prog bounds (some thought involved!)

There are some very knowledgeable and passionately argued points all through this but like so many other threads on PA it all boils down to this:

No-one yet has been able to mint a watertight definition of 'prog'

It is not even established beyond any reasonable doubt  if this would actually turn out to be a desirable thing (any such agreed parameters we arrive at MUST be restrictive by definition and would simply perpetuate the inclusion/exclusion debate for eternity after many of the previous incumbents on PA are jettisoned) It should also be self evident that unforseen innovation that subsequently falls outside our hard wired definition by current long stay residents in PA would necessitate their expulsion ?.

I don't have the answers to any of this but would hazard that a dynamic and elastic definition is the best we can possibly aspire to.

Further to that, we cannot even decide if we should be attempting to define the term 'progressive' in it's semantic guise or its more problematic little brother 'prog' : the latter's casual use carries with it all manner of implied/inferred baggage that changes depending on the user.

I also think there are some gross simplifications as to the proferred definitions of 'punk' and the naive belief that any style of musical expression can have a consistent global identity. In the UK punk was a social and politically driven phenomenon (notwithstanding the greedy svengalis like McLaren and his ilk) while its slightly older sibling in the US was an artistic and aesthetic phenomenon. It is worth pointing out that Malcolm McLaren took all his ideas for punk FROM the USA after a lengthy visit there circa 75 where during his stay he offered to manage but was turned down flat by the NY band 'Television.'

For what it's worth:

I agree that a separate genre for Italian prog is spurious

A new genre of 'Prog Punk' reeks of Reductio ad absurdum eg a vegetarian lion

the original 'orbiting constellations of musical styles' as posited by the original poster is a very good one (although I admit that most it was way over my head) but does rely on 'gravity' and there is way too much of that round these parts to be healthy.

Punk rock and progressive rock can be thought as approximately two ends of a musical spectrum, with the scale being musical experience, and clearly bands/musicians stopping off at various points through their careers. Many move on to more advanced levels later, then some more back (hey there are band wagons to jump on, e.g. Stranglers, Police but some time later move on to more advanced stuff carrying their once less sophisticated audiences with them).

So much of the tirade against punk written here in PA  smacks of  not thinking  outside  the box - a box with parameters previously set by others not turning their brains on. Reading a lot of this stuff in PA if I didn't know better, i would be lead to believe by implication progressive rock musicians appeared fully fashioned, as marvellous near -virtuoso instrumentalists, with a broad range of musical appreciation and deep musical theory. Course not, every musician has to learn - some find it more difficult than  others : they go through levels of proficency. Clearly those self-trained musicians who formed professional bands with 3 or 4 chords, learn on the road, developed and refined their skills on the road - often known as paying one's dues - many get far better with time, some get dissatisfied with the constraints of 3 minute pop songs. I've just been listening to Tomorrow  with Steve Howe sounded reasonably proficient but some way away from the revelation of the playing heard when he first joined Yes - go further back (check Howe's Mothballs album) and the early roughness is not far removed from punk level of playing on early 60's songs equivalent to punk,  e.g. what might be called English garage.?

If you care to read through my Blog What Happened To You, you'll find that I argue that some archetypal punk musicians with developed skills over time moved on too. Listen to PIL's Compact Disc, or Big Audio Dynamite's  This Is BAD, and you'll discover in their ways former members of Sex Pistols and Clash respectively were progressing, exploring new territory - and how many words have been spilled in PA wrt to the Stranglers? Guys such as Joe Jackson and Elvis Costello, who were initially part of the late punk movement, demonstrate more obviously the progression to much more sophisticated music.


Edited by Dick Heath - May 10 2008 at 06:55

laplace wrote: ignore CCVP o:)

damn, i feel so lonely now . . .

mithrandir wrote: its kind of silly to say that there isn't a Progressive nature in Punk music.... that would seem to come from someone who knows very little about the subject, I'll even say that Punk in its infancy started out with a restless spirit that didn't adhere to the norms, Pere Ubu, Television, Chrome, The Screamers, very different Punk bands there were creating something fresh and new, and like someone mentioned did we forget about all the great Post Punk bands? like Cabaret Voltaire, Wire, PiL, Family Fodder, Swell Maps etc....sure it isn't Progressive Rock, but experimental and pushing boundaries? of course...then you have your passage through Hardcore with key bands like Black Flag and the Minutemen all the way through the fusion of Metal and Hardcore which you get so many bands that are now here listed inthe Archives today, then again perhaps Ive missed the point on whats being discussed entirely here,

Daft Punk is a band and not some kind of Punk sub-genre. Guess we were not very clear sorry if the thread misguided man

Pnoom! wrote: Err... Daft Punk, as awesome as they are, are in no way prog.  Not even remotely.

well, i disagree. I think that Daft Punk could be put in the level 6 or 7 of my classification, because i DO think that they had some kind of prog characteristic on Discovery, but i had come to the conclusion that that is something completely subjective and that i can't explain. Its just a feeling, a hint.

