Prog Rock

When was Dean talking about? I can't imagine Ween as adults being embarrassed by liking anything.

the game was different before deaner and wayne etc scored with "push the little daisies" and "she don't use jelly". those two bands going major label seemed to loosen other people up to confessing what they like sometimes not just talking up what they think is cool (not that there isn't overlap!)

it was on his old website which appears to be down now. I can't remember exactly what it was but it was something like, "these are the records I would whip out when all the girls went away"

Now, there's nothing (musically) to react against, really. You can be as experimental as you want

― Dominique, Tuesday, June 13, 2017

Is this true, though? The difference, to my mind, is that nowadays experimentalism is automatically met with indifference rather than scorn or outrage. The mainstream still very much exists and in some ways is more dominant than ever.

dean's about a million and change bros' surrogate awesome older brother. but mary timony recorded queen-like prog as killer as ween, at least on the magic city. if there were any justice in this fallen country, besides trump not being president, critics would feel free to bring up happy the man in tortoise reviews and not as a zing. van der graaf generator's impact on the italian prog scene, a la the velvet underground on the new york dolls and such, would be more familiar, too. alas

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Depends on who's looking I guess -- you can totally ignore the mainstream if you want.

Agree about indifference (in a general sense), but it's because you can choose to pay attention to whatever you want. There are still "scenes", but it's no longer making a statement, or presenting a real alternative to the mainstream just making weird rock music. UNLESS you find a way to do it that generates clicks, press, money, etc. And in that sense, the style of music is a lot less relevant than the thing (whatever it is) that makes you stand out from the crowd for that brief moment in time.

all of this is me leading up to my argument that Kanye, the Kardashians and Trump are our finest prog artists

GTR > KKT

Depends on who's looking I guess -- you can totally ignore the mainstream if you want.

Agree about indifference (in a general sense), but it's because you can choose to pay attention to whatever you want. There are still "scenes", but it's no longer making a statement, or presenting a real alternative to the mainstream just making weird rock music. UNLESS you find a way to do it that generates clicks, press, money, etc. And in that sense, the style of music is a lot less relevant than the thing (whatever it is) that makes you stand out from the crowd for that brief moment in time.

― Dominique, Tuesday, June 13, 2017

Agreed, re: the 'thing' that distinguishes you from the pack and that is systematically something other than the music itself, assumed to be mere form rather than content (assuming that distinction still makes sense). Politics in particular is routinely presumed to determine aesthetics altogether (which I'd argue is problematic even from a strictly political point of view).

As far as choice goes, it's a quasi utopian situation for ILMers and the like, but it paradoxically creates a closed loop for busier and/or less curious listeners who may otherwise have had their minds blown by an utterly unexpected musical experience. It's easier than ever to make a beeline for whatever genre you're primarily interested in and stick to it from here to eternity.

This is all anecdotal, of course, but since I don't know anyone who cares about music the way most people on this forum do, I tend to assume that it's the norm. Anyhow, my sense is that the gap between melomaniacs and non-melomaniacs is wider than ever.

But anywhere that remotely valules being "hip"-- prog still has this aura of nerdiness, of being the definition of stuff that isn't cool, or something you can just put on when people come over to your house.

Heh, the only person I know who self-identifies as a 'hipster' has sung along to The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway with me while driving around Montreal.

IMO it's hard to be considered a "prog" band these days unless you're specifically playing a retro prog style, like symphonic prog, RIO, etc. Original prog bands were progressive compared to rock and roll, and since rock music being "artistic" was a relatively new thing, that meant (for a decade or so) you could try all manner of things and be considered progressive. Once the 80s hit, you either had to recycle the original bands' styles, incorporate new wave/punk, or go so far down the experimental rabbit hole, a lot of the original prog fans wouldn't have even considered you prog at all.

― Dominique

"prog" as a movement was a collection of non-unique signifiers that congealed. someone makes a disco record today and it's instantly recognizable, because nothing had ever sounded like that before, because it had a BEAT. particularly with "big tent" prog it's hard to name an immediately identifiable _sound_ that isn't specifically and detrimentally beholden to the 1970s ("oh, a mellotron!"), which further serves to rubbish any vanguardist claims the genre may once have made (also to disco's benefit: it was not first and foremost a vanguardist genre).

the missing link

https://www.cloudsmusic.com/biography

captivated by despisers, lost in the canyons of your mind

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUOEr0RMxJM&feature=youtu.be

https://youtu.be/UUOEr0RMxJM

But prog geeks mostly hate jam bands as far as I can tell, definitely the Rush fans in my high school had no use for the Dead. There's a cultural divide as much as a musical one.

