The band Ian Anderson said spawned grunge: “We’re kind of recycling”
As one of the first bands to ever be labelled as progressive rock, Jethro Tull have more of a reason to be aggrieved when people lazily compare them to something else that came before them than most other bands do.
Yes, there are aspects of blues, jazz, folk and rock in their music, but they were consistently inventive enough to be seen as the trailblazers, rather than the copycats who were rehashing old ideas. Progressive rock wasn’t exactly an entirely novel concept if you look at it from the perspective of whether its constituent parts already existed, but as far as finding ways to combine them and forge completely new ideas, it was a fresh approach that deserved to be praised for its creativity.
Frontman and flautist Ian Anderson was at the forefront of Jethro Tull’s creative spark, and his drive to create something unique was ultimately what propelled the band to success in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Over the course of several albums, the band managed to keep this flair for pushing the boundaries of rock music as far as it could possibly go, and to say that they were in any form derivative would be to ignore the ways in which they mutated what was already there and available for them to take inspiration from.
However, it’s not like they were alone in this, and during the period where they were emerging and having the most success, you could argue that within rock music in particular, there were far more groundbreaking acts who were doing something for the first time other than just Jethro Tull. If you look at all of the other progressive rock acts from the same period, such as King Crimson, Yes and Genesis, you could argue that each of them was responsible for bringing new ideas to the forefront during their early years as a group, and that being derivative was less of an issue in this sphere.
However, by the 1990s, while there were new ideas, those of an older generation might want to claim that new acts during this period were simply recycling influences from previous generations, and while they may have attacked things from a modern perspective, there were fewer truly innovative groups in existence at the time.
In a 1993 interview with The Tapes Archive, Anderson reflected on the state of music at the time, and argued that a lot of the current crop of great acts were simply borrowing from previous generations, and claimed that the most prominent new movement, the Seattle grunge scene, was entirely taken from a trend that was born over 20 years prior. “We’ve seen revivals of you know, kind of ’60s stuff, and […] Guns N’ Roses, you know, are not 1,000,000 miles away from early Stones and Metallica for Black Sabbath,” he argued.
Adding, “You look at some of the kinda grungy, sort of post-hippie type bands from Seattle or what have you, I mean they owe a lot to a peculiar mixture of kind of ’60s ideology and MC5 anarchism. We’re kind of recycling all these sort of notions and then patching them together in slightly varied ways.”
While new music in the 1990s was certainly borrowing from its predecessors, it’s no different to how Jethro Tull borrowed from their own influences in order to create something new. If you were to compare, for example, Nirvana with bands like MC5 that Anderson mentioned, there’s enough of a gulf to separate what the two bands did, even if they were intrinsically linked in style. Music may be more homogenous than ever now in some people’s eyes, but in all reality, it always has been.
