The persistence of prog rock (2017)
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
Punk etc which came afterwards was also very silly, and also mostly wasn't very good at all, because it was fashion and performance art and social criticism and musically quite conservative and dull in addition to being amateurish. None of which stopped it from being awesome in its own way, which explains why Robert Fripp played guitar with The Damned while King Crimson was on hiatus, because fun is fun and genre wars are just publicity stunts and you would have to be a rock critic to fall for it. Prog rock is really wonderful and there's more fun stuff than anyone could ever listen to, and that's why 50 years of music critic complaining has failed to kill it.
[0] https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2020/06/the-stranger-than-f...
“Punk mostly wasn't very good at all, because it was fashion and performance art and social criticism and musically quite conservative and dull in addition to being amateurish”
That is just an objectively wrong worldview—that Punk was just fashion and a mostly dull, amateur genre.
And I agree with everything you say about Prog.
Go listen to Pink Flag by Wire. It basically is Prog, but stripped all the way down to pure elegance and irony, imbued with the attitude of the earliest rock and roll. Still fresh today.
So many great bands and classic albums. Were the beatles and elvis proto-punk, or were the clash and ramones early rock and roll?
The kinks you really got me, the stooges search and destroy. You’re right Led Zeppelin is silly next to that.
But dull and amateurish, no way. That’s the mindset of someone with a narrow palette.
Good thing Punk is the ultimate palette cleanser. The smartest genre of music we’ve created yet.
It was dull and amateurish and "not very good" if you take "good" to mean the intricate, virtuoso, polished mainstream music that punk forcefully rejected.
Also "smartest genre of music" is a stretch. You'd have to justify that in dimensions beyond music, like its impact on society/culture. The pinnacle of musical achievement cannot be 3-chord music.
Why not? Harmonic difficulty isn't a virtue. Jazz musicians were doing one and two chord and they are criticized for being obtuse.
Heck, difficulty in general isn't a virtue.
That said, though, a lot of what is considered "punk" today abandoned those simplistic song structures of the 60s lo-fi/garage/protopunk (Stooges, MC5, Sonics, etc.) and started doing intricate and musically-complex studio productions. Including the band "Wire" which the comment I was replying to hails as a high achievement of punk.
Heavy metal would like a word.
"The Stranglers and Friends" is an excellent live album of punks and prog figures (including Fripp) playing with the Stranglers while Hugh Cornwell was in jail. Though the Stranglers themselves were quite sophisticated, with Dave Greenfield (RIP) playing keyboards and Jet Black (also RIP) having been a jazz drummer beforehand.
Fripp's debut solo album Exposure, Daryl Hall's Sacred Songs and Peter Gabriel II constituted a sort of trilogy of...interesting rock.
Edit: Sandinista! by The Clash and the first four Simple Minds albums are also musically interesting "punk" albums.
Not always, in some case it they've inspired others to crank up the silliness; the 1990s Stairways to Heaven cover series was sublime.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAqwPcGuSpk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQuGub7yzpA
> Robert Fripp played guitar with The Damned while King Crimson was on hiatus, because fun is fun
He may have taken fun too far (if that's even possible): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3MTlJF2qqM
They fed over into other genres of music, including a variety of dance music styles from reggae to house and on to techno and its many (particularly UK-based) branches. And later, of course, grunge and what followed.
I do love me some prog - I listened to "Seconds Out" every time I drove the 35 minutes each way to Santa Fe for the whole of the pandemic. But punk, for all of its dirtiness and mess, brought some fresh air into the very idea of making music, and I'll always be grateful for that even if I don't love the most direct results.
Ehehe. Pretty big fan Rush here (and Yes as well). I see Rush as the ultimate power trio in rock: well thought lyrics (usually) accompanied by top notch musicianship but somehow still accessible by mere mortals. Want something weirder? Try King Crimson or Zappa.
Somehow those 3 dudes don't possess the usual rock star aura like Led Zep or The Who. They just look your neighbors' dads who have been friends for many many years.
Yes, they retired few years ago and with Neil's passing, it's completely impossible for me to see them play. Perhaps Muse it the closest thing we have to Rush...
And so many middling-band metal shows that were essentially free to get into. The shows were great but “crossover popular appeal” was an impossibility.
That's one really damn good cover.
I’ve seen every tour since Power Windows (‘86). All of them have been clever, funny, very professional, and respectful to their fans. I remember Geddy practically trapped by being almost buried in keyboards during the “Hold Your Fire” tour. The South Park “Lil Rush” short is on point about what this band is about live. (I laugh just thinking about it.) And I’m glad they were able to salvage the recording to capture the energy that was the “Rush in Rio” album. I will say none of the crowds at my concerts sang along to “YYZ”.
Their final album tour was extraordinary, particularly with the string section. It was one of my top concert experiences, along with Pink Floyd’s Division Bell (PULSE) tour (boy was that a spectacle). That said, the execution of their final tour was perfect as they counted down almost their entire catalog against a constantly shifting stage piece.
These guys constantly produced and performed for 40 years, never resting on their laurels. Total pros.
I like complicated music. I like music that I can listen to more than a few times to concentrate on different parts each listen and get something new from. I like the "cognitive load" of prog-rock. Pretty much the same reasons I like psychedelic, avant-garde, experimental, math-rock, jazz, funk, world, classical.
