Van der Graaf Generator / Peter Hammill S& D, C or D?

Trying to think of the best examples of awesomely ugly vs ugly-ugly.

I definitely don't want to delimit "good" sounds from bad, it's definitely not that simple, I guess I'm thinking about ugliness in the service of interesting versus ugliness as inattention to what music can be

RJG is a sociopath and his account of quitting BJH is bullshit, as is everything else he's ever said about anything. But yes The Enid are about the one overtly gay prog band, shame it has to be that guy really.

I know Godfrey tried unsuccessfully to sue Barclay James Harvest not too many years ago; I also remember him making the quizzical statement that the Enid were loved at punk clubs because they were so "un-punk" that they were actually perceived as punk, or words to that effect.

I tried getting into them because Voivod spoks so reverentially about them but it was hard since they were so damn prolific.

I still have a couple things on the shelves.

I like plenty of Voivod and that shout totally makes sense but aren't we talking about another band too interesting to get appropriate respect from their genre peers?

Yeah and I guess Voivod is somewhat prolific too but the difference is I was along the whole time for Voivod and came in late to Van der Graaf Generator.

I know Godfrey tried unsuccessfully to sue Barclay James Harvest not too many years ago; I also remember him making the quizzical statement that the Enid were loved at punk clubs because they were so "un-punk" that they were actually perceived as punk, or words to that effect.

― Halfway there but for you

yeah greg lake made the same claim about ELP. see: rick wakeman's "i'm so straight i'm a weirdo". which is _almost_ right. the truth is that being straight is just fucking weird. i mean fundamentally ok a lot of the time, don't get me wrong, but _weird_.

ELP are incredibly hetero, have you not seen the cover of Love Beach?

― frogbs

just don't ask d3n1s3 sh4rp3 about carl palmer

i definitely need to check out carmen, a lot of this stuff is like... niche symphonic and symphonic has never really been my jam. also definitely interested in david clark allen's fetish art lol.

but yes The Enid are about the one overtly gay prog band, shame it has to be that guy really.

― where did the times go (Matt #2)

i mean that's kind of queer shit in general, though... being queer means you go through a lot of shit that cishets don't and that fucks a person up, queer pioneers tend to be kinda fucked up people. if you look at a lot of the people trans people like me try to reclaim as trans, they're kinda awful. elagabalus? terrible, fucked-up person. ed wood? incredibly bad filmmaker and racist drunk. doesn't excuse it, but there's this desire for queer pioneers to be like tom hanks in _philadelphia_, which to me, from what i've seen of that movie and its legitimacy narrative, it kinda distorts a lot of what makes queer people _queer_.

i guess that's the other thing, just being queer doesn't make a person's work queer. i heard dee palmer's solo album just because i wanted to hear what kind of music she would make. i don't hear anything queer at all in it. it's just kind of an ordinary prog record. which is good! i defend that strongly. trans people don't have to make "trans music", like, our entire lives aren't about being trans.

anyway i'm gonna have to listen to their stuff but given that one of their best-known records is "aerie faerie nonsense", yeahhhh that sounds pretty queer. didn't stand out because faeries are _standard in prog_ except it's usually invoked by cishets for some reason? just... to me they're missing out on the best shit about this stuff.

I get what you're saying but I think you have to separate queerness from sexuality somehow, because prog music is pretty nonsexual as a whole to me. and when it does get horny it always comes off very weird. imo "Ladies of the Road" is worse than just a filler track, it almost ruins the band's entire image (though tbf Crimson was kind of falling apart there anyway). its not just a sex thing either, when prog bands sing about any sort of normal thing (see Triumvirat's concept album about getting laid off at the factory) it just comes off strange to me

there is a modern prog band called The Tangent that sorta pulls it off though, mainly because you just know the dude is an IT worker doing this in his spare time

"when prog bands sing about any sort of normal thing (see Triumvirat's concept album about getting laid off at the factory) it just comes off strange to me"

surely that's good?

I think Fandangos In Space by Carmen is an essential prog album, just amazing. On David Clark Allen's blog he writes about new flamenco bands.

I always thought the faeries and other fantasy cliches weren't that prevalent in prog but just appear more than in most rock genres. Same with power metal, I expected epic fantasy full time but a lot of the songs are about the things anyone sings about.

