10 Rock Bands That Invented Their Own Genre
3. The Stooges
Even in hindsight, critics still call punk rock one of the single greatest things to ever happen to the genre. Since the rest of the rock world was getting more and more bloated as time went on, these were the kind of bands that were meant to take everything back to basics, with both the Ramones and the Sex Pistols setting the standard for what the scene would be like going forward. In a perfect world, that would make sense, but The Stooges had already gotten the ball rolling a few years prior.
Around the time that the Summer of Love was happening, Iggy Pop and the rest of his band of misfits were looking to push the boundaries of rock and roll, being influenced by the heavier side of the genre most of the time. Across their 3 classic albums as the Stooges, they went for the throat on every one of their records, whether it was out for blood on Search and Destroy or just plain apathy on songs like I Wanna Be Your Dog.
If there's one thing that would put them in the good graces of the punks though, it was their live show, with Iggy turning into an absolute animal on stage and getting more and more ferocious as the set went on. The Ramones and the Pistols may have had the pop appeal that no one else had at the time, but as for the stone age of punk, Iggy was the poster child for shake appeal.