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my choice for the greatest American band of all time is Public Enemy. they introduced the basic standard of political and societal commentary into the most commercially and critically vital form of pop music in history. no genre ever stayed as relevant for so long as hip hop.
worldwide, hip hop is still absolutely a political genre first and foremost. in France, by far the second biggest hip hop market in the world, simply being a rapper or producer is often a political act by itself. this report nails it. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/apr/22/rap-music-racial-divide-france
the politics of the UK hip hop has never been louder. Turkish hip hop is the most culturally and politically influential music made by any immigrant community in Europe. in the countries of Latin America, there's never been a shortage of popular political thought in hip hip.
the question of hip hop's very existence in the Arab world is an extremely complex and ultimately political problem. Japanese appropriation of American cultural signifiers reveals more about the prominence of Japanese nationalism in societal norms than any form of popular art.
in Russia, several prominent rappers used the language of popular protest to advance their own careers in major ways. the actual politics of different hip hop communities are incredibly complex and don't fit into any commonly Western narratives of Russian political culture.
I have no idea what's happening in China, but no matter what your political views are, you can bet all Chinese hip hop is inherently political. same with South Africa, where a question of what language to use in a hip hop song demands an answer in the form of political gesture.
political discourses in hip hop would've developed without Public Enemy. there's American hip hop that prefigures their Farrakhan-branded ideology. but it's hard to deny their influence on the understanding of hip hop as politics by all involved in its production and consumption.
Public Enemy is also obviously one of the most musically influential bands of all time. you can hear their approach to sonics in everything from the second wave of Detroit techno to the forms of sound collage in today's electronic music.
what's more, the aesthetics of their classic productions are even more influential than the methods. it's very rare for modern music that plays with the commonly perceived cultural or acoustic contextual contrasts between different sounds not to owe a debt to the Bomb Squard.
finally, speaking of the way they used to document their own existence and to justify their own actions, Public Enemy predate most of the current celebrity culture. they actively dismantled the difference between journalism and PR long before it became a norm.
in the times of advance of Western neoliberalism and "the end of history", Public Enemy offered an incredibly popular form of resistance to the enforced view of the West. they educated millions of people and taught them to doubt the sincerity of dominant cultural expansion.
there are numerous deeply problematic things about Public Enemy and, of course, they only managed to be relevant for a very small part of their career. but they changed everything. there was no American band comparable by the sheer totality of their influence and its reach.
(my second pick are Sun City Girls, the US band that's probably most difficult to assess in political terms. their belief in their own principles and aesthetics defies the possible within the culture they operated in. also it's their time, see Sunwatchers, 75 Dollar Bill, etc.)
(some more thoughts: Morbid Angel and Death both way more influential than Metallica, the VU's influence on the art world is impossible to overstate, Parliament-Funkadelic expanded the definition of theatrical popular music far beyond anyone before or since)
(also, Sparks, the band that always existed within the dominant narratives of the Western pop culture, always subverted them, sometimes in extremely radical ways, never managed either to fully sell out or go full avant and somehow still hasn't stopped working for 50 years)
(the relative dearth of the US bands worthy of discussion really emphasizes how deeply distrust of group work towards the communal form of artistic expression and not for profit runs in American psyche. I think it's more of a factor than purely economic reasons.)
(curiously, Robert Ashley revolutionized opera, a genre of communal artistic expression ordinarily not considered as such, in part by ensuring his operas are impossible to "stage" or "perform" in an "authentic" way without the particular people he worked with.)
(there's also a huge number of "collectives" rather than "bands" in American pop, e.g. The Residents, Wu-Tang, Art Ensemble of Chicago, Underground Resistance, basically all of New Weird America, Animal Collective, Soulquarians, etc. also LOTS of Canadian acts like GYBE or BSS...
...the notable British ones I can name are AMM, Massive Attack, The KLF, Gong, Crass, NWW/C93/PTV and So Solid Crew. Feels like more entities were organized as "collectives" than "bands" in North America than in England or in Europe, Germany notwithstanding...
...what's up with that? There's a difference between communes and cults masquerading as collectives, but notice that the latter are more prominent in England, notably Gong and the NWW/C93/PTV crowd. All while a modern religious cult is an obviously American invention.)
Returning one last time to Public Enemy, just remembered a great quote from Chuck D, describing their strategy (or lack of it) when dealing with public crises, scandals and outrage. "I'm vulnerable. And my deal is, when you're vulnerable, confuse the hell out of them".
It's 30 years since the release of Fear of a Black Planet elevated confusion from technique to art. The most famous rapper in the world (and one of its biggest celebs) acts, talks and creates in full accordance with that quote. Been doing so for some time. Chuck D told us all.
