You might be prog if......

False. You know you're prog when the Rolling Stone Magazine hates you. 

Heh heh - reading back . Human kind likes to put things in boxes with other similar things - that's kind of the way the human mind is wired. With music and me it's all about the journey with the music itself and with the travels the music can take me on - or not. Lady Gaga takes me on a journey alright - right out of earshot of her. I don't like pop music generally as I'm a long way from being a teeny bopper and simplistic things don't appeal to me. If I spool up a track and find that that track takes me to places in my head, good or bad places it doesn't matter much - then that music to me is prog music. It could be said that classical music has the effect of carrying people on mind journeys but then I percieve personally that the old classical music is far closer to prog music as we know it than it is to bubbly pop music. I could spool up 1812 by Tchaikovsky just as easily as I could Supper's Ready by Genesis but I could not spool up any of the myriad of pop bands out there today - I would feel kind of self let down doing that and I would have a very unpleasant half hour or so listening to drivel that people like Cowell make a fortune out of marketing to millions of airheads who purely want a pleasant jingle to get them through the day. Things like Jazz, the Blues, Classical music, Progressive Rock Music in its many forms are not things that Airheads would like to listen to - there is a huge difference between reading a novel and reading an Archie comic book and that is kind of the way I look at music. Personally I'm not overly fond of Classical music or Hardcore Jazz and so I get my eargasm kicks from what I define to be prog rock or prog metal music - I don't really care what the powers that be here at PA define to be prog music as I have my own definition and I trust my own mind to tell me what I think. PA has got most of it right and thus I'm a fan of the site (it's great) - I just mustn't get started on the Stratovarius thing, heh heh, because it seems to get some people here and me steamed up somewhat.   

Television, the drug of the Nation
Breeding ignorance and feeding radiation

To be is to honey scoobie doobie flat minor in excelsis glory glory halley bopp bop a looby looby loo bam blam cha-cha.

smartpatrol wrote: I think Wikipedia has defined it very well: ... Progressive rock songs either avoid common popular music song structures of verse-chorus form, or blur the formal distinctions by extending sections or inserting musical interludes, often with exaggerated dynamics to heighten contrast between sections. ...

Edited by moshkito - March 31 2013 at 12:40

You might be prog if you take your shoes off.

stacanova wrote: What is Prog? How can you tell if a band is Prog? How do you know if they are not?  ...

Cross over/Prog related originally derived from the idea to simply be a little more interesting than average Pop , but with much less complexity. Now it is compartmentalized into a catagory with a definition which will register in the minds of people who may have originally thought the music just to be "Rock" ..as many did with the Beatles in the 60's and early70's. I find the whole concept of define this or that to be ridiculous whenever I think of the original idea, which was to simply have freedom of expression within various styles of music decades ago. That seems too premature to people today and a catagory/store sticker feels more logical to them. That revolves around the frustration in people's minds that 2 + 2 cannot equal 4 and so a  classification solves their ultimate confusion. Experimentation in the 60's and 70's , logically is not summed up by pasting a stub on it to satisfy a confusing definition in your own head that you didn't grow up with, makes no sense at all and beats the hell out of you. Lady Gaga is not Prog. Styx is not Prog...but catagorization gives it a lame excuse to be Prog. That's insulting, disgraceful, and moronic.

Edited by TODDLER - March 31 2013 at 06:23

Prog can be a difficult animal to understand and I've seen various arguments around the net of what is and what is not prog. To me what makes up prog is music that is different from the ordinary structure that makes up a mainstream genre - pop music, rock, country rock, country, folk, jazz, metal etc. etc where it goes beyond those specific genres. To over complicate something on purpose is to mess it up and perhaps we shouldn't over complicate what makes up prog music. When I was around 12 years old I found prog rock and it was an instant love affair. (I was 12 in around 1971). Back then the music stores that mattered here in SA didn't have such a thing as a prog category but what they had was a section in their stores called Underground and to me that section contained what I percieve as prog music as it was far removed from the mainstream genres of music. If I wanted Yes, Genesis, Hawkwind, Alice Cooper, Black Sabbath, Uriah Heep etc I looked for it in the underground section of music stores. From there things went further and the prog label was ultimately born.

Edited by sukmytoe - March 31 2013 at 03:48