Makes me wonder - were there any drugs specifically associated with prog in the 70s?

I recall pot being the predominant choice for suburban progheads like myself in the 70s and early 80s.

Yes, same here. But I don't know what the bands were using.

the road stories i've read from the era mainly fixate on prog bands being divided into pot camps and beer camps, with apparently not much crossover between the two. (and not much room for other stuff - you could have a coke habit _or_ a synthesizer, but seldom both.)

Wasn't it the Yessongs movie where Rick Wakeman displayed a fine collection of empty bottles on top of his keyboards?

interesting that psychedelics weren't part of the story

Dave Weigel's book is pretty good so far (intro and 2 chapters in). It's not as illuminating as all the personal essays in Yes Is the Answer, it's def a straight history of the genre; but worth checking out.

Don't quaaludes/mandrax and acid feature in there at all?

Yes Is the Answer reviews don't sound very enticing. Apparently a lot of the pieces are by people embarrassed by music they used to like or even never liked in some cases?

listening to Genesis today

Fucking "Supper's Ready"...really blows my mind how human beings could sit in a room and come out with this piece of music

another thing I love about old Genesis is you can always hear little bits of the canny pop band they would become, the little minute-and-a-half McCartney-eque bits in Supper's Ready really stand out among their peers

lol, I listened to that this morning too, after mentioning it on the Relayer thread,and the Beatlisms stuck out to me too.

tt made me listen to Foxtrot in its entirety yesterday, there is definitely something to her claim that it is one of the greats

I'd rather unfairly overlooked it beforehand

Watcher of the Skies always struck me as a Beatles-y melody.

"watcher of the skies" has "hello goodbye" vibes

I love "Watcher" and "Supper's Ready" but never quite got into the rest of it, "Horizons" excepted of course

Watcher of the Skies is let down by the lyrics -- not the content of them, but they just don't scan and aren't very singable. Otherwise, it's a brilliant song.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgLB_t2DcfU

i was checking an algiers vid earlier and this was the sequel, and i'm..."what is this proggy wibbling"? is this nu-prog?

that is dope

Foxtrot is the best Genesis LP.

supper's ready is a fucking mess. thank god they never did a "side-long" (*not actually a side-long) number again.

sorry you are wrong, it must be lonely in your supper's ready hating bubble.

i can forgive them willow farm or i can forgive them the greengrocer's apostrophe, but not both

"greengrocer's apostrophe" I have no idea what that means but ok?

Idg that either. "Supper's Ready" = "supper is ready", surely?

"Horizon's"

oh, "lover's leap" presumably, which I believe is how it's written out on the jacket.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lover's%20leap

Supper's Ready really does sound like a compilation of castoffs or various sections that didn't fit into other songs (similar to the middle section on The Battle of Epping Forest). Still one of the best sidelongs of the 70s.

Gross apostrophe abuses unlikely among the crymes of these poshos.

The return of the opening motif after the tense 9/8 standoff and Gabriel straining his high register is massive and cathartic.

yes, i meant "horizon's". both "supper's ready" and "lover's leap" are perfectly grammatically correct.

my loathing of "supper's ready" really does come down to "willow farm", which was, i'm told, inserted in there just so people wouldn't think it was another "stagnation" (really? how deaf would you have to be to confuse it with "stagnation"? we're not exactly dealing with an "in the wake of poseidon" situation here, guys).

the older i get the more i come around to it - though damn near every "side-long epic" could stand to have at least six minutes cut from it (probably including even "a plague of lighthouse keepers", which i love and all but i can't remember anything between "presence of the night" and "where is the god that guides my hand?"), and though "willow farm" is very much the musical equivalent of the magical underpant gnomes' "????", it's not _quite_ as compositionally incoherent as all that. it sure as hell isn't close to being as well-constructed as "close to the edge", but very little prog is, and at least genesis could always write a good tune.

the other thing, and this is snobby, but genesis before "selling england by the pound" come off as cheap and underrehearsed, which to be fair they were. for a genre as chop-heavy as prog they sure did sound sloppy - phil collins, who i know for damn sure is an excellent drummer, manages to make 9/8 sound as leaden as pink floyd. it's really odd how much more apocalyptic the "evil jam" (usually dismissed as second-rate wankery) is than "apocalypse in 9/8".

Huh, was it spelled that way on the original vinyl? It's "Horizons" on my digital version and in anything Google turns up for me.

I really enjoy "Supper's Ready", even though I don't think it's in the same class as "Close to the Edge" in composition or performance.

Tbh, if anything offends me on Foxtrot, it's probably the mess they made of Bach's G major cello prelude in "Horizons".

i like willow farm. nothing wrong with a touch of whimsey.