A major flaw in our judgment!!!

CTTE is three song album with two prog songs.

SEBTP an eight song album with two prog songs.

TAAB a one song album with two prog song...

looks like Floyd for the win then.

schizoid_man77 wrote:    in the #2 spot of the top 100 prog albums of all time is ludicrus!

small point, but the chart is the top 100 albums in the archive - not the top 100 prog-only albums and certainly not of all time. your claim is ludicrous.

Okay, I'm not joking now.

 

I rate every album in the top 10 highly - I do think that perhaps Genesis may be a little over represented, but I don't care that much because I've liked each of those since they were originally released and anyhow, I'm quite good at mentally skipping those and noticing that VdGG are in the top 20, along with PFM and Dream Theatre - hey I can look further down and see Riverside and Porcupine Tree and think - cool, that's really good going for albums that have only been released a few years - so I know that all is well with the world and the entire universe isn't going to disappear up Roger Water's backside.

 

In 1975 when Wish You Were Here was released we really didn't give a flying duck about how Prog it was, all we were interested in then was damn fine music recorded by a damn fine bands and Pink Floyd produced the goods so we were happy. We were so happy in fact that we bought it in sufficient numbers to get it to #1 in the album charts (sorry, but we didn't have the cash to do that with Close to the Edge or Selling England by the Pound, but you know, it was the seventies, in the UK we had strikes, power cuts and rising unemployment to worry about, the USA had it's own problems to deal with, students were rioting in France - well, you get the picture).

 

Pink Floyd have done it all - they have charted the course from psychedelic-pop through space-rock and mad improvisations to symphonic, ethereal, jazzy-pop, heavy-rock, latin-themed music, folk-music and pure progressive-rock covering every subject under the sun in linear concepts, abstract concepts, emotional concepts and reaccuring concepts. And everytime they did this they created their own rules (for other others to take or discard as they wished). Pink Floyd may not have written THE rules on prog, but they showed everyone how it should be done, and (horrors!) even made a bit of money doing it.

 

To me that is what progressive means - not long compositions, layering, wierd time-signatures and clever lyrics (though Floyd all did those in abundance, and in many cases they were one of the first bands to do them)

 

On this site I have read pages of arguments on how X is prog but Y is not, or how band Z made some prog albums and then made some non-prog albums, and to be honest it is all just opinion. A band is either a prog band or it isn't and if a prog band makes a non-prog album, then so what? what does that mater? what does it prove?

 

 

You say it isn't prog. I disagree: WYWH is a very cynical album about the music industry, something that Roger Waters started in 1969 with Cymbaline and again in 1972 with Free Four, (and has carried on with for the rest of his career). But cynicism, being a negative emotion, is never an easy starting point, yet Floyd managed to make the music carry this sentiment without being completely contemptuous of what they were trying to say, because I find that the music is strangely optimistic (ref: the title track) - a conterpoint to the lyrics - that's a fairly progressive concept isn't it.

 

I'm sorry if WYWH isn't prog enough for you, but let us have this discussion in 2039 and see if you think the same. (I'll be 82 by then, so I might just permit you to shout, but only so as I can hear you)