I haven’t seen any threads on these:
Article in The New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/06/19/the-persistence-of-prog-rock
Book generating decent coverage about Prog rock: https://www.amazon.com/Show-That-Never-Ends-Rise/dp/0393242250
They respect Prog and its enduring popularity, while putting it in context across musical genres and in the history of the day and the emergence of punk.
I’ve personally been getting into prog rock again in the last year, with the discovery of a few internet radio stations with few adverts but often foreign language, it seemed to never lose its popularity in some countries like Holland, Germany and France.
It’s got me into a whole bunch of bands I missed from the time, because apart from playing the normal famous ones like Yes, Pink Floyd, Rush, Marillion etc, they’ve focused on others I missed like IQ, Sylvan, Saga, Galahad and Pendragon…
Nice to get the hourly news in Dutch. Always something I don’t understand going on in Rotterdam…
I started listening to Gryphon after hearing them mentioned in a discussion Dave Weigel did last month. Very surprised how much they appealed to me given what their nonrock influences are.
Dave’s twitter has good political coverage btw.
I heard the interview with him on NPR this morning. I’ve long been a fan of prog rock, especially some of the more obscure (to Americans anyway) bands from the 70s like Camel, Nektar, and Triumvirat (aka “the German ELP”). I am seriously thinking of buying the book, it sounds like a fun read.
I can highly recommend Prog magazine; I’ve been reading it since the 1st issue.
Yes.
An unfortunate cluster of croakings recently with Chris Squire, Kieth Emerson, Greg Lake and John Wetton. Sure we all get old, but I thought that was a little heavy how they all went in almost succession it seemed.
Great musicians, sorely missed.
What I find weird with any of these discussions about prog was their need to explain how deluded the genre all was…
I grew up past the time, so got into it late 70’s and early 80’s, but I never felt any of this sense that “this is making music better”, I just thought “they like concept albums and some have a lot of classical influences and musicianship”.
If anyone thought this big Armadillo thing that ELP had was serious and that Roger Deans artwork was more than just album artwork, then they’re clearly never really been a fan, and buy into this popular narrative that rock was clearly done by 1977 and punk was so wonderful. It’s amazing how they skip all the spitting that the punks used to do back then in the revisionist present, as well as the fighting. I’d not be attending a punk concert back then even if I liked the music…
If anything, I’d say prog more disappeared during the 90’s. The unpopularity of the seed genre (straight AOR rock) with grunge (not exactly a carefree and amusing genre) meant it faded for years. Like I’ve mentioned elsewhere, some of the bands survived because there were countries which still loved them, european ones, with the likes of Pendragon surviving for nearly 40 years now…
Recently they’ve had a rebirth I think. Younger bands are making the music. Some, like Floyd, are so mainstream and popular that people still listen to some of it daily too…
These days, I hear a huge amount of prog influence in newer metal bands, particularly those from northern and eastern Europe. It’s especially evident, of course, in symphonic metal, but I see it showing its face in many other metal subgenres. Perhaps not so much with the odd time signatures (though I do encounter some of that), but even some of the more “straight ahead” metal bands are putting out longer compositions that have definite “movements” to them, as well as blending various types of “traditional” music and instruments into the metal, adapting compositional techniques from other genres into the metal structure, and creating “concept albums”.
Interesting timing. Last week, I dug Red out from the crypt for a first listen in who knows how long. Man, that is a great album.
DAYUM that chorus in “Fallen Angel”, huh?
Fuckin’ eh.
Pisses me off there’s six trillion versions of it on youtube, including the dog-awful 8-bit version (what in the name of Ken Nordine is the fucking deal with 8-bit anyway? Who listens to that dumb annoying shit?), yet, no original.:mad:
This version might sound a little off.
Bumping this thread because I just finished reading Weigel’s book. It was a fun read, but in my opinion way too short. It seems to me like he focused on too few bands, and either briefly covered or totally ignored way too many others. He could have easily gone another hundred pages or so and still kept it interesting. It almost reads like he couldn’t decide if he wanted to write a book about ELP or King Crimson, so he did both, and just covered a bunch of other bands as filler.
What the book really needs, though, is a companion CD, so you can listen to some of these bands/songs as he is discussing them. In cases where I didn’t already have the music in my personal library, I found myself going to YouTube and trying to pull some of these up so I could hear what he is talking about.
Dave is a political reporter’s political reporter, and very funny.