Close to the Edge question

Dark Side of the Moon, Queen II and Close to the Edge are my top 3 albums in rock/pop music, so it wouldn't just make my top 10 favorite prog albums quite comfortably but also top 10 rock/pop albums list as well as music in general. Relayer is brilliant too, but well, I prefer And You and I to To Be Over, Siberian Khatru to Sound Chaser and Close to the Edge to Gates of Delirium, so it's not that close, even if the difference is not that big either.  

chopper wrote: Frenetic Zetetic wrote: moshkito wrote: Weird ... a Moshkism that is the worst Moshkism I have ever seen. I was around in those days, and already had THE YES ALBUM and FRAGILE ... and not a single person that I knew or met, or at the couple of record stores, EVER ... said, or used the word "prog", or the words "prog fans". The assumption is ridiculous, and a mental fabrication of what many folks do today to "change" the history of the time, and how people felt about music and the arts. Almost all of it, was not about the "fans" ... it was about the music itself ... it was later, when things got even worse and more commercial (FM radio in America was no longer independent!!!!!) that things changed and all of a sudden the word and "style" became better known and used, but I don't think that a single person EVER said "progressive" about Pink Floyd until way after DSOTM. For the most part, it was still considered "art rock", and up until later, it just floated ... until the incredible backstabbing flash of the record companies started trying to kill long cuts after the deluge of them in 1971 and 1972 (and earlier). And the same record companies had done the same thing to black music in the 1950's according to Tom Dowd and others! The main reason? It was improvised and the cuts were too long, and they were not "songs" ... and a lot of it was considered "jazz" that at the time was not given a whole lot of credit as being "music" at all. It wasn't until the 60's and after that jazz really got its chance and just flew ... much further than rock music for that matter! My father (approaching 70 years old) confirms this as well; "Nobody called it prog we all just called it rock and they were all different! YES was different and that's why I loved them!". Labels definitely came after the fact, hindsight being 20/20, right? Just consulted my NME Encylcopedia of Rock 1978 edition and Yes and ELP are called "techno-rock", no mention of the "p" word. My dodgy memory tells me that progressive rock was a thing in the 70s but I hadn't heard it shortened to "prog" until more recently.

Frenetic Zetetic wrote: moshkito wrote: Weird ... a Moshkism that is the worst Moshkism I have ever seen. I was around in those days, and already had THE YES ALBUM and FRAGILE ... and not a single person that I knew or met, or at the couple of record stores, EVER ... said, or used the word "prog", or the words "prog fans". The assumption is ridiculous, and a mental fabrication of what many folks do today to "change" the history of the time, and how people felt about music and the arts. Almost all of it, was not about the "fans" ... it was about the music itself ... it was later, when things got even worse and more commercial (FM radio in America was no longer independent!!!!!) that things changed and all of a sudden the word and "style" became better known and used, but I don't think that a single person EVER said "progressive" about Pink Floyd until way after DSOTM. For the most part, it was still considered "art rock", and up until later, it just floated ... until the incredible backstabbing flash of the record companies started trying to kill long cuts after the deluge of them in 1971 and 1972 (and earlier). And the same record companies had done the same thing to black music in the 1950's according to Tom Dowd and others! The main reason? It was improvised and the cuts were too long, and they were not "songs" ... and a lot of it was considered "jazz" that at the time was not given a whole lot of credit as being "music" at all. It wasn't until the 60's and after that jazz really got its chance and just flew ... much further than rock music for that matter! My father (approaching 70 years old) confirms this as well; "Nobody called it prog we all just called it rock and they were all different! YES was different and that's why I loved them!". Labels definitely came after the fact, hindsight being 20/20, right?

