I think what's much more interesting is instances before it became a "thing".
Before things get a name, culture, rules of what it is and is not, there's many instances that are close to it. Those are interesting as a collection but drawing the lines between the isolated elements can be a bit dubious. Ideas are communicative but also come out of thin air.
We have an unprecedented amount of knowledge at our fingertips these days and can cross correlate vast expanses of say, music. You can hear say some song from 1960s in peru and then see how similar it was to something in japan in the 1980s but actually showing that the second creators even knew of the first, that's the part that I think is hard - it has to be demonstrated.
Just the other week I was talking with some artist from northern england who sounded like legowelt (danny wolfers) telling him how much I really liked his legowelt-style song - danny is a minor figure generally but pretty well known in the subgenre of electronic music he works in. This guy honestly said "who's legowelt" and got back to me the next day "wow, this guy's amazing, never heard of him".
So even today, with the internet, you can have someone essentially sound like the exact style and still have never heard of the person they're supposedly "influenced" by.
It expunges the tidy narrative where we want everything to have a clear delineated beginning. "Rappers Delight began the 80s rap formula" - that one super clear, yes, hard to argue against - but most things are not so clear.
Before things get a name, culture, rules of what it is and is not, there's many instances that are close to it. Those are interesting as a collection but drawing the lines between the isolated elements can be a bit dubious. Ideas are communicative but also come out of thin air.
We have an unprecedented amount of knowledge at our fingertips these days and can cross correlate vast expanses of say, music. You can hear say some song from 1960s in peru and then see how similar it was to something in japan in the 1980s but actually showing that the second creators even knew of the first, that's the part that I think is hard - it has to be demonstrated.
Just the other week I was talking with some artist from northern england who sounded like legowelt (danny wolfers) telling him how much I really liked his legowelt-style song - danny is a minor figure generally but pretty well known in the subgenre of electronic music he works in. This guy honestly said "who's legowelt" and got back to me the next day "wow, this guy's amazing, never heard of him".
So even today, with the internet, you can have someone essentially sound like the exact style and still have never heard of the person they're supposedly "influenced" by.
It expunges the tidy narrative where we want everything to have a clear delineated beginning. "Rappers Delight began the 80s rap formula" - that one super clear, yes, hard to argue against - but most things are not so clear.
---
here's an example of the "legowelt imposter" https://bassagendarecordings.bandcamp.com/track/mind-to-body... who I claim sounds like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BZbJY28iSM