Prog-Rock Politics

Good site for multiple stances on the same albums - just wish they updated more often. (oh and I have reviews there too)

Gnosis is a great resource - especially check Eric Lumbleau and Craig Shropshire if you're into prog on the avant end.

btw, just clicking through on some of these sites led me to this non-sequitous discovery and I can't think of any other thread to post it to, so:

Maestro exists because the Gravitars say it must.

"Technology has now advanced far enough for Maestro to exist," Mike Oldfield.

http://www.mikeoldfield.com/flash/maestro.html

check out the screenshots, I am losing my mind

or blaming a random a random Brit for belonging to a small island whose inflated
sense of importance is about 100 years out-of-date?

Inconsistency is such a useful thing.

Why do people still respond to Squirrel Police?
-- Tep (te...), April 9th, 2004.

More fool me. But you are the worst arsehole on this forum.

PS The adjective qualifies the noun you emptyheaded piece of shit!

x-post noodle okay that's it sorry. I am enjoying reading this thread, which is how I got myself onto it in the first place.

Web fans boost Marillion single

Rock band Marillion look poised to enter the UK top five with their new single after a sustained campaign among fans on their website.
Retailer HMV's online arm has received a record 4,400 pre-orders for the song You're Gone, which is out on Monday.

It could become their biggest hit since Kayleigh, a number two success in 1985, according to HMV.

Marillion singer Steve Hogarth urged fans to buy at least three copies of the single to get it into the top 10.

You could dig deep, get into eight quid's worth of debt and buy three copies or more of our single

Steve Hogarth
On the band's website, Hogarth said: "By our calculations, in the current UK single market, if you go out and buy one single each, we'll go top 40. If you go out and buy two versions, we'll go top 20.

"If, however, you'd like to make an old dog very happy, you could dig deep, get into eight quid's worth of debt and buy three copies or more of our single.

"We'd almost certainly go top 10 and I'd have my first ever top 10 single just before my 45th birthday!"

The song is available on two CD singles and a DVD single with a combined retail cost of almost £8.

'Loyal support'

Marillion spokeswoman Lucy Jordache said: "Whatever chart position You're Gone achieves will largely due to the fans' loyal support of the band.

"We hope that this will enable other people to hear the music and get into the band."

The band's fans are renowned for their loyalty. In 1997 they raised $60,000 (£32,000) to help finance a North American tour.

Marillion were among the first to embrace the internet as a means of marketing and selling their records, and communicating with fans.

HMV spokesman Gennaro Castaldo said the campaign had led to the most orders on its retail website since its launch in 1997, beating the previous best of 4,000 for the Stereophonics' Moviestar in February.

Anyway, I lost interest when Fish left.

Wonder if Status Quo will try the same tactic.

>Inconsistency is such a useful thing.

Actually, I haven't blamed de or accused him of anything. I did call him
Mr. Douche Bag, but that's an honorific around these here parts. I simply
pointed out that Britain is an amusing little shithole, although no doubt there are
many sterling examples of humanity floating around on the surface.

Now TEP's an areshole. The grammar police takes no prisoners,
I see.

I give up.

Yet another potentially interesting ILM thread flushed down the toilet by you know who. (sigh)

...And there is no good book on Krautrock. ;)

Thanks!

Whats the story behind Toyal Wilcox's right wing leanings?

P and indeed shaw! what does this mean?

is anyone else here aware of the musical tastes of a cohort of John Tyndall (notorious British neo-Nazi leader) named Andrew Bower?

Actually, aren't we all full of contradictions, meaning that a) anti-asylum seeker racists will whole-heartedly cheer the liberation of France and b) listen to 'black people's music' while they do it and c) my local 'sexiest dance and r'n'b station uses Kula Shaker's 'Hey Dude' as backing for one of its things AND played Tattva during its golden hour segment recently.

i don't know which of the many prog threads to bump, so i'm going to bump this one

i was reading peter blegvad's wikipedia entry and came across this lengthy anecdote:

"Blegvad would later reveal (in an interview for the Hearsay fanzine) that "the piece that got me kicked out was "Living in the Heart of the Beast". I was assigned the task for the collective to come up with suitable verbals, and I wrote two verses about a woman throwing raisins at a pile of bones. Tim Hodgkinson just said, I'm sorry, this is not at all what we want. And he wrote reams of this political tirade. I admired his passion and application but it left me cold. I am to my bones a flippant individual, I don't know why I was created thus or what I'm trying to deny, but it clashed with the extreme seriousness. People who take themselves very seriously make me giggle, unless they're pointing a weapon at me or my loved ones".[1]"

1. "living in the heart of the beast" is a fucking fantastic song.
2. it would be better if it were about a woman throwing raisins at a pile of bones
3. i will never quite forgive henry cow for breaking up slapp happy.

