To be more clear with my language, Prog made me discover that I was bisexual.  

I'm rather young and have only been a prog rock fan for 3 years. I never watched the love performance of the artist on youtube since the quality of most recording from the 70s usually low. Prog in the 70s was a sausage fest, and it is still extremely male dominated today. I enjoyed the 70s atheistic of the artist, but never cared to much about it. I never learned about Peter Gabriels costumes until a 4 months ago when I came across this video which is in the bottom of this message. I never never understood being gay. The stereotype that was in my mind was of liking strong muscular men that are extremely athletic. I never thought that you could like more androgynous or feminine guys. Until I saw this vid. I was amazed at the beauty of Peter Gabriel. The Close up shots on the face really got to me and made me blush. I tried to deny it for a while, that I wasn't gay, but I keep coming back, not for the music, but to see him. I know this might sound strange to Heterosexuals  that grew up with this, but Peter Gabriel is pretty hot IMO. I started to look at more prog artist, not caring to protect my fragile Heterosexuality. I looked at John Wetton, and Jon Anderson, (when they were young of course) and It fully convinced me. and thats how prog made me gay. I know this must be extremely strange to hear, For most of you reading this are neither gay or young. Yet I'm happy that I did realize it this way. Now the problem is that I doubt I will find any man that looks like a 70s prog star, but I can still dream. Thanks for reading my story.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qMsr7jjQF0&list=PLBX7aixn0YAe5qh9eYsNC2mua5uSQcMbQ&index=4&t=980s

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qMsr7jjQF0&t=1361s

I mean, the best prog songs all have the Judas Priest guitar solos. It's the most essential ingredient.

That makes no sense.  There's certainly more to music than prog though.

I concur.

I also love music with a strong rhythm section --so Yes and Genesis fit the bill.

I also love music with complexity and not simple chorus and verse.

Having said that I don't love all prog and find some of it ridiculous ---when its good its very very good and when its bad its horrid. 

Without trying to be a terrible turnip ... that there is nothing in it that was not there before, except loudness.

The talent and ability for a lot of music has been around for thousands of years, and us thinking that one particular snot is different than all the rest ... is just tea time talk about the pink flamingos!

Actually, I think I'd rather listen to mindless pap than Gentle Giant and 80's era King Crimson, but each to their own. 

I can hear Judy Collins singing "Send in the Clowns" as the soundtrack to your post. Except with Marshall amps and Strats. 

Yes, music has existed for as long as mankind has been around. However, in context (and I realize you are incapable of maintaining contextuality), before prog there was simply 3-4 chord rock (or rock and roll, rockabilly or whatever) based on blues scales and R & B melodies. To say that progressive rock was simply a matter of loudness is a silly take -- sillier than your usual tripe. 

Synthesizing classical and jazz forms transcended that simplistic rock mode and allowed for more complex compositions within the rock genre. It expanded the palette, and for at least a little while also expanded popular music beyond the banal crap that still floods the airwaves. 

I wonder if prog actually happened because of psych or if they both happened concurrently. I tend to think that art rock at least happened around the same time psych started. You might even say psych was a kind of art rock. Also, I think PF and Zappa/MOI were blurring the lines as early as 66/67. 

I've never been able to get into Gentle Giant either, nor Gong, or Van Der Graaf Generator, or Magma for that matter, which probably means I'm not a 'proper prog fan'.

I once knew a guy who seemed to like every seventies prog band except Yes. I was going through his record collection and saw Pink Floyd(I think), Gentle Giant, ELP, Genesis, King Crimson, Caravan, Hatfield and the North, National Health, Soft Machine, etc etc. but no Yes. I asked him why and he said he didn't like Yes. At the time I was thinking to myself "how can you be a prog fan if you don't like Yes?" This was in the 90's and at the time I doubt he had any idea about the current prog scene either(although I didn't ask him). He also didn't seem to know about Italian prog. So there you have it. People can like what they want and we don't have to agree with it as long as we know what we like (to paraphrase a certain prog song). 

In reply to Progishness, try the "Downwind album by Pierre Moerlen's Gong if you've never been able to get into Gong. The album sounds remarkably like a classic album by Mike Oldfield. 

