The Velvet Underground

Formed in New York in 1965 around the axis of Lou Reed and John Cale, The Velvet Underground sound-designed a rock'n'roll that nobody had needed yet: literary, confrontational, half-destroyed. Reed brought the Brill Building's melodic instincts and an unflinching diarist's eye for street-level New York — heroin, transvestites, violence, boredom — while Cale's classical viola training turned the band's rhythm section into something more like controlled interference than a beat. Andy Warhol attached his name and a famous banana to their debut, giving them an art-world imprimatur that their commercial performance never warranted. In 1967, when everyone else was San Francisco and flowers, The Velvet Underground & Nico sounded like it was from another dimension entirely.

Their four studio albums trace an arc from the sublime noise damage of the debut through the more naked folk-rock of The Velvet Underground (1969) — an album so hushed and intimate it barely seems to exist. What's remarkable is that none of it resembled a trend: the band had no contemporaries and left no real imitators for a decade. Then, in the mid-eighties, the imitators arrived in large numbers. The cliché about the debut — "everyone who bought it formed a band" — is actually understated; the record's influence runs so deep in this graph that nearly every edge traces back to it eventually.