concerned themselves much with what was taking place elsewhere in the arts. In that sense I really do think that the sheer ambition of SY's vision is pretty much unrivalled, at least in terms of its commitment over such a prolonged period.
Fascinating thread this.
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