The cultural legitimacy of prog, metal and punk

There's a red thread running through all of this I can't believe I haven't noticed until now:

It appears that the people most concerned with which types of rock music are most "culturally legitimate" are usually reviewers and scholars rather than musicians and songwriters.

Somehow, I don't think this is a coincidence.

Dean wrote: ...  Prog Rock has never been a cultural movement, a subculture or an all embracing artistic movement, there was no fashion or literary subgenre attached to it, no cinema, no theatre. And the same is true for metal (in the main) - loose biker-imagery of leather, studs and denim is the best you'll get - jeans and a band t-shirt doth not a uniform make.

Ah... no. As strange as this may at first appear, it is nothing to do with the music. The music was at best a by-product of the cultural change and predominantly the change in youth culture that was happening at the time. The music was a result of the change not a driver for it, therefore the cultural movements that we now associate with the music, to the point where it is impossible to separate them, were a product of the environment they developed in and developed in parallel with the music (and for the benefit of Pedro: the art, the literature, the cinema, the theatre, etc. if, and only if, it is applicable). As I have argued on several occasions, Prog Rock has never been a cultural movement, a subculture or an all embracing artistic movement, there was no fashion or literary subgenre attached to it, no cinema, no theatre. And the same is true for metal (in the main) - loose biker-imagery of leather, studs and denim is the best you'll get - jeans and a band t-shirt doth not a uniform make.

This is a very long post, but I've been building up some thoughts over the last year or two about whether progressive and psychedelic music really are higher artforms than "non-progressive/psychedelic" metal, not to mention the extent to which either has succeeded as cultural movements and not just genres of music esp. when compared to punk.

A couple discussions I've had a while ago on Facebook with several black metal musicians, revolved around the issue of how psychedelic/progressive rock and punk have gone down in history as important cultural movements that had a lasting impact on Western society be it for better or worse... whereas almost the entirety of metal is seen as a footnote in rock history and a cultural dead end. This extends down to people who can't stand the genres: Those who intensely dislike psychedelia or punk have to accuse them of "ruining rock music forever" if not blame the associated subcultures for perceived social problems in the present day, whereas at least in my own country I have to go back to the 1990s to find comparable indignation over metal bands that aren't either openly Fascist or pretend to be. Consider how either of the three genres are covered by magazines like Mojo or Record Collector or Sound Venue, how many academic studies have been made of them as artistic movements with a significant sociological impact et cetera, how they're described by the people who write about music for the "arts and culture" sections of upscale newspapers. (not to mention how positive/negative their assessments are)

Here's where it gets weird: Not only would an argument that any of the three genres is objectively sillier than the others be one hell of an uphill battle, there's also been a significant degree of mutual influence between all three since at least the late 1970s. (as much as the more genre-chauvinist elements of both metal and punk subcultures would deny that)

Now, I can actually understand why psychedelic and progressive rock is in general considered "higher culture" than metal... to the point that those metal groups who are most respected by the people deciding that usually have one foot planted in prog/psych or post-rock:

Its main ideological inspirations came from the Beat Generation and the hippie movement, subcultures that would both go on to replace the cultural elites they originally reacted against.

Psychedelic rock being musically defined by its attempt to expand the stylistic vocabulary of a genre originally considered superficial entertainment, its spawning progressive rock when it begun incorporating more and more influence from "art music" styles like jazz and classical.

There's also a sociological element in that many of the influential progressive and psychedelic rock groups like Genesis and Pink Floyd met at art school or university whereas Black Sabbath and Judas Priest both came from the industrial slums of Birmingham.

As far as punk goes, while it's obviously on average less outwardly complex and intellectual than heavy metal or prog rock, it's obvious why it's perceived as more serious: It's by far the most realistic and least escapist of the three genres. This becomes even clearer if you compare grindcore to regular death metal and sludge to traditional doom metal: Both genres approach specific metal subgenres but from the "outside" perspective of punk, the resulting music as a consequence being way more abrasive and intense than its original form. Whether that makes it inherently better is a completely different issue, though, and something I frankly consider mostly subjective - the entire "true art is realistic" ideology has only enjoyed its present level of popularity since the mid-19th century after all.

Thing is, how much of the described status hierarchy is actually warranted and based more in the music's content as opposed to more superficial factors if not the plain old cultural snobbery I mentioned when comparing the demographics of prog/psych and metal?

This article by the metal webzine Black Ivory Tower points out how often which black metal groups are accepted as artistically legitimate and which don't comes down to more a matter of image than with music. People who know more about music theory than I do have pointed out something similar with how categorizations like "progressive metal" are applied. For instance, I've been told that Sepultura's Beneath the Remains actually is more structurally complex than Coroner's No More Color despite not being categorized as progressive.

The conception of punk as more artistically valid than metal also bears revision in light of the amount of punk groups who either became more metallic later in their career (e. g. Black Flag, Killing Joke) or jumped ship completely (e. g. The Exploited, Napalm Death). By the same token, the idea of punk being more serious than prog/psych should be taken with a grain of salt considering The Boredoms' career trajectory or the recent phenomenon of sludge metal groups (read: punks playing doom metal) turning to progressive rock for inspiration after Mastodon became popular.

Finally, there is the issue of how often the musical cultures in question actually reach their self-proclaimed ideals when it comes to the genres' thematic content. While a common criticism of metal's inspiration from both classical mythologies and 19th century Romanticism, the genre's main claim to "cultural legitimacy", is that the vast majority of metal lyricists reduce those rich traditions to escapist fantasy on the same level of pulp genre novels... these very boards have seen quite a few threads about the lack of insightful lyrics in progressive rock, and I've met plenty of musicians from classical and jazz backgrounds who find progressive rock's approximation of either awkward and superficial. As for the extent of punk adhering to its own virtues, that's been pored over by fanzine editorials ever since the late 1970s.

What are your thoughts on this? Is it even a desirable thing for music genres to also aspire towards doubling as "cultural movements" in the first place? The entire "putting ideology ahead of music" thing is not just by far my least favourite aspect of punk, it's also the main reason I find 95% of the more national-romantic type of black metal an absolute chore to listen to.

It might also be relevant that one of the black metal guys had no idea that prog/psych-rock was a considered "higher" form of cultural expression than metal to begin with.

Edited by Toaster Mantis - January 08 2014 at 12:46