I have chatted with coworkers after "The Lord of the Rings" films came out who had not read Tolkien but after seeing the movies thought that the story was fairly derivative. Maybe not such a surprising take if you allow that nearly all fantasy since Tolkien has been so heavily influenced by him that his fingerprints are everywhere — in D&D, films like "Willow", etc.
I remember hearing Raydio's hit "Jack and Jill" [1] back in 1978 when it came out (I was 14 years old) and it was probably the first synthesizer I had ever heard in a song. I cannot even describe to you how alien and wonderful that sounded when I first heard it. Electronics in music would become so mainstream of course that it is hard to "shock my ears" any longer and even harder for someone used to it to go back and hear this song from over 40 years the way my "virgin ears" heard it.
If you listen to a lot of 60's music, you find a ton of interesting ideas coming from all over the place, and coming fast. It's interesting how something that sounds so out of place one year sounds pretty normal two or three years later. The Beatles did interesting stuff, but I haven't found a lot that seems ahead of it's time the way, say, the Kinks using power chords in '64 does.
Interesting to me too reading about it, they would create/introduce something new like a tape loop, use it on just one song, and then move on. Where other bands would define their entire sound by just such a novelty.
There was a lot of musical experimentation during this time period coming form all over. There's a tendency to collapse all of that to just a few popular bands, and then pretend they're the lone geniuses who invented everything.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2WBBcH6OPU [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aL6MNGHeEuI
That was my joke about Shakespeare in the root comment: his expressions are so commonly quoted that they have become cliche.
I still ultimately prefer The Monkees.