The myth of the 1990's prog resurgence

Hi,

AFlowerKingCrimson wrote: I first got int prog in the mid eighties and discovered the underground prog scene via newsletters and mail order catalogs(some of which are still around but now online stores). Back then there was no internet but there was a burgeoning prog underground happening. The prog resurgence happened very gradually and it started happening before the internet but for the most part it is a myth and I'll explain why.

My apologies, however, the "myth" is only a problem with the media and the folks that believe in top ten ... because the music had been there all along, but some fans, had to have material that sounded like YES and GENESIS, because they got tired of ELP's brashness, and that kind of stuff was no longer around ... and most fans ... so stuck in the top ten mentality, had no ear for music whatsoever, to concentrate on other new material that was out there.

The history of music, going back 500 years, is not one of repetition of top ten bullcrap, or fanboy appreciation and every other generation there is always something new ... but we are too damn stuck on top ten, to appreciate lesser known things and composers ... like Albinoni is a hecker and an idiot compared to Vivaldi, because the top ten fan will only know Vivaldi ... hopefully.

The advent of "progressive" and "prog" music was never really "underground" ... it just did not sell as much, but the proof that you are incorrect is that 50 years later, they are selling way more than they ever did, and their work is appreciated more than ever ... if that is not a sign that things happened, you are not looking.

And then, as is the usual in all arts, it changed into something else and all of a sudden "noise bands" (loud and louder) ... became the in thing, that made folks think they were progressive ... it certainly was a much better definition of the 4 minute song, however, it was now about the 15 minute song ... instead of 4 ... with exactly the same music passages as the smaller song.

Where is the creativity when the style and design is the same?

That is not to say that things like Iron Maiden and Dream Theater, and many other bands do not deserve any credit ... they certainly do so ... however, comparing them to the early material is unfair as this was a completely different time, and ... consider this ... Berklee School of Music is not exactly the London late 60's in terms of creativity and exploration ... and never will be ... because some idiots think that teaching means ... notes and chords and timing ... nothing else! The worst school of music EVER!

Sorry to disagree, but I have been there with all the music since about 1965 or 1966 in 3 countries (2 in the

US if one factors Midwest Madison and West Coast LA!) ... and anyone thinking that the music died and was resurrected, simply was not listening ... and never even heard the early days of FM radio and its incredible addition to the ears of all fans ... until it was finally bought by corporations to push their own product and stop all these different bands from selling anything ... you might not give a poop, but one day in '74, a big corporate guy gave a couple of bands over 100M dollars each, and within a month over 400 bands were dumped because they did not "sell". They did sell, or they would not have been pressed ... are you an idiot that do not know what BUSINESS is all about? It's a commercial lie to get you to favor their top ten! What sort of businessmen/women would do that and not sell a single copy? And they will tell you that they only sold ten copies, so they can say that the big cahoona sold a million copies so you think the big cahoona is great and the other band is crap anyway ...

Wake Up (XTC playing in the background!) ... this is the reality ... and you gotta get past the commercial talk and bs ... there is a huge history of material out there, and too many folks CONTINUE ... time and again ... to ignore other countries and other bands, that deserve the credit and the attention ... that we lost a long time ago, because we had no ears for music anyway ... we only liked the top hit!

After all this time, and history of music ... we STILL ignore ... that there are other artists out there ... and they will continue to compose and work, and create ... but we think they are dead because we won't give them a minute.

Sorry about the rant ... but this is almost personal for me ... I came from a house with 40K books of Portuguese, Brazilian and Spanish Literature and there were easily 1000 authors in there that were not index'ed by any University in America ... and stuff that it likely never going to be read or found ... and the music scene with its top ten, is doing exactly the same thing ... an attitude that all of those authors are a bunch of hacks, ash-holes and idiots ... which unfortunately does not say much for the audience, does it?

So you have only been a prog fan for the last ten years? 

What is your point?

 

I didn't see King Crimson with Tool so I can't really speak to that exactly but I would guess something similar happened when ELP toured with Dream Theater. My guess would be many people in their twenties are still trying to figure out what prog is and what it's all about. They need to go to this site and see for themselves and see that it's not all about post rock and prog metal or Rush, Tool, Pink Floyd, Porcupine Tree and Dream Theater. I mention them because they seem to be the most known prog bands for younger people or at least the  first ones they hear about.

As such I think most of the younger prog fans are coming at prog from a different angle then those of us who are maybe a little bit older(or even quite a bit older). While I did meet some twenty something prog fans who told me they got into the genre through Jethro Tull I think that's rather rare for them. I think they are more likely to get into prog(or find out about it)through either prog metal or some other kind of connection(maybe by hearing bands like Tool, Muse, Umphrey's McGee, Coheed and Cambria or Radiohead described as prog). I think these days it's not too likely(although certainly not impossible)they would get into it through older bands like Yes, Genesis or ELP. However, Pink Floyd, Rush and to a great degree King Crimson(maybe through the Tool connection)do seem to have some kind of "street cred" with the younger audiences. 

I took a break from prog in the mid nineties when I was in college. I figured college kids wouldn't be into this stuff and I didn't want to seem like some kind of weirdo. I had one friend who knew about King Crimson and other bands like Pink Floyd and Yes but that's about it. So partly because of that I was more into the popular alternative bands at the time like Smashing Pumpkins(who actually did have some prog influences but that's another discussion) and others. I met this one guy who told me about this new thing(well not brand new because it had been around for a few years by then but it was still relatively new to me and I didn't know much about it other than it was information based and involved a computer)called the internet. He showed me something called news groups. I asked him if there was one for prog rock and it popped up. I don't remember much about it and didn't spend much time looking at it at the time. This was around 1996. 

Fast forward a few years to late 1998/early 1999 and I found a book in the book store called "the progressive rock files" by Jerry Lucky. This led to me ultimately finding that newsgroup again and prog online in general. Before that I never really thought about looking up prog online and instead relied on my old prog mail order catalogs. In the prog news group and a few years later on another well known prog rock website I remember seeing a lot of folks talking about the prog resurgence that was due to the internet and took place starting around the mid 1990's. Looking back I don't feel it was much of a resurgence at all.

In my mind resurgence kind of implies a lot of people suddenly discovering something for the first time not something that they already knew about but found out is still around. To me that's what happened with prog in the 90's. It was mostly older fans rediscovering prog not younger fans discovering it for the first time. There has been a resurgence in prog but in my opinion that didn't happen until a larger number of younger fans discovered it for the first time and that didn't really start to happen until at least 2005 or so with Porcupine Tree and the Mars Volta being possibly the biggest catalysts for that. There were other factors also such as the appearance of this website, the growth of prog festivals and social media but none of those were around(except for the prog festivals which were still very small at that point)in the 1990's. 

So, in conclusion there was a major rediscovery of prog in the 1990's mainly due to newsgroups such as alt.music.progressive and the ability to search for prog websites, if you happened to already know what prog was, but even with the popularity of Dream Theater the real prog resurgence didn't happen, in my opinion, until the new millennium.