Just checking in to be sure that 10cc is still in the lead. Although, if Firefallhad been listed, I’d have had a hard time choosing between the two…
Very well said. Only in the last few years I have become appreciative of songs that are just catchy tunes. But I have never understood the dislike some show bands that play their instruments well and show it.
hogFat…er, make that Foghat.
Saw them open for someone, I think it was J Tull.
Awful.
Others, for you punk fans…
Dead Kennedy’s
Sniveling Sh!ts
Just noise.
Rush is one of those bands that people may like or dislike, but few with any knowledge of music consider them untalented. Objectively speaking, they are in fact very good musicians.
I have no problem with anyone saying they dislike Rush - taste is subjective and the same subject-matters are not going to interest everyone.
But why is it “baffling” that people who are, by any objective account, very good musicians, would have loyal fans? People tend to admire talent.
Is this poll a whoosh?
It’s baffling insofar as they have a cult-like status that I’ve not seen with any other prog band except maybe Floyd. As in, the fanbase possesses a fervour that means any criticism of the band is greeted with… rather strong responses, typically.
I don’t think they’re untalented, but I do think their talent is somewhat overstated by their fans, as if Rush invented the idea of odd time signatures and so forth.
Is Floyd generally seen as prog rock? They’ve always sounded a bit different–more atmospheric, soulful, and less “showy” than what I typically think of as prog rock.
As for odd time signatures, I don’t understand why anyone thinks they’re such a big deal. Yes, they’re unusual in Western pop music, but go to a Greek or Balkan wedding and you’ll hear odd time signatures aplenty, with people dancing and tapping along to them like it’s the most natural thing in the world. It’s all about familiarity. Playing a 7/8 or 13/8 pulse really isn’t much harder than a 4/4 when you’re used to it.
All the bands we’re arguing about put out quite a variety of songs during their careers. If we’re going to address the alleged suckitude of a particular band, we need weneed to get down to specific songs and why they specifically suck.
And how much airplay a song got/gets is part of the equation, since it’s hard to hate a song you never have to listen to.
They’re prog, IMHO, in that the music is long-form blues-based space rock with avant-garde influences. The title suite from Atom Heart Mother is surely prog. But I agree that they’re quite distinct from most other bands in the genre.
Floyd is Floyd. They were far too big to be said to have a cult following and they had too strong of an acid rock root and blues root to really be called Prog. They were spacey and strange like prog rock but not really prog rock.
FWIW, the ProgArchives site includes Pink Floyd in its lists.
They also include Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue in that list, so I’d take it with a grain of salt. Anyhow, that list has Floyd as “Psychedlic/Space Rock,” while the other bands that I mentioned have “prog” in their genre description.
Yeah, I saw the Miles Davis inclusion after I posted. Still, regarding Floyd, I suppose it depends on how narrowly or broadly you define prog. I have a friend who loves Floyd but can’t make the leap to Yes or Genesis, and I suspect that’s true for many Floyd fans, which does suggest Floyd probably isn’t in the same category.
If you include, say, The Wall as prog, you may as well also include Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell, and then where would we be? 
In the early 80s it seemed like everyone had either the Wall or Dark Side of the Moon in their collection. It didn’t matter if they were into Punk, Heavy Metal, Pop, R&B, Rock or whatever. Only my fellow Prog Rock fans had Yes, ELP or Rush and especially King Crimson. Tull was more mainstream but nothing like Floyd.
(Arguing with myself…) I think the intro to the Wikipedia page on progressive rock makes a compelling case for including Floyd in prog:
[ul]
[li]“a mostly British attempt to elevate rock music to new levels of artistic credibility.”[/li][li]pushed “rock’s technical and compositional boundaries” by going beyond the standard rock or popular verse-chorus-based song structures[/li][li]“…explored extended musical structures which involved intricate instrumental patterns and textures and often esoteric subject matter.”[/li][li]Progressive rock bands sometimes used “concept albums that made unified statements, usually telling an epic story or tackling a grand overarching theme.”[/li][li]The term was initially applied to the music of British bands such as Pink Floyd, King Crimson, Yes, Genesis, Jethro Tull, and Emerson, Lake & Palmer[/li][/ul]
I think an important point is that musical genres are based around sociological movements in the world of music, not musical distinctions per se. Stewart Copeland has half-jokingly suggested that New Wave bands only really had a hair style in common, but I think this gets to the heart of it.
Prog was mostly British white upper-middle class guys attempting to “elevate rock music” as an intellectual art form. Punk occurred because the British working class rebelled against what they saw as the upper class co-opting their music–no more, no less. Johnny Rotten rightly includes even the early Police with Pink Floyd as part of this musical class warfare even though The Police were (on the surface) punks in the beginning.
