I think what pop songs are about is marketability rather than repetition or simplicity. It just so happens that the two tend to collide. Not always, but frequently.
And things happened SO FAST back then... I mean, Tales From Topographic Oceans was released in 1973... what was the musical landscape only 5 years before that?
Where did I say that I hated it? I'm a massive Crimson fan of all eras - including post-81 where I don't think they fit the Prog label at all; like some Genesis, and I'm fairly ambivalent about the rest. And love things that get chucked into Prog like Robert Wyatt, Can, Family etc - I even bought most the early VDGG last year! But what irks me is this attitude that Emerson clearly had that what he was playing was so much better than mere pop music because it was more complex.
Well, I doubt they would have done - let's stick t what people have said rather than hypotheticals. And I disagree with him anyway - it can be more challenging to write a perfect three minute pop song than a side-long piece. There are some that can do both but they're few and far between.
One thing I can definitely say prog is not, is a musical style. Hell, it is barely even a genre. Seriously, if prog is a style of music, how could bands like: Magma, Univers Zero, Art Zoyd, National Health, Arti e Mestieri, Happy the Man, Aranis, The Contortionist, Tesseract, Miriodor, Bruford, Gong, YES, Genesis, King Crimson, Echolyn, etc, etc, be of one style, when they don't sound anything like each other? Anyone who thinks they know what prog sounds like, but has only heard: YES, Genesis, KC, ELP, and the other well known bands, is simply uninformed. Once one gets beyond the best known bands, and into the subgenres such as: Zeuhl, avant-prog, prog-fusion, RIO, technical-metal, almost any clichés one associates with prog, are nonexistent. Prog to me, is music that has the following attributes: complexity, very high level of musicianship, usually long format, broad range of emotional content, sometimes use of compositional techniques usually associated with classical and jazz (atonality, dissonance, free improve), does not follow verse-chorus-bridge format. There are many prog bands (many of the avant-prog bands), that could barely even be considered any form of rock at all.
Oh, you think Emerson was arrogant because he was explaining what he felt made his music interesting. Gotcha. Would Beethoven have been arrogant if he'd been explaining what made his 9th symphony more complex than the Bavarian folk songs sung in the local inns?
I'd agree in that the purpose of pop music is to make money, so sure, marketability is another word for that (basically speaking). But I think repetition and simplicity are such well-known tactics from advertising -- and other fields, like propaganda -- that it's hard not to see the connection there, and see repetition and simplicity as inherent to the form. Pop music is populist (as opposed to elitist), and populist forms of expression use repetition and simplicity because those devices serve the purpose of the art: to reach as many people as possible, for whatever reason (money, political power, etc.). I mean, there are plenty of quotes from musicians in praise of simplicity and so forth. Another poster quoted Lou Reed's line about how "One chord is fine. Two chords is pushing it. Three chords and you're into jazz" -- which is intended with humor (some Lou Reed songs have a lot more than three chords!), but in its own way, no less pompous than Emerson's comments. I think it's usually more challenging to write a "perfect" anything than an imperfect something-else! Is it more challenging to write a perfect 3-minute song than a perfect 18-minute suite? I'd say there are people who are good at one, or good at the other, or good at both. In general, my experience is that being good at large-scale work is a more unusual talent than being good at small-scale work. Writing a first-rate short story happens to a lot more writers than writing a first-rate novel.
If a band has any three of these, it will usually scratch the prog itch for me. Also: "hairpin turn" changes in the music. I don't know how to describe these--think the tempo/music changes in songs like "Roundabout," "Carry On Wayward Son," and "Swim to the Moon." Hard to explain, but I know them when I see them.
So what? I'd rather listen to ELP than the last 20,000 pop songs. And ELP isn't even in my top 10 favorite prog bands.
To me it was a musical cocktail produced at a very specific point in history when late Romantic classical music, Psychedelia, church music, post Bop (but not Free / atonal) Jazz and Folk Rock got mingled together in various combinations. Often coupled with the influence to varying degrees of the ecological movement, eastern and proto new age spirituality, New Wave science fiction, fairy tales, myths, legends and Victorian Gothic. The ability to write long and extend ideas with more musical development than just long solos was also crucial, Though it hasn't really progressed much in the last 40 years and started to go backwards musically with the generation that was heavily influenced by The Wall and stopped being taught classical music at school. Without that classical music influence and extended forms there is not much daylight between Prog and any other retro rock format. The rest is marketing.
There were a lot of bands that dabbled in the progressive sound to one extent or another in the 70s, including the likes of Led Zeppelin (particularly circa Houses of the Holy), The Who (with their ambitious rock operas), the Grateful Dead (see Blues For Allah) and Fleetwood Mac as well. I think that the Bob Welch in particular material leaned this way, but even some of the later Peter Green output reached for a kind of progressive blues vibe, particularly with some of their extended improvisational jams heard on live takes of "Rattlesnake Shake" and the like. I don't know if I would go so far as to call Future Games full fledged prog, but it had some of that flavor, particularly the title track. Like psychedelia before it, it was one of the prevailing styles of the day, so some bands dipped their toe in more fleetingly while others dove in whole hog.
I agree. Not all those attributes are necessary to be prog. I believe long form is the least important. For example, Ron Jarzombek's solo album of very technical and progressive music, Solitarily Speaking Of Theoretical Confinement, the longest song isn't even 3 minutes long.
Progressive rock was a communist plot, invented by Vanilla Fudge in 1968 and widely copied, particularly by Europeans, but never equaled.
Yep. It gets kind of old, when non-prog fans always seem to reach for the 'low hanging fruit' of ELP in order to deride most of prog. Which to me, is does only show lack of imagination, it gets so much about ELP wrong. As with you, ELP is pretty far down on my list of favorite prog bands, hell, there are more than 10 prog bands just from Italy alone, that I rate higher than ELP. But dismiss them as being pompous and overblown, ignores much of their output, which was not.
Well, we get into definitions of prog here - mine versus yours. But yeah, I see tunes like ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, ‘Love You Too’ and ‘Eleanor Rigby’ (Steve Hackett points to this song as a major influence/milestone) as proto-prog which I suppose is tightly connected to/conflated with, ‘psychedelic’ - music that has jettisoned any pretensions of American rhythm and blues influence, doggedly looking elsewhere for inspiration - both musically and lyrically. Even the first Crimson album is viewed by many as foremost a psychedelic record, with its moniker of being the ‘first’ prog record being retrospective.
Ah yes, ELP...the band that came back in 1977 - the year of punk - with a double album where Keith Emerson's side was "Piano Concerto No 1".... Now, what were you saying about Steely Dan?
Oh yeah, because Aja really captured the raw, bare knuckle intensity of the emerging punk scene so well. . .
As they were in the US I think they could probably be forgiven for not actually noticing at the time...
