Why do Indie bands consider themselves pr

I was browsing Myspace music for  progressive bands and what came up with was frightening; many of the bands were emo, indie, punk, or a combination of the three (as if there were a difference). My question to everybody out there is, how in the Hell do these idiots consider their music to be in the progressive vein at ALL?! It all sounds the same...

Well, indie is not s genre but more of a musical movement that has plenty of great prog in it, such as all post rock is indie and a good chunk of modern art rock, so that's understandable. Dunno about punks and emos though. 

Because either they 1) don't know what it means, but think it sounds cool 2) vaguely know what it means and want to be coined with a complex genre 3) know exactly what it means and think a lot of themselves.....or 4) and they generally are progressive, but not wholly...that last is exceedingly rare. 

The Miracle wrote: Well, indie is not s genre but more of a musical movement that has plenty of great prog in it, such as all post rock is indie and a good chunk of modern art rock, so that's understandable. Dunno about punks and emos though.

I know what you mean...there just bands that suck and just try to be different....plain and simple.

activetopics wrote: I was browsing Myspace music for  progressive bands and what came up with was frightening; many of the bands were emo, indie, punk, or a combination of the three (as if there were a difference). My question to everybody out there is, how in the Hell do these idiots consider their music to be in the progressive vein at ALL?! It all sounds the same...

Do you care that much about corporate labels? Does a punk band that progresses punk qualify as progressive? If it was in the original purpose of the term very much so. The term has changed though from a description of a movement to an elitist badge of honer that sites one form of "progression" as best and disregaurds the rest.

Nobody is realy sure what progressive actualy means as it is tailored to fit the users agenda. What makes it worse is is not a very good term to describe a genre (not to mention it is historically inconsistent with how we traditionally describe genres of music).

If you take just the progressive rock era, yes there were a lot of bands that did "progress" rock; yet there were many others (or even the same bands) that "regressed" rock in what others view as more important areas. Some "prog" bands were really emotionaly infintile compared to bands in other genres. Why is not singer/songwriter rock progressive as they progressed lyrical depth and conceptual depth beyond anything in rock before. Like I said though it is a bad term, and very subjective to boot.

unicorn coffee wrote: The easy answer is that myspace's given genres dont give you many choices, and the ones they do, nobody uses-- so it's quite difficult to describe a post-rock band for instance, and the band may end up using the term "progressive"

remember that prog-rock = good rock is a FALSE statement... prog-rock is just some... special kind of rock (there are like 1089474899 threads about what prog-rock is so I won't start another one).

What I don't understand is why a band would want to mislabel themselves. To draw on other audiences? Which audiences are gonna be interested in something they don't care for and were duped into listening to..?





Edited by Atavachron - August 10 2007 at 00:50

Easy, Radiohead had huge success among Indie/alternative fans and Progheads (they have elements of both even when IMHO barely Prog), Coldplay (with less arguments) is considered Prog by some people, so why not follow a succesful formula and double your potential audience?

Edited by Ivan_Melgar_M - August 10 2007 at 01:03