Pioneers of rock n roll. Yes, you can talk about The Beatles.

Sun Wukong said

I'm not a huge fan of Elvis as a person or even really an artist, but it's pretty wild to see people in this thread discounting the absolutely singular impact he had on the rock genre all because they can't get over their "white people bad!" circlejerk.

Also: The idea of "stealing" musical genres is braindead. If Elvis "stole" it, so did every white person who came after him, including your beloved Beatles and everyone they influenced, so hold them to same standard.

If we're going to dictate that only one race/culture can lay claim to a style of music, it has to apply all the way forking down.

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Race has nothing to do with my point that Elvis stole his melodies and many of the guitar licks in his songs. This isn't a question of copying the "style or genre," it's a question of stealing particular musical lines. Yes, the Beatles were "copying the style," including playing many of the American blues songs flat out, but they didn't write new lyrics to them and pretend those songs were their creations. Copying style is fine; that's just playing within a particular genre, but just copying melodies and riffs (riffs, not chord progressions) outright is intellectual theft.

Jimmy Page stole the opening of the intensely boring "Stairway to Heaven" from Randy California, a totally different style of "rock" than the blues licks Elvis stole. It doesn't matter what color skin Randy had nor does it matter what the color of skin was that the bluesmen had from whom Elvis stole licks, theft is theft.