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Originally Posted by Genteel Death
How has Beefhart pushed music forward? Don't get me wrong, big fan of his here.
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Well, first of all, he inspired the Beatles (who all attended a Beefheart gig together). Especially John Lennon (Safe as Milk was Lennon's favorite album of all time). I'd say pretty much every musician worth a damn has namedropped Beefheart at one point or another (The Fall.. Mark E. Smith mention him by name in 3 songs!). I mean, listen to pretty much any of the bands on any of those Beefheart comps; Dog Faced Hermans, Sonic Youth, etc. Oh yeah, Hendrix was a Beefheart fan too, but he died shortly after saying that so I debt he was too inspired by them.
I'm willing to say that he invented what we call "math rock", what we called "no wave"; hell, pretty much any avant-garde, or overly technical music within a rock context. Don't get me wrong, there were some prog bands that existed around the same time, but no one was doing what Beefheart was doing. I'd say just about every band on Skin Graft owes a debt to Beefheart.
More than that, he inspired painters, filmmakers, television show creators (The Mighty Boosh!).
So, as an inspiration -- yes, definitely. As far as "pushing things forward", he completely reconfigured the rock language; NO ONE sounded like something like Trout Mask Replica. You can draw a few very basic connections to blues, free jazz, etc.. but I'd say within a rock context, nothing had come close. Now, not
everything was verse chorus verse, but Beefheart went beyond that; he skipped that idea and just had sections, he had every instrument playing in different time signatures, he had guitar riffs constructed of noises instead of "conventional" riffs. And he made it all sound musical!
I really can't think of another musician who invented their own language, inspired so many influential people, and was actually commercially successful (slightly, and only in the UK, but hey...). Oh, and in a really short amount of time. Like 13 years, but like 5 of those years were in sitting around waiting for an album to come out that never did, and Beefheart recording some shitty sellout records. Let's skip those.