Genius or Hack?

Just how authentic and experimental is Michael Gira's music? I feel as though I've changed my mind a good twenty times at this point. After hearing about Glenn Branca's influence on To Be Kind, and the Black Flag influence on Filth, I can't help but wonder if he crossed a line somewhere. Who else has he heavily relied on for inspiration during his career?

>the Black Flag influence on Filth
Ehhhhh if any band influenced early Swans it's Flipper

>Who else has he heavily relied on for inspiration during his career?

Why are you portraying this as a negative thing? Literally every other artist in every artform does this. That's part of the process.

I shouldn't have just said Black Flag, I meant their song Damaged I in particular.

checked, trips confirms Gira as a plagiarizing hack

tru genius relies on the pure creative blackness of space and nothing else and nobody else

I think you know what I mean, and I don't know why you would waste your time questioning the exact wording of my post. Here, pretend I said "too heavily". Better?

You didn't establish how what he's doing is "too heavily" relying on his influences.

My point is that fucking everybody heavily relies on their influences, this isn't evem worth pointing out.

>You didn't establish how what he's doing is "too heavily" relying on his influences
Oh, I didn't establish that because I don't know, that's why I made this post. I want to know how we should go about defining the point (if that's even possible) at which an artist has gone too far in drawing from his influences, and then where Swans falls in that regard.
So far, all I've seen here is that people who don't like Swans consider their music derivative, while fans will just brush this off and say they were merely influenced.

>trips
bunp

I really don't think you understand the purpose of Filth, Cop, or Greed if you think fucking Black Flag influenced Gira just because the instrumentals are similar on one song.

Who cares, every song on Filth sounds infinitely better than Damaged 1.

Something about hypermasculinity I don't know, is this really relevant? It's the instrumentals that I'm primarily concerned with.

>hypermasculinity
>he thought flex your muscles was literal

What song from Filth has the same songwriting as Damaged I? None of them do, it's produced the same and sounds angry so you immediately say it's a copy.
Besides Filth is much more percussion based than Black Flag.

>hypermasculinity
>>he thought it was literal
No, I thought he was mocking hypermasculinity, so it would be ironic. As for the rest of your post, I think there are far more similarities than you're willing to recognize. The vocals in both songs consist of short, detached phrases, lack actual singing, and the lyrics themselves discuss dark themes. I think one of the main things that makes the songs sound alike is the way each instrument plays the same the sludgy, simple, atonal part the whole time (though Damaged I does have some sort of progression as you said, this doesn't contradict a claim of heavy influence because the lack of progression in the songs on Filth requires no extra work).
And look, I'm not even trying to convince you that Swans ripped off Black Flag, if you read my earlier posts; I much prefer Filth myself.

I just realized my post makes it sound like I was comparing two songs when it was supposed to be about Filth; I was listening to Stay Here while writing it, so you can consider that the song of comparison.

...

Fake

Every musician has influences you fucking dimwit.

lmao what a cunt

Speak for yourself.