Floyd are “prog” because they’re part of that general movement. They were tertiary-educated boys from Cambridge, after all.
OK, fair enough, but to me Floyd was different from most of the others on the list. And I say that as someone that love Yes as much as Floyd.
I certainly understand the justification of classifying Pink Floyd as “prog.” It’s just that it doesn’t really fit in, in retrospect, to what has come to be known as prog rock. It’s somehow different. I feel Pink Floyd closer to bands like Radiohead (circa OK Computer) and The Flaming Lips, neither of which I would really consider prog. I’d put them more under the general category of “art rock,” but “prog rock” also is considered part of art rock, so who knows. As said upthread, Floyd is Floyd.
At the end of the day, I think there are merits to both arguments. Perhaps it really is simply is a matter of one approach being sociological while the other is musicological.
Either way, Miles Davis doesn’t fit…
Heh. In the Beyond the Lighted Stage Rush documentary DVD, Geddy Lee says something like, “We’re the world’s biggest cult band”.
Honestly, one of the biggest things that appeals to Rush fans — and maybe this is something non-fans aren’t fully aware of — is their “we’re gonna do whatever the !@#$ we want, musically” philosophy. There’s a reason 2112 is held to be so “holy” to Rush fans that has nothing to do with the music itself: at the time they were making that record, they were essentially “finished” as far as their record company was concerned. They had had moderate success with their first two albums, but their third, Caress of Steel, was so experimental and “out there” that it sold very poorly and resulted in wretched ticket sales on the following tour. When they entered the studio to record their fourth album, they were under extreme pressure from the record company to make shorter, more commercial, more radio-friendly “pop” songs.
The boys talked it over and decided amongst themselves that they would stick to their musical vision, even if doing so meant the end of their career. As Neil Peart said in the documentary (paraphrasing), “I was fully prepared to go back to work at my dad’s auto parts store, if that was the price of sticking to my musical beliefs.” As a group, the decided that if they were going out, then they would go out on their own terms. So they wrote and recorded the songs for 2112 and presented the results to the record company. The company was utterly horrified, but didn’t want to spend any more money on recording a band they intended to drop anyway, so they went ahead and released 2112. But did almost no marketing or promotion. And then a funny thing happened: the album went gold almost entirely on the strength of word-of-mouth. After that, the record company let them record whatever the hell they wanted, and it seems to have worked out. And it’s continued to work out for nearly 40 years now.
Interestingly, when Rush puts out new material, even we diehard fans often don’t like it at first. I’m a member of a mailing list for a group of Rush fans who are so devoted to the music that they painstakingly create extremely accurate transcriptions/tablatures of the songs. As long as I’ve been on the list, the initial response to any new Rush is, “WTF? This sucks!” followed by detailed criticism of everything that’s wrong with it. And then, strangely enough, once we’ve had time to listen to it many times, we start to see what’s going on and our opinions usually change for the better.
And maybe that’s the whole deal right there. Rush music (and maybe prog in general) is music that requires you to think about it. It’s not background music, or music to make you get up and dance. It’s music that requires active listening. And that’s why Rush is such a love 'em or hate 'em band.
One of my favorite jokes:
In New York City, an out of work jazz drummer named Ed was thinking of throwing himself off a bridge. But then he ran into a former booking agent who told him about the fantastic opportunities for drummers in Iraq. The agent said “If you can find your way over there, just take my card and look up the bandleader named Faisal–he’s the large guy with the beard wearing gold pajamas and shoes that curl up at the toes.” Ed hit up everyone he knew and borrowed enough to buy transport to Iraq. It took several days to arrange for passport, visas, transportation into Iraq and the shipping of his equipment, but he was finally on his way.
Ed arrived in Baghdad and immediately started searching for Faisal. He found guys in pajamas of every color but gold. Finally, in a small coffeehouse, he saw a huge man with a beard–wearing gold pajamas and shoes that curled up at the toes! Ed approached him and asked if he was Faisal. He was. Ed gave him the agent’s card and Faisal’s face brightened into a huge smile.
“You’re just in time–I need you for a gig tonight. Meet me at the market near the mosque at 7:30 with your equipment.”
“But,” gasped Ed, “what about a rehearsal?”
“No time–don’t worry.” And with that, Faisal disappeared.
Ed arrived in the market at 7:00 to set up his gear. He introduced himself to the other musicians, who were all playing instruments he had never seen in his life. At 7:30 sharp, Faisal appeared and hopped on the bandstand, his gold pajamas glittering in the twilight. Without a word to the musicians, he lifted his arm for the downbeat.
“Wait.” shouted Ed. “What are we playing?”
Faisal shot him a look of frustration and shouted back, “Fake it! Just give me heavy afterbeats on 7 and 13.”
Wow. That is an esoteric joke, but I like it! 