That Gentle Giant album "Three Friends" sounds like a pretty normal mundane story.

it is about a gay ogre orgy

Troll Throuple

I get what you're saying but I think you have to separate queerness from sexuality somehow, because prog music is pretty nonsexual as a whole to me. and when it does get horny it always comes off very weird. imo "Ladies of the Road" is worse than just a filler track, it almost ruins the band's entire image (though tbf Crimson was kind of falling apart there anyway). its not just a sex thing either, when prog bands sing about any sort of normal thing (see Triumvirat's concept album about getting laid off at the factory) it just comes off strange to me

there is a modern prog band called The Tangent that sorta pulls it off though, mainly because you just know the dude is an IT worker doing this in his spare time

― frogbs

King Crimson's image is really interesting to me! I think they're a very... like not musically complex, but _personally_ complex band. The image of King Crimson often doesn't accord with the reality. That's what I found so fascinating about the recent King Crimson documentary. It really delves into that.

This idea of King Crimson as this non-sexual, intellectual, cerebral band is, as far as I can tell, completely divorced from the reality. The impression I get from Fripp's statements about this period is that he was pretty much a huge slut. "Ladies of the Road" isn't even their first paean to groupies - "Cadence and Cascade" is also on that theme. In the "Larks' Tongues in Aspic" period there were a fair few references to analingus, as well.

I definitely do... I mean I don't differentiate queerness from sexuality in an _absolute_ sense. My gender identity isn't the same thing as my sexual identity. (My sexual identity is one that I've seen described as "WTFSexual", as in "What even is sex?" I'm not asking that ironically. I genuinely do not know what "sex" is supposed to be.)

I guess when I talk about queerness and the lack thereof I look at it kind of along the same lines as Natalie Reed's "Null HypotheCis". The default reading for me of prog isn't asexual or non-gendered. It's cisgender, heterosexual music, whether it's _explicitly_ sexual or not. There are a lot of implicit assumptions in there, things that aren't even noticeable to cishets but just don't track with my own experience and understanding. I mean, look, I don't want to get too sociologist here, but the music of, say, Magma, which is propulsive, repetitive music that drives towards an explosive finale... I'll just say that it _parallels_ normative cis male sexuality. I understand the appeal of that kind of sex. It's not the way I do things. That's not to say that Magma's music is explicitly sexual music or that music is all about sex or whatever whatever. There's just a level of resonance with cis male sexuality that's just _there_, it's congruent in a way where the presence or absence of congruence isn't even a question. And to me, I feel that incongruence pretty strongly.

A lot of what I like about prog rock is what I've seen referred to as "padding", as being "aimless". King Crimson talks of their name being evocative of a "man with an aim". I'm a woman and to the extent that I have an aim, it's mostly to live in and embody the moment. (Which, actually, is King Crimson's aim too... we get along a lot better than the name might suggest!)

Prog rock songs can be very long and while they do tend to eventually get where they're going, it's a long, often scenic trip. They don't get in and out within two minutes. Which, again, I'm not condemning. I think that's pretty cool, having that quick hardcore blast of energy. When I think about myself, how I express myself, that's not how I do things. If I arrive at a conclusion at all, it's almost by accident. That's the feeling I get from my favorite prog - oh, that actually makes sense? I didn't expect that to make sense, I thought we were just wandering around aimlessly. When I do stuff that's... _maybe_ sex? Anyway, that's kind of how I go about things. I'm very fond of the "fuck around and find out" approach.

And there's a sort of tension between that sort of structural _queerness_ I find in prog with the way so much of it is cishet coded. That's kind of what I mean when I talk about music not being queer, I don't necessarily mean explicitly, I mean sometimes people's queerness informs their work, the way cishet people's cishet-ness informs their work. Honestly maybe that's why Palmer's album disappointed me... it's missing any kind of implicit sense of gender or sexual identity whatsoever. It's just kind of _there_.

That Gentle Giant album "Three Friends" sounds like a pretty normal mundane story.

― Bulky Pee Pants (Tom D.), Sunday, January 14, 2024 8:59 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

it is about a gay ogre orgy

― I? not I! He! He! HIM! (akm)

six of one, half a dozen of the other