1. Yes.
2. No. I like the words.
3. Maybe.

fuck it, let's do this here, past the (whole) point of no return (cheeky Wyatt reference innit)

notwithstanding that the ukpol thread has radicalised its posters not into IS or any Baader-Meinhof cell but merely into being total wankers, it does seem that for the politically-straitened, any hint of prog or indie 'excess' codes as somehow centrist or anti-revolutionary, even when coming out of the mouth of someone as blatantly left-wing and anti-establishment as Richard Dawson

i don't really have much of a point beyond this, but it is curious how artists of bygone eras like Wyatt or the RIO gang are rightly hailed as firebrands, but contemporary artists who mix musical complexity with politics are being dismissed by a noisy subsection of the boards as posers

i think you're misreading me, obviously i can't speak for alph. most of my complaints have been "not interesting enough".

and that's fine on its own but that wasn't exactly what you said iirc

look i don't want to fight you NV and 'total wankers' is affectionate exasperation more than FRIENDSHIP ENDED WITH but we can't go cancelling all of indie rock is my point here

i'm not asking anybody else to cancel it but as a style now it's largely regressive and yeah reactionary and that seems to me at odds with bold claims about politics etc - which as far as i'm concerned are never really a reason to enjoy a piece of music on their own anyway.

it's not unlike some of the twee-er, keep calm end of let's be generous and call them the "nice" wing of the soft left. in amongst all the affectionate slightly self-lampooning takes on their own class status or vision of nationhood they end up reflecting or playing with the same ideas as the people they're allegedly against.

i was unnecessarily gruff yesterday which kind of started out as joke trolling but my hangover picked it up and ran with it, and i'm sorry for that. didn't mean to come across actually nasty. a couple of caveats tho. it's not unheard of for you and some of the other ilm friends of meat and potatoes rock and roll to be disparaging about other acts or genres you don't really get, so y'know, fair play. and really it's not hard to dismiss me or anybody else doing a tired old "lol indie" shtick on a bad day. i mean it's there to be lolled at, sometimes.

i reserve the right to draw idiosyncratic rules about what does or doesn't suck and personally i don't like most "this sucks" nonsense but sometimes i don't know what the hell, scratch the itch.

politics thread is a whole nother conversation for another time and place, all i can say is that some of the radicalisation and yeah tedious fucking repetition of the same angry sloganeering comes from a place of having felt under attack from alleged allies and genuine tiredness and despair and irl precarious terror.

...my point being that those emotions are precisely those being discussed in that indie rock song you repeatedly laid into

and sure, I've been known to be a bit quick to judgement before - even perhaps once or twice during this EOY rundown - but I'd like to think that having said my bit I've gotten more accustomed to both leaving it be and also listening to others' reasons for why I'm wrong

a more sophisticated musical style does not equate directly onto a softer and more collaborationist politics

The problem isn't political music, the problem is indie music.

"but we can't go cancelling all of indie rock is my point here"

Why not? If the music is bad then why do I owe any of my time to listen to it?

yeah i mean how many times can i say "it's not more sophisticated" and y'know sophistication be damned anyway, i wouldn't describe his prior stuff as sophisticated but it felt, at least, more personal

i mean i think the idea that lumbering along with a few off-tune blues chords is inherently "more sophisticated" than something else might be an ish for me

"notwithstanding that the ukpol thread has radicalised its posters not into IS or any Baader-Meinhof cell but merely into being total wankers"

Sure am a wanker for seeing through the bullshit of tactical voting. Maybe my politics will be actually radical someday, like the um, IS.

lol I deliberately didn't mention Cage because I find his music profoundly uninteresting as a listening experience, barring an exception or two. But the intervening years certainly haven't agreed with me, so perhaps it's some form of justice.

xp

Aside from the reasons given so far, Stockhausen also worked far more with electronics than any of those, except possibly Cage, so it makes sense that musicians who were exploring electric instrumentation might have looked to him. There's also just the powerful visceral impact of some of his music.xps

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Musique concrète's protagonists don't appear to have been as 'marketable' fwiw.

Wrt Cage, I can see why jazzers might not have been taken by a guy who scorned improvisation and rockers might not have identified with
ideas of non-expression/non-intention. That said, Zappa and Patrick Moraz appeared on the 1993 Chance Operation tribute and a number of rockers have worked with the prepared piano.

Stockhausen was a pioneer wrt live electronics, which seems significant.

lol I deliberately didn't mention Cage because I find his music profoundly uninteresting as a listening experience, barring an exception or two.

― toilet-cleaning brain surgeon (pomenitul)

this is how i feel about stockhausen!

That's totally fair. The thing too is that both composers' outputs are so massive that there is likely much that could tip the balance either way were I to hear it.

Love both, although it took me a little while with Stockhausen.

To go back to this thread's original premise, part of me feels like Stockhausen is a prime candidate for proggiest major postwar composer, if only because of his penchant for high-minded yet unintentionally silly conceptual grand narratives. Berio, too, but for completely different reasons (mostly having to do with proto-polystylism).

also his penchant for quilting together traditions, which is key to what makes prog "progressive" imo: not just the world-music tape-tapestries (telemusik and hymnen are distortion-heavy cousins to all you need is love) but also his constant drive towards at combining competing elements in the avant-garde (composed serialism, musique concrete, electronic composition, live electronic manipulation of all the above, plus some cheekily unacknowledged thefts from the early minimalists, and -- post his starvation-tantrum to persuade his wife to return to him in 1968 -- free improvisation)

Played not bad jazz piano, in his spare time, so I believe.

Wouldn't be surprised given his son Markus's musical path.

also indeterminacy of course