What is the best record as an intro to prog?

You know what it feels like to me sometimes? ... it's almost like we're telling folks that "progressive" is like ... if you want to go to San Francisco, be sure to wear flowers in your hair ... " and some folks are not going to like that and think that is stupid and crazy! I'm not a hippy! So, in a way, I prefer to take that part out, with the inevitable problem that by being "quotidian" I am placing this in the middle of that "flowers in your hair" thing ...

there were a lot of people that did really good music ... and we just have not met those people, or that music

Of course there were, of course we haven't. What has that got to do with it?

Moshkito wrote: Desert_Storm wrote:  After all the Thread Starter asked about an album as an introduction and not a detailed explanation of the whole movement? It's like seeing a forest instead of one tree, or vice versa. I'm not sure that you can "exemplify" a concept with one album or one band. That is really an uneducated idea that your own professor and instructor is going to hammer you on.

Well thanks for calling my ideas uneducated. By the way, what you say my professor (whoever you mean, I didn't know you knew I study or what or with whom) would "hammer me on", I'm sorry to disappoint you, but picking examples to explain the big with the small or the general with the particular is exactly what we do where I study. A professor wants to explain the, let's say baroque variation form and he starts with showing us Bach's Goldberg Variations. After we analyse it, we look what it has in common with other variation works from that time and whats different, and thus get a picture how to stake off the respective genre. This is very common in music, I've read tons of books about musical morphology and analysis and about every author that comes to my mind uses this method. So you're still free to disagree with the complete methodology but if you want to do that and still be taken seriously I would like to know a little something about your background.
By the way, after typing this, it comes to my mind that it was absolutely superfluous. Taking examples to explain something is used all the time in all disciplines and in real life. Look at anything you want. In physics we teach gravity by throwing one example object on the floor and examine how it falls. In Language we pick one correct or incorrect example sentence to show what's grammatically/logically/whatever right or wrong. In biology we watch one example plant or animal develop and thus explain evolution. Look at the children: "Mommy, what are rocks?", and the mother will pick up some random rocks from the ground and say "those things". Should she better say "Well, that depends, there are many concepts regarding the definition of what is a rock and what not, and in each concepts there are many different materials in many different forms that qualify as rocks, so showing you one would not help you at all" ? Come on, it's ridiculous.

You can use it as an example, But your professor is going to say ... that's one example ... let's have more showing this and this and this and that ... which you did not show.

Of course multiple examples are better than one, but that was not the point. The point is that if you don't have multiple, one is infinitely better than none.

I get the issue ... make it simple stupid ...