I don't like boring music; a song that sounds like it should be a subset of another song. But then sometimes I do like a boring song if the instrument/effect is unusual or if the melody is particularly nerve-tickling.
I want to write more about the ephemerality of "like" and it's relationship to familiarity, but also laziness, and the too-high-level abstraction of genres to define and describe something as complex as music and the ridiculous over simplification of "I (don't) like <musical genre>" and such statements as proxies for self identity, but I've got other things I need to do.
Lastly, I do want to call out the band Cleft, who brought prog-rock into a more modern, ADHD-friendly format with their self-defined turbo-prog: "We made horrible instrumental music using a guitar and some drums. Imagine a machine that compresses 14 minute songs down to 3 minutes". Give "Alec Baldwin's Hair" and "Me, Sugar" a listen as introduction - if you don't like them, you need go no further.
In my teens I was heavily into trance especially goa while these days it's mostly psychedelic/stoner rock, but I'll still enjoy a wide variety of artists and groups across genres.
I never dismiss an artist or group based on a genre label. Of course there are genres where I tend not to find new stuff I like, like rap/R&B or jazz. But I'll have a listen, after all won't know if I like 'em till I hear 'em.
Psychedelic but still quite complex, well, I give away copies of The Evening Descends by Evangelicals because it has so much going on.
Exploration is tough. So many of The Algorithms seem to have settled on "Well, people who played that also played ..." and just don't seem to try very hard. Exploration of the now-mostly-over doomjazz microgenre has been a challenge.
Indeed. I use "curators" like KEXP[1], regularly check out what my local venues are playing, and just randomly click on stuff people have bought on Bandcamp in the purchases feed.
That said, I've discovered a lot of stuff I like using Spotify which I use when driving. Yeah it follows my initial genere choice a bit much, but could be a lot worse.
Waste of Space Orchestra - Syntheosis[1]
It’s Not Night: It’s Space - Our Birth is but a Sleep and a Forgetting[2]
Mount Hush - Mount Hush[3]
Wizard Rifle - Wizard Rifle[4]
Firebreather - Under A Blood Moon[5]
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Z_2iQRUj7Q
[2]: https://smallstone.bandcamp.com/album/our-birth-is-but-a-sle...
[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLyKVZW-7Gg
[4]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBTCdZ8-9Qk&list=OLAK5uy_mIK...
If you watch some of Rick Beato's "What Makes This Song Great" series, you'll learn how meticulously crafted pop songs can be.
Most prog-rock seems to me to be the band sort of "incohesive aimless noodling around for a while".
Maybe interestingly, I find the African-American contemporary equivalent music such as Progressive Soul, Psychedelic Funk, etc. to be much more tightly played, better recorded, more cohesive, and ultimately much more listenable to me.
What's strange about this is that I grew up with Rock music in the house and neighborhood, but not a lot of African-American music (I grew up in an immigrant and Caucasian heavy area, but not an African-American area).
You made a point. Certainly one of the most common complaints about prog rock.
Interesting you mention African-American since King Crimson, one the granddads of prog is influenced by African-American music... which is jazz. Not blues though, like most rock bands in the 60s e.g Cream. One of their nature is to write compositions that involves odd time signatures (not easy to hum to) and weird rythmical patters that doesn't feel natural, at least to average music listeners. Indeed very experimental. If you are into that stuff, probably you'll like Sun Ra. He's more difficult to grok, though.
I feel like this author really does not like prog rock though. Or is working very hard to convince his readers that he is, actually, too cool for this discredited genre of popular music. I am not too cool for it; I am past fifty and I quit caring if my musical choices made me cool somewhere in my twenties. I just like listening to music nerds who have spent decades learning to play incredibly intricate music and make it seem effortless.
Though Tony Levin hints that it's over now in <https://tonylevin.com/road-diaries/king-crimson-2021-tour-pa...>.
An entire concept about a sad doomed swordsman, last of his elfin kind, wandering the multiverse with a sword that eats souls.
It is possible to get proggier than that but this is a feat few mortals can attain.
Bruford writes ruefully that, throughout his career, women “generally and rather stubbornly stayed away” from his performances.
Brings back school memories. Fortunately I also had some Parliament.
From my humble corner I can say I've heard of just a girl, _only one_ girl who said she liked prog rock.
No idea why. Perhaps prog rock with it's typical mythology/sci-fi-related lyrics is a man stuff :p
Animals I need to listen some more too, not something I can pick up on in a single pass. This isn’t uncommon. I think DT is actually really approachable, but even still it takes me several listens to find the groove of the album (in contrast to LTE which takes even more time). Animals is just flat a lot to absorb in one hit.
Townsend was super entertaining and has a remarkable voice. But much like Buried when I saw them years ago, I like the music but it’s hard for me to get past the dirty singing. Same with Opeth, at the same tour as Buried.
But yea, the Townsend set was really fun.
It is focused far more on the 70s/early 80s era, and only briefly discusses the descendants and branches from the genre of that era.
https://open.spotify.com/track/4rPv8eZH6ABfkrtxxHHtV4?si=E5Y...
https://purereasonrevolution.bandcamp.com/album/eupnea
https://purereasonrevolution.bandcamp.com/album/above-cirrus
And their first album remains a classic masterpiece:
https://purereasonrevolution.bandcamp.com/album/the-dark-thi...
Especially, "Ittsanottasonatta, But It's Close" is a hidden gem of genre.