A new guest to the confines of kw.com, RXB, just left a comment on one of my first posts, back from May 2005, re “progressive rock.”
RXB did make one interesting suggestion (”Let it be its own category, then. Why should [progressive rock] be debased by any sort of association with “rockin’”, at all?”) before moving on to his/her real point:
It’s interesting to see that, even today, there still appear to be those who feel that the existence and popularity of a more complex form of music threatens the validity of less complex forms. What else but sheer insecurity could explain the quite literally hysterically negative reviews that the music received at its inception? If “rockin’” became sterile, then that is the fault of the inherent limitations of the medium and the recycling of its limited vocabulary of cliches, and not of those who sought to escape them and–gasp!–actually do something difeerent, something that involved skill and imagination.
To which I replied, in part:
It’s not insecurity, RXB. It’s that the pretensiousness of much prog rock is in direct idealogical conflict with the admittedly simpler form of rock music which I frankly prefer.
I don’t know of any hysterically negative reviews but I do know that there were any number of bands that did/could fall within the rubric “progressive” - Chicago, Blood Sweat & Tears, Yes, Steely Dan - who were very popular. Yet, despite prog rock’s moment in the 70s sun and the refusal of some of these musicians to give way on stage in these latter years, progressive rock as an ongoing, creative endeavor no longer exists.
And despite the assertion in the Boston Globe that prompted my original post, to the effect that prog rock was seeing a revival, no such revivial has happened in the intervening 14 months, to my knowledge.
It’s not that prog rock is inately bad; it’s that rock and pop favor the simple, the direct, the percussive. Admittedly, this can be a detriment (most rap, a lot of disco) but it has produced some wonderful results (40s R&B, 50s rock ‘n’ roll, 70s funk).
When I got older and felt the need to listen to more complex music - something that should, but does not, happen to everybody - I did not turn to prog rock. Not on your life. I turned to jazz. In the 70s “fusion” years, prog rock and jazz had some overlap; Blood Sweat & Tears and Chase, for example, were rock bands whose “prog” element was derived from jazz. (By contrast the likes of Yes and ELP were influenced by classical music.) Even for a novice listener there existed these “ins” to gain access to, what was for me, a “new” form of music.
As an aside, it helped that my parents had pretty wide-ranging tastes, including the swing they heard as kids, the jazz of the 50s, 70s rock, and even novelty tunes. Thank God my Dad liked Spike Jones. I do not joke in saying that every kid should hear Spike Jones records when they’re growing up. In the 70s, rock desperately needed its own Spike Jones.
But I digress.
My first confused forays into jazz were clarified somewhat when a friend suggested I just listen to what I liked. Since swing was most familiar to me, I started there and later moved both back (traditional/Dixieland) and forward (modern jazz) in time.
Also, while I was in college, the release of two albums helped open up new music for me: Elvis Costello’s Almost Blue and Joe Jackson’s Jumpin’ Jive, covering country & western and jump, respectively. I was off to the races, listening to anything I could find and moving from genre to genre (R&B, blues, country, etc), some of it simple and some of it complex - but wherever possible finding what was good.
(As with any self-education, there are holes in my knowledge, especially re more popular and established artists who I took “as read,” but whose work I was not actually that familiar with, aside from hits. I’m still catching up with Bob Dylan, Roxy Music, etc.)
In the end, I learned to agree with Duke Ellington’s dictum, There’s only two kinds of music: good and bad.
“Prog,” considered as a genre, produces more bad music than, say, your day to day pop. Why stick with something that’s got diminishing returns? Simply because complexity is supposed to yield better results because it offers more options and is theoretically not constrained by a “limited vocabulary of cliches”?
It’s all just pop music, really, and though there are a few pop stars who still attempt more elaborate projects, with mixed results (the aforementioned Joe Jackson comes to mind), your best pop is made by talented people who are not dumbing down their work by making 3-minute pop records (Joe again, most of the time). They instead work within the limitations of the form and come up with something novel, or fun, or new or perhaps even great.
Well, this afternoon I have some time to myself before getting my Monday morning face on. Think I’ll a crack cold one or three and listen to some good music. A partial list might shape up like this, based on what I’ve got lying around right now: Gerry Mulligan, Richard Thompson, T-Bone Burnett, a Joe Jackson bootleg, some mix ‘n’ match from 70s compilations and stuff I transferred off vinyl, including some Lena Horne tracks with sublime Marty Paich arrangements.
I here quote David Johansen, of the New York Dolls, as seen in today’s New York Times:
I mean, I have my ideas about rock ‘n’ roll and all that kind of stuff. I don’t know if it’s actually necessary for the species, but it sure makes life fun.
I guess my biggest problem with prog rock is that it doesn’t bring the fun.
Now, where’d I leave my Louis Jordan CDs?
Tags: Culture by KevinWolf
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