Is classical influence essential to prog rock?

ExittheLemming wrote: ...For me, Prog was on its last legs long before Punk really held sway centre stage circa 76/77 and the relative simplicity and accessibility of Post Punk/New Wave was a natural reaction against what many thought was the bombastic, complexity as an end in itself, empty virtuosity and out of touch reality of the Prog giants.

I'm not sure this is totally right, or that I believe it.

You can go back to 1971 and 1972, I things like New York Dolls, or Iggy and the Stooges, and I think that is "punk" as much as anything else. Punk, as we know it, might have been a media reaction in England, but probably less of a factor in America, where NY has its own music, LA has its own music, Nashville has its own music, SF has its own music, Chicago has its own music, and New Orleans has its own music. Folks in many of these places didn't give a damn about Iggy or the Dolls, os any kind of punk, but LA and NY went googoogahgah over it!

I, sometimes think that the reaction is more our own, than the reviewers. We look at the listing of stuff and think ... ohh more of these ... less of those ... ahhh, there was a reaction, and progressive music stopped being this or that. I seriously doubt, and Dean says the same thing, that the music ever died or was not alive and well. All we have to do is look at Peter Hammill and Van der Graaf Generator, and dude ... 45 years later!!!!

That ought to show you something, though you might say that some of the albums in the 80's from Peter of the band, were not your favorites, but it didn't die simply because they are not your preference.

ExittheLemming wrote: ...Such is the cyclic nature of popular music that one generation's values are eclipsed by the next's (in this case brevity, economy, discipline, lyrical realism etc and the broadsheets can only reflect this as much as they pretend to drive it) I really don't believe that the best post punk musicians would have played anything remotely resembling Progressive Rock had it endured into the eighties nor do I detect the level of competence you describe as being on a par with the Prog Rock virtuosos existing in Post Art Rock.

The only "difference" I see is that I did not hear screaming in classical music, or any of the music that has been recorded since the 20's and the 30's, and when I hear a couple of places in some operas, it would be more than justified, which kinda suggests that there was some editing along the way, and some composer probably already had screaming in it, that was edited out as ungentlemanly, and unmusical!

The content itself, or the 3 notes, is not as valuable an assumption at all, specially when the 20th century "classical" music went on to "minimalism" and music that was considered more simplistic than the more obviously composed sounter parts. So, in that sense, "punk" did something quite right!

But it could be generalised that progressive/art gave away to punk, and ohhh my gawd, it right out and gave way to new age, or should we say rap, which for a long time was very similar to a lot of punk lyrically, though even generalizing that is not a good idea. There are, and were, some excellent poets doing rap. From one excess point to the other! Some how, even coming from me, that just sounds silly.

Dean wrote: ... In the eighties virtuosity was a dirty word and that was propagated by the media, so yes, I do empower the troll-hacks at NME and Sounds with the means to influence the prevailing fashion.

A lot of the media reminds me of the old days in high school and how the paper was so poor and cheap and vanilla (specially in the late 60's at a school like ours in Madison, WI), and intentionally ignored all the political and social relevance of their students. and to show you how vindictive some of these folks can be, our graduating class is the only one that is missing a reunion opportunity, even if it were with another class, which kinda tell you what some of us thought of those (obviously fake) virgins, and their total dislike for us hippies, radicals and soccer players (NO KIDDING!), because a few of us were from foreign countries!

We could not get into the journalism side of things, because the teacher in charge did not like us, and was a narc and a disrespecting man, that would not stand with us when we asked for the flag to be lowered when Dr. Martin Luther King was shot. Like a symbol of peace and love is just another radical ideal, when in fact all it was hiding was his racism!

We couldn't expose this. But it did get a principal fired and three of those bad teachers were not there the following year thanks to the help we got from two folks that became a part of the City Council in the fall, and we helped them get there! The City Council was not happy with the Board of Education for ignoring "facts" about abuse and the lack of acceptance for intelligent discussion.

Dean wrote: ... In the internet age we tend to forget how influential the music press was in dictating trends, the NME, Sounds and Melody Maker in the UK were the only window the average record buyer had into this world, one review is all it took to sway public opinion when the number of available reviews was reduced to just those three voices.

By the time I found these, in 1972 in Los Angeles, I bought my first copy of Melody Maker, and I think that was the one with the washing machine music comment on Tangerine Dream.

And it was within that month that we found a whole bunch of things on the Harvest label (The cereal breakfast "ingredients") that I went after religiously, and had almost all of them in my collection at one time or antoher. Not always great, but always VERY different.

And it was a that time, that I noticed that none of these got a review, and when they did get a blurb, it was one that basically ignored the band and their music, similar to the example Dean gave on that reviewer. By that time, Guy Guden and I were already friends, and were listening to a heck of a lot of music, although it is likely that he had more of an ear for some of it than I did, specially the oddball stuff, some of which threw me for a loop at the start. But I went for every used copy that I could find of any LP that was on Harvest, and we found many gems in there, and for me, Kevin Ayers and Roy Harper are still the best. And Melody Maker or NME didn't care. They were always putting the famous this or that or their new fad beatoff on the cover and kissing as$ like crazy.

After all, the job of the media is to support the company, right?

So why would they say something good about something that they do not benefit from? Think about it! It's about the company line, or you don't have a job, right?

So you still want the media to kiss you and your band, regardless?