Thanks, great link!!  This reminds me of an admonition from a bandmate many years ago = "Never wear underwear onstage!"

Glad you are finding out who you are, life is full of surprises.  My wife, an experienced psychologist, taught me "Love is never wrong!" 

What have I discovered?  Mostly how powerful the camaraderie is of fans of this music.  Presdoug and I are close friends, although we have not met - we have sent one another CDs and vinyl, and we share a deep and abiding love for many things prog.  

I still chat on a daily basis with friends I've known for 50 years or more, and we often discuss our live music exploits of the 1970s including Yes, Deep Purple, ELP etc.  The wonder never seems to fade. 

I actually have downwind on cd somewhere. Right now Time is the key is on the shelf and I played it once(good one). I have to revisit the early Gong albums at some point too. 

Speaking of Mike Oldfield I am severely lacking as far as he goes. I like what I've heard though.  I think he sounds like the PM Gong because they played on eachother's albums. 

The more I delve into what I truly enjoy with no apology, the more I realize how little I have in common with other people!

I laughed and nodded my head most vigorously at this because it's undeniably true. Even before I properly got into prog I was into classic rock and I was noticing this in the late 1990s and it hasn't changed since! 

As for what I've discovered through my love of prog is the diverse subgenres and influences that it has and discovering even more excellent music in the process. It's a neverending musical journey!  

I discovered Lady Room's lines at prog concerts are much shorter than pop concerts. 

That could be but imo there's still more female prog fans than most people seem to think. I think most just don't hang out on prog websites or facebook groups that much and that gives most of us the impression that there's a really small number of women who are into this kind of music. 

Yes concert at Southend - about the only concert I've been to where there was a queue for the Gents and none for the Ladies. Let's just say the audience was predominantly of a certain age.

Yeah, I've noticed that for the most part most younger Yes fans are prog fans. Many older Yes fans aren't necessarily prog fans. What I mean is I think a lot of younger folks first get into Dream Theater, Haken or prog metal and then find out about Yes later and not the other way around. 

Compared to male fans no there aren't a lot of female prog fans but they are definitely out there. Trust me.

I've had a colleague at work for 7+ years, although quite close for some reason we'd never discussed music tastes. She moonlights as a personal trainer (and is in the sort of shape that I can only dream of) so I wrongly assumed her gym playlist was your classic motivational, get-pumped-feel-the-burn selection of modern meh.

One Christmas drinks though, she turned up in a T-Shirt with the Lark's Tongues in Aspic album cover on it that she revealed she bought from Burning Shed. Turns out the gym playlist actually flips between 70s peak era prog and the likes of Porcupine Tree, Phideaux, Big Big Train, Wobbler etc.

Books and covers and all that.

I must be in the minority with this.

Firstly, I'm a woman who loves prog, and secondly I've only ever met 2 people in real life who liked prog and they were both women.

Weird.

Hi,

From our house, there was so much literature that you learned real quick that 30K books of Portuguese, Brazilian and Spanish Literature were NOT a bunch of toilet paper. So by the time that I heard The Beatles, and a lot of other music (was in Brazil then), the "differences" were already so apparent that it took away what we think is "new". Perhaps, I'll admit to the meditative side of the "tripping" material that was longer later when I came to America, but I'm not sure that it made me discover something that I did not already know or understand.

For me, it is all about the "inner experience" and how it can be translated within an artistic form, regardless of which it is. Thus, what we think is "new" often, is more a different interpretation than it is "new".

Saperlipopette! wrote: ... Most people didn't have parents with a gazillion classical albums and all that, so we'd had to find out about everything pretty much from scratch. ... Why do you take for granted that everyone but yourself is a stupid ignorant?

Hi,

In the end, if anyone EVER studies some inner work, you will find that it is all "there" right in front of you, however, the mind did not "register it". Thus, when we finally discover something, often one ends up saying 

something like "I could have done that before".

I do not consider anyone stupid or ignorant. I write with the hope that anyone might be able to see something else in what they are reading, with the exception of the professorios that go around thinking themselves superior and more knowledgeable. I don't measure "stupidity" or "ignorance", and I certainly do not go around saying that I am more this or that than anyone else. 

