There's this trope that music critics sometimes use, where they talk about a particular artist, or a particular record, "inventing the future" - or "inventing our future". There's a variant of it where the critic asserts that this particular artist or record invents a much later artist (or record).
I associate this trope with a particular blogger prone to this construction, this kind of assertion - and who particularly loved doing it in situations of maximum incongruity and over-reach (such-and-such a Bucks Fizz B-side "invents" Autechre - that kind of thing).
Here's an example of me using the trope in a 1995 column on Krautrock.
I don't imagine I was the first to use "invents" in this way in the world of music criticism. That said, I haven't come across earlier examples.
I'm wondering if I picked it up from reading Harold Bloom. It's a construction he uses often as part of his whole Anxiety of Influence view of literature as family romance: a net of filial links that bind poet to ancestor-poet, and from which the later poet struggles to break loose (adding parricide to the filial filigree) . So he often write about how a certain precursor poet "invents" a later poet.
But Bloom also loved to say, repeatedly, that Shakespeare invents us - meaning Western consciousness, modernity, our conception of the psyche and human motivation etc. (More pointedly still, he asserts that Shakespeare "invents" Freud - massively preempts him - talk about family romance).
"Inventing the future" also has a life, as you'd imagine, in the world of writing about science and technology, futurology.
Here's an example I found from 1992 - "Japan Invents the Future".
Back to my Krautrock column - another notable thing about it is the piss that the Melody Maker reviews editor is taking out of me for my relentless vanguardism.
