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Old 11.12.2007, 06:49 PM   #11
atari 2600
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atari 2600 kicks all y'all's assesatari 2600 kicks all y'all's assesatari 2600 kicks all y'all's assesatari 2600 kicks all y'all's assesatari 2600 kicks all y'all's assesatari 2600 kicks all y'all's assesatari 2600 kicks all y'all's assesatari 2600 kicks all y'all's assesatari 2600 kicks all y'all's assesatari 2600 kicks all y'all's assesatari 2600 kicks all y'all's asses
There are loads of places with either large "scenes" or notable ones. And typically, most are college towns. Look at Austin. They've enjoyed the largest "scene" of any city on the planet for a long time now and have produced very little to show for it. ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead is the only band to really even emerge from there in quite some time.


Now Athens did not invent "the indie music scene." That was more the NYC No Wave scene. They broke non-mainstream music among the club faithful. Thus it all began as a "they told two friends, and those two told two friends, and so on, and so on..." type of thing. Sonic Youth grew out of this scene (mostly after the fact) as many know.


Athens bands did, however, invent "college rock" though and get small record labels to back non-mainstream music in notable ways by demonstrating that it could be profitable with the somewhat popular successes of bands like The B-52's, Pylon and R.E.M., among others. The key catalyst was R.E.M.'s performance of the yet-unnamed "So. Central Rain" on NBC's "Late Night with David Letterman" back in 1983. And as the post above alludes, Athens bands still exert quite the influence on "indie" music today with the legacy of Elephant 6.

Although you wouldn't know it by the dreck that's posted at this board about them, of course John Lennon and Yoko Ono were the first pop culture figures who introduced mass audiences to experimental music.

And it was Charles Mingus who was well-versed in classical music and all jazz styles, including the emerging avant-free style, that first really turned music on its ear with his protest of the Newport Jazz Fest and his staging of an alternate "Newport Rebel" festival with the relatively unknown music of Ornette Coleman as the focus. Mingus also was the first to really glean the improvisational innovation from Lennie Tristano/Marsh/Konitz/Bauer/Ind on Crosscurrent (aka Intuition) in 1949.
Mingus introduced the world to the "concept album" with his Pithecanthropus Erectus in 1956 which is over a decade before The Beatles, The Kinks and The Beach Boys, and later The Who and Pink Floyd, who unleashed the experiment of the "concept album" or "art album" onto mass consciousness.
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