Punk: A Logical Extension of Prog?

Finnforest wrote: Dean's comments ring true to me, about how small it really was.  Despite the consistant baying of every music publication of the day, there were just a handful of kids at school getting into the whole punk/new wave thing.  95% of the student body just wanted their Who, their Angus, and their JimmyP.  Everyone listened to hard rock and very few cared who Johnny Rotten was.  Even as regards prog, the established prog and prog related bands had more fans than did the punk bands.  It wasn't until later, by the time MTV was getting huge, that the "new" sound would rival Mr. Townshend and Mr. Page in terms of popularity in those high schools halls around here.

Oh I certainly recognize its influence on later music, but I think prog also had an influence on later pop artists which may be unrecognized because punk seems to be favored more by music writers.  Would many of the "colorful" 80s bands have embraced such flamboyance and freedom without prog pushing boundaries a decade earlier?  Maybe, maybe not.  

 

That too, yes, but prog rock also.  I think the musical artistry of an album like Synchronicity owes something to prog rock. 

Finnforest wrote: That too, yes, but prog rock also. (being Glam)

Agreed. I saw Wakeman perform with Yes in the early seventies with his trademark capes. Now, that was Glam! 

Edited by SteveG - March 07 2015 at 12:37

^Wakeman's capes were part of the Yes concert experience!

SteveG wrote: For something that's deemed to be so small, Punk's lasting impact on music cannot be underestimated. There would be no New Wave movement without it and no Grudge movement as a response to New Wave. And let's not forget the entire arty Post Punk movement. Prog simply has not have had that impact on Pop music, regardless of how big it was, unless we look in terms of Punk being a reaction to Prog, which would place Prog right back into the negative light that it was cast into in the middle to later seventies.

Have to agree with most of this but as for the reasons, things get a tad blurry hereabouts. As Dean has correctly pointed out already, Punk's musical legacy was rudimentary and meager at best, until such time as we reached circa '79 and the so-called Post Punk artists emerged. I guess that what Punk bequeathed to music were the sorts of values I personally still hold dear e.g. discipline, brevity, economy, focus, structure etc in stark contrast to the spacey improvs and lengthy noodly meanderings that afflict some of the worst Prog. It also probably goes without saying that Punk was accessible so that anyone with a very basic set of chops and a cheap guitar could join a band with like minded souls without being subjected to ridicule or having to attend a conservatoire beforehand. Similarly, the subject matter was considerably more pragmatic, prosaic and political (at least in the UK) than the sort of conceptual tangents so beloved of Sinfield, Anderson, Gabriel, Lake et al. Prog was effectively overripe and rotting by circa 1974/75 and had lost much of its customer base. I'm still unsure what deserting Prog fans started to listen to instead between then and the end of the decade?


Edited by ExittheLemming - March 07 2015 at 15:15

ExittheLemming wrote: SteveG wrote: ExittheLemming wrote: Tom Verlaine felt Television were not part of any so-called punk movement. "We felt outside of that," he says. "I don't think any of those bands (Patti Smith, Blondie, Talking Heads, Voidoids) were punk and everybody knows they're not punk so it's kind of a dead issue. Nobody calls those bands punk, outside of maybe the Ramones." I'm aware of the distinctions between the spirit of the law and the letter of the law, Ian. Simply put, Television has to be categorized. So what category would you place them in? I wasn't being pedantic.  If they have to be categorized, Television are a rock band who stripped away a lot of the habitual blues vocabulary from their music which gave it a somewhat unique sound for the time.  No more, no less.

Unfortunately Ian, all music has to be categorized. I'm not being condescending, it's the curse that we live with. I'll use the numerous subgenres in PA as an example.

Punk got co-opted fairly quickly by the music industry and was turned into sterile mush within a few years. The fashionably unfashionable look and attitude remained, but the music went to hell.  It seems the record companies' subversion of musical trends was a phenomena that picked up steam in the late 70s. Maybe they had perfected it by then. It was evident, of course, in the 60s (American Monkee mop-tops aping the Brit Beatles, for instance), but rock music was more volatile in the 60s and early 70s, and less subject to cookie-cutter assembly lines vomiting out either MTV synth players with bad hair and an emo tendency to whine, or big-haired, bandana-wearing pseudo-tough guitarists with band names that reflected vermin, lewd body parts or parasitic insects.

Edited by The Dark Elf - March 07 2015 at 20:31

SteveG wrote: ^Wakeman's capes were part of the Yes concert experience!   (...)

Of course it was a part of Yes experience! Same with e.g. Mr Daltrey's Tarzan-shirt at The Who gigs in the middle 70s. All in good time

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