Music journalists – and I’m allowed to say this because I used to be a music journalist – can often be some of the silliest people on planet earth. You can tell they are silly because they are forever describing pop musicians as ‘important’, when it’s patently obvious that very, very few pop musicians, ever, have been genuinely important. Marvin Gaye, Bowie, The Beatles, Prince, Madonna? Fine. But there aren’t many others.
The late Richard Wayne Penniman, better known as Little Richard, was and is unique amongst pop musicians in many ways: not the least of which is that to call him important is a huge understatement. None of the above artists – or thousands of others – would exist without him.