Laplace, i have been thinking about these lens you mentioned, but i found the job too frustratingly endless, since i could not trace a clear line between anything.

However, i found a better way to do this: trace lines and then include bands. I have Came to 8 different ones:
1° Essentially progressive bands (RIO / Avant Garde)
2° Traditional / Milestones of progressive rock (Yes, King Crimson, Pink Floyd, Genesis, Tangerine Dreams, Jethro Tull, etc)
3° Progressive bands (bands that reproduce traditional progressive bands today and neo-prog bands)
4° Highly influenced by prog (Dream Theater, Supertramp, Rush, Death, Opeth, Phideaux, etc)
5° Bands that were prog in some moment / bands that influenced prog
6° Bands that have some prog characteristic
7° Bands that remember prog
8° Bands that are not prog



PS: i had drawn a circle, but i could not upload it.

I brought them up to the Electronic Prog team for you and they said flat out "no way." 

Sorry. 

He he, Caio, you sure know how to manipulate people. However, I urge you to take care of this one yourself, if I had to fill in every request that I get similar to this one, I would not be able to moderate any more - or is that what your after?

Laplace, some boundaries of progressive rock/metal are indeed not clear. Going back some post here, when i was talking about the dialectic process of development of the world, you can see why: music had always two tendencies, to be complex and to be simple. For this to be better understood, lets go back a few decades before the conception of progressive rock, but still on the trail of rock (here we can really go back to the birth of music itself, when mankind tried to reproduce the singing of the birds and used logs, rocks and everything else that was in it's reach to make some sound, but ill wont do that, because that would be useless to the explanation and would demand more research that this post needs), when jazzy big bands played endless nights on the 40's to the youngsters. During the 50's, rock music was born from the "black's" tones (blues and jazz) and translated to the hateful and racist white America as a "white" music, made by white musicians being everything "white and clean" (a period of rock that i hate because of the hypocrisy and the prejudice of other kind of music just because they were made by "blacks"; that really get my nerves ).

Anyway, here we can witness the 1st process of the complex music (jazz) loosing its space on the simpler music ( early rock and roll). after that we had a log period of simple music (almost all 50's and early 60's) and then, by the 2nd half of the 60's we see the mainstream music slowly getting more complex until we hit the jackpot with prog rock .
From the late 70's on we see another process, more abrupt and furious than the previous, that the complex music is substituted by the simpler music (mainstream media people! don't crucify me here).

After the shock cause by punk and its fierce opposition to it all, on the early 80's comes a process that makes music complex again just as abrupt and furious as punk made music simple; here we have the New Wave of British Heavy Metal bands.


OK, knowing that metal is USUALLY (every rule have its exception, and metal we got a lot of exceptions on this case) a complex kind of music, just like progressive rock, and , with the mix of both genres at the late 80's and early 90's, creating progressive metal, we got a genre of extremely complex music.
 Well, you may be thinking here: WHAT THE HELL THIS HAVE TO DO WITH BOUNDARIES OF PROGRESSIVE ROCK / METAL? And i would say: calm down i am getting there !
Since we don't have a definition of what is exactly  prog and what is exactly metal, we usually guide ourselves with some general characteristics of the genre (here genres) and here the main characteristic  to identify what is prog metal and what  is not are 2:  to see the complexity/technicality of the music, but that alone is not essential, since we got technical heavy metal bands also and how close they sound to traditional bands / how well their music progresses, how well the music is developed. Since man is not a cold heartless machine, much of its judgment, no matter how impartial it may be, will always be guided by his beliefs and culture. If the people who choses which progressive metal band enters the web site and which does not, well, this is a problem that can never be solved and will only depend of who is in charge at the time being.

CCVP wrote: Besides, i left a hint for the progressive electronic team i my 1st post. FOR GOD SAKE FOLKS FROM PROGRESSIVE ELECTRONIC TEAM, JUST TAKE A LOOK IN DAFT PUNK'S DISCOVERY AND HUMAN AFTER ALL ALBUMS!

No screaming in the blog section - all caps are impolite. Maybe you should PM one of the electronics team members or post the band in Suggest new bands. Those ways are more effective than this - you can't expect the team members to monitor every thread on the forum for suggestions, especially if they are as busy a you mentioned yourself.

Now carry on....