Progphobia is the last acceptable prejudice and is tied up with people's fear of being silly, which is a silly thing to be afraid of, as being silly and being awesome are two sides of the same concept album LP. Led Zeppelin is deeply and profoundly silly, but everyone kind of ignores it because they are great. Going bankrupt putting on a King Arthur-themed ice skating opera[0] is deeply silly but also a pure example of artistic commitment which transcends petty aesthetic criticism and can only be understood spiritually, perhaps as a Werner Herzog movie. And no, I won't ever listen to it because give me a break, but it's still a completely awesome thing to do.
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.
“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.
> That is just an objectively wrong worldview—that Punk was just fashion and a mostly dull, amateur genre.
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.
I agree that difficulty isn't a virtue, and I'm a big fan of minimal art and music, but I don't think 1-4-5 power chord music is the pinnacle of musical achievement. But I think those simple songs were extremely powerful in their cultural context and the rejection of norms that they represented.
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.
What was great about punk was the DIY ethos. The actual music, for the most part, never did anything for me (my stepfather has what is probably an insanely valuable collection of the first wave of UK punk singles). But the ethos that you could make music yourself, release it yourself, get gigs yourself, define the culture you were a part of yourself ... even if these ideas did not 100% align with the reality of what was happening, they were very powerful.
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.
> which explains why Robert Fripp played guitar with The Damned while King Crimson was on hiatus
"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.
>> and by the end of the decade there was Rush, a Yes-obsessed trio of Canadians who received even worse reviews than their British forebears
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...
Poor Rush... a great band that managed to entirely re-invent itself at least twice maintaining its quality, forever relegated to the backwoods as "nerd rock." Wearing your rush T-shirt in high school pretty much guaranteed you wouldn't get laid, but I didn't care: everyone except me is wrong. Alex Lifeson is the worlds most criminally underrated guitarist and I'll take that to my grave.
It doesn’t help that their entire catalog is reduced to three songs continually recycled on Classic rock stations.
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 went to a Coheed and Cambria concert where my girlfriend was seemingly the only woman there, at least in the standing area. Very high energy and great fans despite the smell.
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.
Coheed and Cambria is also cool.
Back when lockdown was globally started in 2020, Coheed's Claudio collabed with Les Claypool (Primus), Danny Carey (Tool), Bill Kelliher (Mastodon) to cover Rush's classic track Anthem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fULwDbZ4iSU
I like prog-rock as much as anyone can like a genre; there's a lot that I don't like, but I generally like the reason behind what they're doing it trying to do.
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.
Rick Beato is great. Since he came up in a discussion of progressive rock, it's worth pointing out that he seems to have a massive blind spot in this area. If he's ever discussed Adrian Belew or Robert Fripp at all, I never noticed it.
Personally I've given up genres and settled with that I like what I like.
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.
I am a fan of stoner/doom, partially for the sense of humor they seem to have about it. Blood Ceremony has this bit: "They say these rites are dangerous, they say we are insane / I'm only here to help you fraternize with Caine." And of course there's a flute in the mix for that proggy feel.
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.
If I were a space alien and had never heard of prog rock before, and only had a description to go off of, it would sound like everything I'm into in music -- avant-garde, philosophical, highly technical, etc. But then I actually hear it and I almost always reflect off of the genre.
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).
>> Most prog-rock seems to me to be the band sort of "incohesive aimless noodling around for a while".
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 can't argue with Crimson's "Red" as an introduction to the joys and excesses of Prog Rock, though I think "Discipline" is a better one.
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.
The author notes Fripp disbanding King Crimson in 1974, but doesn't mention the 80s reformation at all (with Discipline, Beat and Three of a Perfect Pair). Or the 90s ("double trio") reformation, or the 00s ("double duo") reformation, or the 10s ("seven-headed beast") reformation.
I don't know if it qualifies or not, but I recently discovered Hawkwind (circa 1970) and while it's not as lyrical as favoured prog bands, it has that "Oh, I really like this and it's only halfway through the 15 minute track".
I only discovered Hawkwind about 10 years ago, IMO if they had had a really good vocalist they could have been up there with Yes years ago! Even so, they're one of my favorite bands.
It seems not only he noted that since the very beginning but has always been vocal about it. There is a clip in YouTube from VH1 where he talks with Tony Levin (it seemed to be around the time they were in the 80's reincarnation of King Crimson) and they briefly discuss it, he acknowledges that women tended to go more even to his shows with his jazz band Earthworks - but for some weird reason they weren't present on King Crimson shoes. Even (if I recall correctly) at the end he asks woman viewers to go to their shows.
From my humble corner I can say I've heard of just a girl, _only one_ girl who said she liked prog rock.
While true Dream Theatre is prog metal, it's also great evidence that prog rock was not an embarrassing dead end when you have amazing bands like Dream Theater, Animals as Leaders, Devin Townsend, and Between the Buried and Me as their new prog legacy.
I’ve been fortunate to see all of those bands, on the recent tour and years ago on a Prog Nation tour.
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.
No mention of Mike Oldfield who, although is arguably not genuine Prog Rock, was Prog-ish during the 70's and had to pivot over to Pop-ish in the '80s like Yes did. I know he released some songs featuring Jon Anderson and Adrian Belew, and probably other Prog Rockers I'm forgetting.
The important lesson is to not worry about what critics think. Critics certainly serve a purpose. With their informed perspective they can help you find or understand new kinds of music. But they also susceptible to trends, and although people love when critics really tear something apart, it’s not very interesting. Why do you care what some guy who hates Prog thinks about the latest Rush album?
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...