Progs' Resilience

punk is the music of rebel schoolkids without a clue

I think its more than that. It was crafted to bring music back down to earth from the soaring heights of prog (amoung other genres). Instead of complex instrumental arrangement music was reduced to three-chord crunches and with simplistic tendencies. It was an engineered killer you could say which, unlike prog was encouraged to grow.

Edited by Australian - December 27 2006 at 06:31

Snow Dog wrote: smithers wrote: punk is the music of rebel schoolkids without a clue Punk was a very healthy thing. It allowed kids with "less" ability to get up there and create music themselves. It opened up a closed world. And it was exciting.

sex pistols were horrible. There's a start :)

progismylife wrote: smithers wrote: sex pistols were horrible. There's a start :)      The sex pistols weren't that bad...

I'm not a huge punk fan, but one can not deny the impact it had and it DID give music in general a renewed focus and sharpness, imo. I even like the odd punk track- shock! horror!, though it's not something I'd go out of my way for by any means. I'd argue prog was perhaps at its lowest ebb in the late 80s- prog bands were still having big hit albums in the late 70s, lest we forget. Punk WAS resposnsible for a whole lot of rubbish and talentless imitators, something a lot of the bigger punk bands would be quick to admit. The ones with a wider musical outlook such as The Jam, The Clash, The Stranglers, The Damned etc survived into the 80s because they broadened their horizons somewhat. The fly-by-nights did not- something that is the same in prog.

And also, I feel one look at the pop charts of the mid to late 70s it's possible to argue that had as much on impact on, if not more than, the anger of the punk movement towards the music scene. They were literally filled with MOR and lightweight disco/pop.

I think that punk was more in response to disco than prog.  For the most part, one cannot dance to prog.  I believe that young people that liked to dance wanted an alternative to disco music.

Magic Mountain wrote: I think that punk was more in response to disco than prog.  For the most part, one cannot dance to prog.  I believe that young people that liked to dance wanted an alternative to disco music.

You are right.....it was the dire singles chart, but also big bands like Led Zeppelin that Punk was a reaction too, as much as it was Prog. It was against the establishment and established acts.

Frasse wrote: Snow Dog wrote: Magic Mountain wrote: I think that punk was more in response to disco than prog.  For the most part, one cannot dance to prog.  I believe that young people that liked to dance wanted an alternative to disco music. You are right.....it was the dire singles chart, but also big bands like Led Zeppelin that Punk was a reaction too, as much as it was Prog. It was against the establishment and established acts. And by now they are established acts themself.

Who are? Punk bands of the seventies? I don't know ao any who are currently established acts.

Do you mean that they became establishered acts? If so, yes, a small ammount of them did, but what of it?

Interesting thread-bits here. Once I heard someone comment that parts of Genesis' "The Lamb..." gave inspiration for punk as a genre (not to mention the direction Peter Gabriel was going himself). That comment up for debate, I would agree that punk was less a reaction to prog and more a reaction to other mainstream pop music of the mid-1970s (esp. disco)....