{"id":20674,"date":"2013-06-15T09:01:49","date_gmt":"2013-06-15T14:01:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=20674"},"modified":"2013-06-15T09:01:49","modified_gmt":"2013-06-15T14:01:49","slug":"prog-rock-fans-unite","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/06\/15\/prog-rock-fans-unite\/","title":{"rendered":"Prog rock fans, unite!"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Maclean’s<\/em>, Stephen Skratt<\/a> talks about a new book on prog rock:<\/p>\n

Let the hating begin. ELP are often cited as the reason punk had to happen. After the Beatles and before the Sex Pistols, they, along with Genesis, Yes, King Crimson and Pink Floyd, sold millions of records, topped critics\u2019 polls and ushered in a golden era of prog rock. There were capes, songs about supernatural anaesthetists, a trilogy of albums about a \u201cradio gnome,\u201d and King Arthur on ice \u2014 literally, with skating pantomime horses (courtesy of a Rick Wakeman show). Prog virtuosos fused rock, classical, folk, jazz and Renaissance music, and took little from blues. The music couldn\u2019t get more white \u2014 or more unfashionable. Twenty-minute songs performed by earnest young men trying to sound like an orchestra, hopping from one instrument to another, or playing several at once: this was large-scale, ambitious music meant to accompany grand lyrics and stage spectacles. Gone was sex, drugs and rock \u2019n\u2019 roll, replaced by Kubrickian space-outs, Eastern philosophy and walls of synthesizers \u2014 or guitars trying to sound like synthesizers.<\/p>\n

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

Now the music is crawling out from under its toadstool in Yes Is The Answer<\/em>, edited by Tyson Cornell and Marc Weingarten. Cornell, founder of L.A.-based Rare Bird Books and a musician himself, admits the idea of having respectable writers challenge the accepted gospel about prog was far-fetched. \u201cWhen Marc and I started doing this,\u201d he says, \u201ceverybody we talked about it with was just laughing at us. But then people started to tell their stories, and it just unfolded.\u201d<\/p>\n

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

The book \u2014 a tribute to what Weingarten identifies in the introduction as \u201cprog rock\u2019s grandeur, its mushy mysticism, its blissed-out mystery\u201d \u2014 is a high point in a renaissance that\u2019s been building: a reverential 2009 BBC documentary (Prog Britannia<\/em>), a magazine (Classic Prog<\/em>), and a growing number of festivals, including Prog Angeles, organized by Cornell and featuring members of Weezer and others. Tastemaking online music journal Pitchfork<\/em> drops the P-word on an almost weekly basis in describing some impossibly cool band\u2019s music, from metal monsters Mastodon to French electronic duo Justice \u2014 an admission, finally, that someone was listening. And there is the full-on revival of the band responsible for a concept album about hemispheres of the brain: Rush. As Nirvana\u2019s Dave Grohl said in his speech inducting Rush into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, \u201cThere\u2019s one mystery that eclipses them all: when the f\u2013k did Rush become cool?\u201d<\/p>\n

For all this, it\u2019s unlikely prog will get the reappraisal its supporters feel it\u2019s due. The biggest strike against the genre has long been that it\u2019s bloated, corporate, the antithesis of punk \u2014 even though in spirit prog may not have been all that far off from punk. They shared a broad political ideology. Henry Cow and the other bands make up \u201crock in opposition,\u201d a popular subgenre of prog, which, aside from influencing avant-garde<\/em> jazz musicians over the years, make the Clash look like weekend protesters. King Crimson\u2019s 21st Century Schizoid Man<\/em> opens with the snarl of, \u201cNothing he\u2019s got he really needs.\u201d Prog explored dystopian worlds of environmental apocalypse and corporate greed, occasionally with more subtlety and whimsy than punk. And prog rockers were as committed to their outlandish musical vision as punk was to its three chords; far from all being pampered middle-class kids, they too struggled for an audience and money during their formative years. The average punk band just imploded within a few years of forming \u2014 they never stuck around long enough to be derided as \u201cdinosaurs.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Maclean’s, Stephen Skratt talks about a new book on prog rock: Let the hating begin. ELP are often cited as the reason punk had to happen. After the Beatles and before the Sex Pistols, they, along with Genesis, Yes, King Crimson and Pink Floyd, sold millions of records, topped critics\u2019 polls and ushered in […]<\/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":[32,4,28],"tags":[263,86,200,915,772],"class_list":["post-20674","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-britain","category-media","tag-1970s","tag-criticism","tag-music","tag-progrock","tag-rush"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-5ns","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20674","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=20674"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20674\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20688,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20674\/revisions\/20688"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20674"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20674"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20674"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}