Shameful confession time: I’m a long-time fan of prog rock. I suspect I’m not completely alone, as Dave Weigel wouldn’t have put this article together if there weren’t more than a tiny number of us fans still alive:
By 1967, Emerson was touring with the Jimi Hendrix Experience and Pink Floyd, and composing the first long classical-rock symphony. By 1970, he was one-third of a super-group that could sell out Madison Square Garden and summon 350,000 people to the Ontario (California) Speedway, possibly the biggest single concert of the 1970s.
And by 1977, Keith Emerson was, to critics and a new generation of fans, the wince-inducing icon of progressive rock. Prog. And prog, thanks to the heroic efforts of the culture-gatekeepers, was deader than Elvis locked in King Tut’s sarcophagus and spit out of an airlock.
You can’t completely kill an art form. Even if a musical genre becomes despised, it endures — on master tapes, on cut-out LPs, on Spotify or MP3-trade fora. Simon Reynolds describes how the “massive, super-available archive” gifted to us by the Internet allows anyone to rediscover anything, and pop music to gnaw its own tail. Hip-hop artists, our cultural magpies, comb through prog’s greatest hits to sample its stranger riffs and lost organ bleats. Modern, prog-influenced acts like Dream Theater and Porcupine Tree can sell out midsized venues.
But if ever a form of popular music dropped dead suddenly, it was prog. Progressive rock essentially disappeared, and has remained in obscurity for 35 years, ridiculed by rock snobs, ignored by fans, its most famous artists — Yes, King Crimson, ELP, Jethro Tull — catchphrases for pretentious excess.
Nope, you’re not the only one.
Comment by Fishplate — August 15, 2012 @ 05:51