Credit: Far Out / Heinrich Klaffs
Sun 30 August 2026 19:00, UK
When you look back at the history of music, be it in hip hop, rock music, indie, anything, none of it comes from a purely original place; all of it draws from previous genres.
So many of the sounds that are hailed as inventing a new style of music are merely taking an old sound and either combining it with something else or putting a twist on it. Some of the greatest musicians are those who can see the commonalities between genres, as opposed to completely exposing their differences.
Look at a guitarist like Eric Clapton. What we know as the modern rock musician is most likely a direct result of everything that Clapton was able to do. Rather than just pick a branch of rock music and run with it, he decided to merge the styles of guitarists who came before him and essentially invent something new in the process. Steve Van Zandt once called him the most important guitarist who ever lived because of his ability to do this.
“Before Clapton, rock guitar was the Chuck Berry method, modernised by Keith Richards, and the rockabilly sound, Scotty Moore, Carl Perkins, Cliff Gallup, popularised by George Harrison,” he said, “Clapton absorbed that, then introduced the essence of black electric blues: the power and vocabulary of Buddy Guy, Hubert Sumlin and the three Kings: BB, Albert and Freddie, to create an attack that defined the fundamentals of rock and roll lead guitar.”
This idea of merging exists in music, both new and old. Consider a more modern genre like hip hop; despite it sounding like something completely brand new, it was essentially just the reprise of soul and funk. DJ Kool Herc was able to get the same break on two turntables and repeat it over and over. This set the foundation that the entirety of rap music has since been built on.
Contrast that with rock ‘n’ roll. It’s a genre that most people simply assume has always been there, embedded in the DNA of rebellious musicians since the dawn of time, but it was once just two separate genres coming together.
Eric Burdon of The Animals and War has a real penchant for rock music, and even he said that the genre was the result of an artist taking two sounds and finding common ground between them. He credited Bo Diddley with this, as he said that the musician’s unique approach to two separate styles is what gave rise to something totally new.
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“Bo’s one of the guys who invented rock ‘n’ roll,” he said, “He took two cultures that existed in separate forms, country and western and the kind of blues that used to be known as ‘race music’, and put them together. His beat was a jungle beat. That’s what he called it.”
Every genre of music, no matter how original it may sound, comes from somewhere, which is very easy to trace back to. Rock ‘n’ roll is just one example of many, as Eric Burdon, someone who has a pretty encyclopaedic knowledge of the genre, said that it all essentially came from Bo Diddley and his ability to find some form of commonality between country and the blues.
