{"id":16508,"date":"2012-08-18T00:05:52","date_gmt":"2012-08-18T05:05:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=16508"},"modified":"2013-06-15T08:57:49","modified_gmt":"2013-06-15T13:57:49","slug":"prog-rock-today-looking-back-on-the-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/08\/18\/prog-rock-today-looking-back-on-the-future\/","title":{"rendered":"Prog rock today: looking back on the future"},"content":{"rendered":"

The final installment of Dave Weigel’s history of prog rock at Slate<\/em><\/a>:<\/p>\n

This is what fascinates me about prog. The music is relentlessly futurist, with no nostalgia for anything in rock<\/em>. Was there excess? I think we\u2019ve answered that \u2014 there was horrible<\/em> excess, and some of it involved the lead singer from the Who singing atop a giant rubber penis. In the U.K., the music press turned on prog, and turned viciously. Same thing in the States. \u201cIf you can\u2019t have real quality,\u201d wrote Lester Bangs of ELP, \u201cwhy not go for quantity on a Byzantine scale, why not be pompous if you\u2019re successful at it?\u201d Bangs, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, made it into Cameron Crowe\u2019s \u201870s nostalgia film Almost Famous<\/em>. ELP did not.<\/p>\n

[. . .]<\/p>\n

Pop\u2019s move away from prog didn\u2019t happen that quickly. It was slow and tortured and involved a ton of moving parts breaking around the same time. In the United States, where most of this music ended up being sold, progressive rock radio slowly, slowly was assimilated into the Borg of commercial networking. \u201cThe reason free-form, underground progressive ended up becoming unpopular is it was the ultimate \u2018active\u2019 format,\u201d says Donna Halper. \u201cIt was aimed at music freaks who adored everything about the newest groups and didn’t ever wanna hear a hit. OK, fine, that makes up about 6 percent of your audience. But the mass audience wanted a middle ground.\u201d A&R men stopped looking for \u201cprogressive\u201d acts. Sire stopped promoting Renaissance and started schlepping the Ramones. \u201cYou\u2019d put an album out, but they were expecting to sell so many thousand,\u201d says Davy O\u2019List. \u201cI don\u2019t think it hurt the live concert attendances, but it hurt overall.\u201d<\/p>\n

Culturally and lyrically, prog began as anti-\u201cestablishment\u201d music. But compositionally, it rewarded long listens and worship of virtuosity. Punk deconstructed that. [. . .]<\/p>\n

Prog, went the thinking, was an affront against sincerity. If you gussied a song up with strings, surely you were covering for a lack of feeling. That point was made countless times, usually in the same terms with which Bangs dismissed ELP. The originators of prog were trying to make simple pop songs irrelevant. The music that replaced prog copied that reaction \u2014 what had gone before was corrupt, and had to be destroyed.<\/p>\n

That sensibility lasted longer than most medieval land wars. The occasional mainstream defender of prog always, always started in defense mode. In June, this year, Ted Leo published a confessional in Spin<\/em> all about his love for Rush. It was packaged as a \u201cconfessional\u201d because Rush were proggy, and you couldn\u2019t endorse prog qua<\/em> prog.<\/p>\n

[. . .]<\/p>\n

Rush, who came late to the prog wave (1974), have trimmed back the pretention while flaunting the virtuosity. As a reward, they can still play stadiums, in basically any country. They just happen to be the most sellable artists in a niche genre. Virtuoso metal and math rock, bands like Mastodon and Protest the Hero, have nestled into the same place. That\u2019s one fractal of modern-day prog.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The final installment of Dave Weigel’s history of prog rock at Slate: This is what fascinates me about prog. The music is relentlessly futurist, with no nostalgia for anything in rock. Was there excess? I think we\u2019ve answered that \u2014 there was horrible excess, and some of it involved the lead singer from the Who […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,28],"tags":[263,200,45,915,772],"class_list":["post-16508","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-media","tag-1970s","tag-music","tag-nostalgia","tag-progrock","tag-rush"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-4ig","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16508","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16508"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16508\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20681,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16508\/revisions\/20681"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16508"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16508"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16508"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}