moshkito wrote: Weird ... a Moshkism that is the worst Moshkism I have ever seen. I was around in those days, and already had THE YES ALBUM and FRAGILE ... and not a single person that I knew or met, or at the couple of record stores, EVER ... said, or used the word "prog", or the words "prog fans". The assumption is ridiculous, and a mental fabrication of what many folks do today to "change" the history of the time, and how people felt about music and the arts. Almost all of it, was not about the "fans" ... it was about the music itself ... it was later, when things got even worse and more commercial (FM radio in America was no longer independent!!!!!) that things changed and all of a sudden the word and "style" became better known and used, but I don't think that a single person EVER said "progressive" about Pink Floyd until way after DSOTM. For the most part, it was still considered "art rock", and up until later, it just floated ... until the incredible backstabbing flash of the record companies started trying to kill long cuts after the deluge of them in 1971 and 1972 (and earlier). And the same record companies had done the same thing to black music in the 1950's according to Tom Dowd and others! The main reason? It was improvised and the cuts were too long, and they were not "songs" ... and a lot of it was considered "jazz" that at the time was not given a whole lot of credit as being "music" at all. It wasn't until the 60's and after that jazz really got its chance and just flew ... much further than rock music for that matter!

Sacro_Porgo wrote: ... tl;dr It's a practically flawless album both melodically and progressively that came out in the perfect circumstances to become a go-to touchstone for serious prog fans at the time, which time has continued to be kind towards.

I remember hearing CTTE for the first time when I was 12 or 13. At that time I was into the pop/rock hits of the day. I had just discovered Dylan's Blood on the Tracks and that was the big game changer for me. My initial reaction to CTTE was, what the hell is this? But I was attracted to it in a strange way. I bought the record and the more I played it the more it unfolded into the beautiful masterpiece that it truly is. To this day it is in my top albums of all time.

The Shrubbery wrote: patrickq wrote: Posting this in this here subforum because Close to the Edge comes up so often in Personal Top 10 lists. Personally I think Relayer is slightly better, but I agree that CttE is truly a masterpiece. But then again, Yes is my favorite band. My question is what exactly about CttE makes it so broadly popular among PA people? It seems like you could be a Tech Metal or Math Rock fan, and your Top 10 favorite albums will be nine from your favorite prog subgenre, plus Close to the Edge. It's Chris Squire's bass line. It's one of the greatest syncopated bass lines ever.  Relayer is stunning but it doesn't have that melodic unforgettable bass line

To me, Close To The Edge makes perfect sense as the quintessential prog rock album. There's no filler, and the band of top players writes and plays together at the peak of their powers. It's lean at only three songs, and every song stands out for a different reason, none of them having a wasted moment. The melodies are both well framed and well written (and catchy). Plus, it came out off the back of Yes' biggest hit to date (Roundabout), which had more or less put the thriving subgenre of prog on the radio. Yes were a big deal, and they came out with an album that was both a bold statement (mostly for only having 3 songs) and a natural progression of their craft. All of these qualities made it a commercial success, despite not really having a single on it. Being a commercial success coming from a popular (and by now, classic) plays a big role in how much discussion it warrants in the press and amongst fans, whether or not its any good. So when it turns out to have nothing on board but excellent progressive rock, all that discussion is amplified. Many other albums boast music of similar quality, but very few of them hit the nail on the head at just the right time in such a classic band's career, the way CTTE did for Yes. Dark Side Of The Moon perhaps, but that record is a hair too commercial for the prog community to hold it up and say "this, this is the quintessential prog record" (though I seriously doubt commercial and progressive are mutually exclusive qualifiers). Genesis, Tull, ELP, KC, Rush, none of them ever got the timing so gloriously right as Yes did doing CTTE right after Fragile (and Roundabout). For some, they never achieved a hit with as much staying power as Roundabout, and for others, that hit came after the band had moved past their peak prog phase. 

"Zipf's law is an empirical law formulated using mathematical statistics. The law is named after the linguist George Kingsley Zipf, who first proposed it.Zipf's law states that given a large sample of words used, the frequency of any word is inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table."