Creative influences
I love it when artists are inspired by other artists whose work is stylistically utterly unrelated. Just because you sing the blues shouldn’t mean you can’t appreciate Burt Bacharach. There’s lots of bad country — and there’s also Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson. My favorite such example — and one I’ve quoted to students for years — is that the aloof existentialist Samuel Beckett’s preferred reading was detective thrillers and his preferred viewing was Laurel & Hardy. Parochialism is the province of snobs and poseurs.
How fun, then, to discover Pearl Jam, the last standing major grunge band, performing a song by Devo and donning the appropriate attire to do it in. I like that a lot.