Prog Rock

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.

the most offensive thing about foxtrot is that it's not very well produced.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/06/23/prog-rock-pomp-and-circumstance/

Prog rock should get an additional pass because it spawned nothing. It came and then it went. Subsequent generations weren’t saddled with nutty synthesizer solos and odes to each and every one of King Henry’s wives. Prog rock remains a curio, eminently easy to avoid, to disregard.

what I learned from this paragraph, towards the end, is that the author is unaware of metal

this is the only decent sentence in the whole thing: "Prog rock was stoner music, pure and simple."

posted the article because i'm still shocked to see any attention paid to prog

It's definitely true that you never hear Pink Floyd or Rush anymore.

Yeah, you know with Pitchfork's recent best songs of the `70's list, there was zero representation of prog (maybe a single Pink Floyd tune?). If a person had no prior knowledge of `70's popular music and used that list as an accurate representation of the landscape back then, they would just assume that prog had next to significance.

*next to no significance

Have another cup of coffee, Austin. Don't mind if I do.

thank you, austin! personal confession: my favorite music magazine is 'mojo'. prog rock (besides floyd) may as well never have existed according to them

If a person had no prior knowledge of `70's popular music and used that list as an accurate representation of the landscape back then,

Huh, people use Pitchfork this way?