Taking Sides: Genesis 1970-1977 Vs. Genesis 1978-91

gabriel tends to kermit it up a bit in the genesis days, there's some vox-and-lead-guitar only stems from "selling england" floating about that aren't particularly flattering to him

before genesis i believe collins did sing lead in flaming youth, who were, honestly, a quite fine band. ultimately the '60s stuff descended into his lugubrious cover of "groovy kind of love" but as r&b/soul-loving white british lads go you could do far worse. gabriel as well... that time hackett showed up at a gabriel solo concert in the '80s and they played "reach out (i'll be there)", a fine moment.

gabriel-era genesis is something i relate really strongly personally to, honestly. it's often dismissed as being the typical prog-renfaire nonsense, but not all schoolboy stories of ancient time are created equal. what story do genesis retell? the story of hermaphrodite. when i look at gabriel era genesis, i see a band with a frontman who, at just about every turn, subverted and defied the expectations of heteronormative male gender presentation. and you best believe he got shit for it.

good reading

revisited in the Slippermen

lovely post, Kate

more lessons in amazing portals of possibility :)

(spotify meanwhile followed seconds out with whiter shade of pale, which makes more sense to me as a source than stevie winwood, at least if i want my interest piqued)

tbf I'm really just talking about Winwood's voice

yes i'm not disagreeing particularly, just that some routes in leave me (personally) less excited than others

(my entire intervention here has been a very self-indulgent analysis of micro-details of my own evolving taste)

(a thing never before encountered before on ilxor.com)

lol this has been the best ilm thread in ages

phil is good again :)

xposting to myself, memory jogged: duh, I completely forgot that "Owner of a Lonely Heart" is half Motown riff. Still, prog does tend to shy away from soul stuff. Yes covering "America" seems more par for the course. Bartok seems like a another popular reference (see: ELP, King Crimson). Folk and classical, stuff that showcases the frilly and fussy.

90125 is, like i said, this wonderful anomaly, and it's soul roots are already distorted through T Horn and the burgeoning 80s reinvention. there's a good train of thought about how the trite anti-Prog narrative ignored all of that stuff tho, including the Collins/Gabriel stuff we've poked at on this last convo

Was there much of an anti-prog narrative in 1980-whatever, though? If anything, prog kind of won!

"Frilly and fussy" = not how I've ever thought of Bartok :P

there's still a banal kneejerk anti-Prog narrative now, depending where you look. the joy of criticism now is there's no papers of record, maybe.

xpost OK, not Bartok, lol. Maybe invoked as a signpost of Serious and Complex Thought, then.

It's actually kind of weird how many prog acts not just thrived but hit various commercial peaks in the '80s: Genesis, Gabriel, Yes, King Crimson, Asia, Rush. Marillion? (I've never heard Marillion.)The Police had prog roots, too.

Might be a North America/UK divide here? Classic rock radio was definitely still beaming Yes, Tull, Rush, and Floyd across this continent in the 80s, while you'd have to look to 'alternative' or even campus outlets to hear much that was punkier than the Cars or Police. I think things went differently on the other side of the Atlantic.

my prog challops starts from the feeling that it's like the unhappy families in the first sentence of anna karenina (the the defitinion of a game in philosophical investigation): there's no such thing as "typical prog" if this means a characteristic found in every exemplar. if someone happened on ELP and genesis independent of the critical history, would they identify them as versions of the same thing?

of course there's a fvckton of traces of all kinds of black music across prog as a whole, which is no surprise given the patchwork of rival 60s clubs and london scenes its players emerged from

the erasure of Prog as a (necessary) joke enemy comes into my "why critics who use the word 'Punk' as an adjective of approbation are worthless" theory but i feel like in real terms people of good ears have moved beyond this, it's a kvetch about a certain kind of basicness that doesn't really matter

of the uk-based names in that list, almost all very significantly rebooted themselves at some point between 76 and 80: often with a hiatus following what may well have been a crisis of nerve

(i know nothing abt asia and do not plan to change this)

that was members of yes and elp. had at least two huge hits here.

there's a massive tangle that could fill a lifetime of knot-pulling. cities vs suburbs - consider that in terms of the vast geographical gaps in north america vs the UK; sophisticates vs conservatives, access to records, class affinities in small towns vs cities, the relationship of both to national music press, shit is complicated sorry i've had a few

before even touching the sexual/gender/class twists in there

i mean to quote the Onion, "Rock History Written By the Losers"

Idk, is it that hard to hear a resemblance between the band that did "From the Beginning" and the one that did "Supper's Ready"?xps

one thing that might be intersting there sund4r is moving between the things that are consistent between the very first recordings and how they held those motifs when their interests had moved on, like never mind "Supper's Ready" there's still the same uptight thought in ""The Last Domino" somehow.

yes my thought experiment fails when knowledgeable but secretly hostile critics select for possible overlap :)

also lol what a horrible horrible singer greg lake is

i hate him so much

B-b-but he talked to the trees!

No personal hostility! :( The idea was very interesting, which is why I was trying to consider it critically!

lol i always mix that song up with Paint Your Wagon

Lake is cool on that first Crimson record.

i was teasing sund4r, don't worry :)

while i'm fucking up a Genesis thread that Kanye sample justifies 30 years of KC nerd-post-rock imo

Is he a prog fan? There was also the Anderson/Oldfield sample on the same album.

"fan" is a word innit? i don't know, but it seems to me like there's enough chops on those records to be attractive to a concerned sampler

He also samples Can on a different record. And Alan Parsons Project, iirc.

What I hate about "punk" love is what it excludes rather than what it admires, plus, y'know, lazy thought

yeah Lake isn't a bad singer. He has a very clear voice and isnt annoying. He's arguably the least annoying singer Crimson ever had. That said I don't like most ELP; but not because of him.

I actually quite like his voice but I also don't have the issues with KC's other singers that a lot of people seem to have.

I don't like ELP.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that The Nice are infinitely better than ELP.

Don't hste ELP tho.

Greg Lake's voice is awesome. Adrian Belew's voice, on the other hand, should only be heard faintly (and vainly) calling for help from the bottom of an abandoned mine-shaft.

B-b-but he talked to the trees!

― Let's kill the Queen and be legends (Noodle Vague), F

So did Eno! He also spoke to spiders and trees.

Eno is my Jesus so other rules are suspended

There are bits and pieces of ELP I enjoy. I own the first LP and throw it on sometimes. Also love "From the Beginning". The Nice = otm, though.

I enjoy their Love Beach nipples.

look, who doesn't love a nipple?

"fan" is a word innit? i don't know, but it seems to me like there's enough chops on those records to be attractive to a concerned sampler

For instance, who has ever heard Fruupp?

https://www.whosampled.com/Fruupp/

Watching/listening to the video upthread, I was thinking the band sounded much tighter on the more 'rocking' parts of "Supper's Ready" and some other tricky passages, especially the drumming, then realized it was Bruford instead of Collins. So I guess I like him less not only as a singer but also as a drummer?