I write, and say these things, FROM MY EXPERIENCE. Not from some sort of idea that supposedly makes me smarter than anyone else!

Prog, is just music, and you will find "prog" in many musics around the world, with the exception that one is likely to be more conditioned to the westernized music, and sometimes not even have an external ear for something else from another world and country! 

That's all I'm saying, and you might have gotten that idea in school. I should not feel like I have to suggest that at all.

One of the aspects of music (not just progressive rock) that has been an interesting discovery for me, is the phenomenon where I strongly dislike a piece of music - find it boring, or unlistenable, or whatever - and then, as if a switch is flipped, I like it.  Or in rarer cases, *love* it.  It never really appears to be a gradual thing with me... it's an abrupt change of heart (or ear, I guess).

It doesn't happen that often, but it does happen.  So when someone says to me "It might take repeated listenings" - haha, I get it.  And hence, I try to keep an open mind, even about all the music that initially turns me off.

The big example for me personally is David Sylvian's "Secrets Of The Beehive."  I bought the CD back around the year 2000 or so, and I bought it based solely off of the rave reviews it had on Amazon.com.

When it arrived and I put it in the hi-fi, it did absolutely ZERO for me.  I listened to it numerous times over the next several months, and always with the same result.

Then literally one day, I put it on, and WHAMMO.  It was like I heard it for the first time.  How does that happen?  That's the baffling part to me.

I don't think it's just repetitive listenings, though certainly one can fall in love with a piece of music if it's all they ever listen to... which happened to me with Paul & Linda McCartney's "Ram."  As a kid, I grew up with that album in the house, and eventually got my own copy as I got older, but it was never a favorite, just sort of pleasant and familiar.

Then, it got stuck in my car's CD player - and I was too lazy to do anything about it, so I listened to Ram for about 6 months straight everyday, over and over (I had a long commute at the time).  I did not get tired of it... I fell in absolute love with it.

But that sudden "flip of a switch" thing... I love it when it happens.

We never lived together before marriage, and were actually from different cities (separated by 300+ miles) - so our first month of marriage was nothing but constant prog, bong hits, and sex.

What's funny is, she's no longer into progressive rock anymore.  These days she's listening to stuff like Beck, Hozier, X Ambassadors, etc.  I was playing that "Pram" tune Logan posted about last night, and she was laying in bed reading... but it disturbed her enough to elicit some choice negative words for it, LMAO.

Nevertheless she has an encyclopedic knowledge of prog.

richardh wrote: I've discovered I'm superior and can look down at all the plebs that only listen to 3 minute songs. Pah.

Yeah, but that's because you're well over 6 feet tall.

ExittheLemming wrote: Just for the record, I'm openly straight, physically wretched and older than most trees.

Ah!! That might explain a few things

presdoug wrote: That music appreciation is essential to my health and well being; without it, I would be not well.

That'sa pretty good one.

I dare imagine that if my first album bought (see the ad-hoc thread) hadn't been "prog", I might've become a mindless mainstream.

Indeed, though hardly an elitist in most entertainment/art forms, early exposiure to prog has led me to never settle for half-baked stuff thrown at the public. Of course it was helping that I was "bonging" (as ProfPangloss puts it ) often and disliking the "non-bonging" mainstream.

Saperlipopette! wrote: moshkito wrote: Hi, Without trying to be a terrible turnip ... that there is nothing in it that was not there before, except loudness. The talent and ability for a lot of music has been around for thousands of years, and us thinking that one particular snot is different than all the rest ... is just tea time talk about the pink flamingos! Yes but that's not what the question is about, and it's still possible to answer it without being "a terrible turnip":) - whatever that means.

Hey, as the OP said, this is a confession thread... So we've discovered Pedro is a swearing vegetable.

Not that surprising actually, now that one thinks about it.

ProfPanglos wrote: We never lived together before marriage, and were actually from different cities (separated by 300+ miles) - so our first month of marriage was nothing but constant prog, bong hits, and sex.

Actually, I did discover that it is possible to have sex with prog music banging on your eardrums

My GF really loves doing it with Anglagard's Hybris on (as long as I skip the opening track)

cstack3 wrote: Oh damn, I thought you said "porg!"

.

The only differences being vegetables are good for you and considerably more coherent