I'll second Pink Floyd. The Stones played an important part in early rock and roll popular music, not unlike the Beatles. Many of their songs have a lot on common with the Beatles composition style, but at their heart, the Stones are at their best with rhythm and blues influenced rock and roll. There's nothing *unimportant* about that, but rhythm and blues influenced rock and roll is very very common. While the Stones absolutely deserve a place of honor near the top of rhythm and blues influenced rock and roll, they didn't particularly invent anything ground-breakingly new.

AC/DC is an amazing group, and they self-proclaim themselves to be straight-up "rock and roll" if that really means anything specific. The Young brothers deserve a top spot on the blues-influenced rock and roll chart too, but again, it's not like they invented the category of music.

Pink Floyd pretty much single-handedly invented the "concept album" where the entire album is considered the composition, and while for purposes of radio play single tunes can be culled from the album and played as pop singles, the entire album as a unified composition is really what they were going for. Albums like Dark Side of the Moon, and Wish You Were Here, and The Wall, and Animals, and The Final Cut are really best experienced in their entirety from start to finish. To this day Roger Waters tours "Dark Side of the Moon" as an entire set. The post-split Pink Floyd continued down the path of concept albums with unified themes and songs that flow smoothly from one to the next with "gapless playback" with albums like "A Momentary Lapse of Reason" and "Delicate Sound of Thunder."

Also, The Wall as both a hit album and a movie, really went a step farther in elevating the importance of "the entire album as a composition" similar in concept to the "Rock Opera".

So I have to go with Floyd.
Source(s):
Learned opinion.

Permalink | Report