Originality - An observation by King By-Tor

A lot of what you say is true and very depressing, but in the case of the prog genre, whatever that is, keep in mind that a lot of the early key albums were made by musicians influenced by things other than rock music, ie, jazz, the classics and folk. Nowadays we have bands influenced by previous prog bands, or even more distressingly, by alternative rock bands and that can't help but be an attenuating effect on the music itself - song for song, modern prog might not be any less "original" (depending on your definition) but the majority of it is certainly more predictable.

I'm sorry to give you such an unfavourable response but I have been quietly considering this topic for a while, now...

originality |əˌrijəˈnalitē|
noun
the ability to think independently and creatively : a writer of great originality.
• the quality of being novel or unusual : he congratulated her on the originality of her

Recently I've been thinking while reading about so called "uncreative" music and studying theory behind conventional and contemporary music. All too often I see bands get put down for being so-called "uncreative". Some bands that are tagged as retro are often attacked with such an insult, and sometimes I wonder why. It's not surprising sometimes of course, since a lot of the new wave generation of prog bands are finally able to emerge onto the scene because there is once again a market for them. These artists, had they gone to record labels in, say, the late 70s or early 80s surely would have been turned away because of the nature of the music they play. Now they have been given a second life and people are calling them down for it.

Are we so fed up with people trying to appeal to our tastes that we simply turn them away?

Are we simply nostalgic so that no new bands could possibly be as good as we remember the old bands as being?

Of course you must consider the original Proggers to be a very creative bunch, in a time when pop and rock tunes stuck very close to the formula they decided to become musical virtuosos and play long jams to their hearts content. But were they not influenced by classical music? Were they not influenced by blues? Indeed, a Yes song is your typical 'verse, chorus, verse, bridge, chorus, verse' kind of song except extended to great amounts by classical noodling.

Why then do we attack bands for doing things the same way now?

Should this music simply have faded away when the time was right?

For every band there has to be an audience, and so even with the most 'unoriginal' of bands we find that tey have a following. Again, this is easy to see since that typical song structure is the most popular in the world. U2 sold more records than The Flower Kings ever will, and why? U2 appeals to a larger mass of people. Are they excellent virtuoso musicians capable of playing a 16-hour guitar jam on stage? No, but they know the inside and out of song writing, catchy choruses and hooks, making their music appeal to that large group who really don't care about how 'technical' the music is.

Prog fans on the other hand seem to have a hard time grasping this. This is where the 'elitism' argument comes in most of the time, but I'll forgo that for the moment. but does no one realize that even our most cherished prog epics are the same thing? I've made this point before, but I just want to exaggerate it and make it clear.

And then there's the vocal minority who makes claim that any song that has little to no structure MUST then be good. This is something I find terribly difficult to understand, and while I'm a firm believer in 'different strokes for different folks' there's something I simply can't comprehend; what makes a pop song, or even a prog song good is that you remember it somehow, someway, whether it be through a chorus, melody or hook, you remember it somehow. How then is simply having no structure being original? The meathods work for a reason, and they're tried, tested and true.

Let's also travel back into the past a bit until we get to krautrock. I quite enjoy what I've heard of this genre, and it does no use conventional song writing at all. I've heard that this genre is almost like a cousin to more contemporary genres who don't use a conventional song structure. I honestly have a hard time listening to some new music arriving on the scene with seemingly no structure, but people praise it as being very original! Yet they fail to realize that the same techniques have been applied many years ago, while at the same time bashing other artists who use a more conventional style of writing who have just as much 'originality'.

Everyone is influenced by someone or something. I think that a lot of people have a hard time seeing the difference between originality and conventionality.

Comments?