Omega
Post by beth on Jul 12, 2017 16:28:29 GMT -5
Rick Wakeman, performing with Yes
It’s May 1975, and thousands of Britons have Wembley Arena tickets to see Rick Wakeman—keyboardist and singer, until lately of the band Yes—perform his new solo album, The Myths and Legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Wakeman had been planning a spectacle: He assembled an orchestra, choir, and cast of actors. But then he learned that Wembley was set to host a figure-skating show after his concert, and the arena would already be covered in ice. Deciding to take advantage of the situation, he hired skaters to dress as horses and knights, depicting a clash between Sir Lancelot and the Black Knight.
This kind of excessive showmanship was part of what attracted fans to the strange musical movement known as progressive rock. In The Show That Never Ends (named for lyrics from Emerson, Lake & Palmer), Washington Post political reporter David Weigel recounts stories like this from the glory days of “prog” in the 1970s, when bands such as Yes, King Crimson, Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, and Genesis composed long, erudite, allusive songs about outer space, ancient myths, dreams of the future, and, in the words of Yes singer Jon Anderson, “discovery of the self and connection with the divine.”
Why the music is called “progressive” has never been entirely clear, and many of the most representative bands didn’t use the label to describe themselves. As with any artistic genre, precise definitions are disputed and boundaries are fuzzy: Debates about whether this or that band (or this or that album or period of a band’s work) is really progressive are a favorite pastime of fans. But the general idea is clear enough. In Weigel’s apt summary, prog had three main musical characteristics: retrospection, with artists looking to English and European influences rather than to contemporary American pop; futurism, using the newest techniques and instruments, like the Moog synthesizer or Mellotron keyboard; and perhaps most importantly, experimentation, with prog artists writing music with “19/8 rhythms, polyrhythms, polytonality,” and other unusual and challenging musical methods. Well-known prog-rock songs include Pink Floyd’s “Shine On You Crazy Diamond,” Yes’s “Roundabout,” and Rush’s “Closer to the Heart.”
Weigel describes prog as “rebellious music,” but prog’s was not the youthful, angry rebellion we think of when we think of rock music. Not only did prog lyricists eschew the themes of resentment and cynicism we find in other rock music, but the musicians drew from more staid traditions of classical music and even Anglican hymns. Conservative political theorist Bradley J. Birzer has compared the music to Imagism in poetry, writing that prog “takes a modern form, and it fills and animates it with a well-ordered soul, an essence commensurate with its form.” (There are also, to be sure, left-wing interpretations of the genre, such as Marxist social theorist Bill Martin’s argument that the music of bands like Yes is an affirmation of a sense of utopian possibility; even for leftists, then, what is valuable in prog is not how it represents the rebellious liberation from constraints of tradition but how it manifests a sincere hope for a better future.)
One thing the prog rockers were rebelling against, Weigel writes, was “the standard pop song structure.” But even against pop music, prog was not simply and reflexively iconoclastic—one of its major influences was the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper. And while there is no question that progressive music was something very different from the pop music of its day, or of today, it was exceptionally popular: Pink Floyd remains one of the bestselling acts of all time, while prog bands Yes, Rush, Genesis, Kansas, and Jethro Tull have all sold more than 10 million albums in the United States alone.
Though progressive rock received some critical acclaim during its heyday in the early 1970s, by 1978 a backlash was well underway, with critics griping about the pretensions and bombast. (This critique had to some extent been present from the beginning: In a 1968 review of Music from Big Pink by The Band, Richard Goldstein wrote that “much of what we cherished in progressive rock is musically advanced but emotionally barren. The indulgence of a new, cerebral audience has endangered that raw vitality which was once a hallmark of the rock experience.”) Critics (and record labels) embraced the new punk movement, with its supposed authenticity and primal simplicity.
The punk-vs.-prog conflict is a bit of conventional wisdom that is sometimes exaggerated; Weigel notes that few prog artists from the 1970s resented the more straightforward music that succeeded theirs. But conventional wisdom usually has at least a grain of truth to it, and there was certainly a stark contrast between a joyful and ornate concept album like Yes’s 1973 Tales from Topographic Oceans and the angry minimalism of the Clash’s 1977 eponymous debut.
Looking at novels like Jonathan Coe’s The Rotters’ Club (2001), a nostalgic story of the British music scene in the 1970s, Weigel identifies the directness and intensity of punk as the obvious form of rebellion against the supposed excesses of prog.
None of the punk acts that superseded prog in critical acclaim and supposed cultural significance—the Ramones, the Clash, the Sex Pistols, to say nothing of their epigones—come close to the same popularity. And yet, in cultural and even academic circles, prog is marginalized. Rolling Stone will gladly publish a list of the top 25 movies about punk rock, reflecting on the cultural meaning and significance of Black Flag bassist “Chuck Dukowski’s Colt 45-induced giggling” in the aptly titled 1981 documentary of the L. A. punk scene, Decline of Western Civilization. But few filmmakers have made anything worth watching about prog rock.
As for academics, a search for “punk rock” in the JSTOR database of academic journals finds 25 times as many results as for “prog rock.” Washington, D. C.’s public library even hosts a “punk archive” dutifully preserving old zines and Fugazi posters from the 1980s as culturally significant artifacts of the city’s once-thriving punk scene.
According to indie songwriter and erstwhile punk Ted Leo, there was theory behind the “primitivism” of punk groups like the Ramones. This same point was made more eloquently by Iggy Pop, who in a 1977 interview said of Johnny Rotten (of the Sex Pistols), “I’m sure he puts as much blood and sweat into what he does as Sigmund Freud did.” (Iggy was not modest about his own work either, saying that “what sounds to you like a big load of trashy old noise is in fact the brilliant music of a genius: myself.”)
more here
www.weeklystandard.com/snob-rock/article/2008736
