Fanboyism in progressive rock

rogerthat wrote: tamijo wrote: I think its very important, that most people just do not care that much about art in general. I you dont care much, you will just crap whatever is around.   On the sociological level there will be a level of "statements" sending, you make a statement about who you are, or rather Who you want others to belive You are, by the art intrests you got. On the psycological level you even send these signals to yourself. Like if you like to send the signal, that you are the normal famli' father, with a steady income, and a nice pension, on the right side of the law, You prob. wont be listning too death metal on the car radio.  Or hanging abound with a bunce of PUNK's at the local underground art gallery.   So in most cases having the Avantgarde taste in art, will be coupled with, beeing able to define yourself, in a way that allows you to stick out from the norm. Something that quite a few would feel rather uncomfortable with, unless they are young and have friends with similar taste.         I completely disagree.  Maybe there are people who do define themselves by their taste in art but I am not one of them and I haven't yet met anybody who listens to non-mainstream music or watches arthouse cinema that does so.  Maybe I got lucky, huh?  Anyway, I took interest in rock rather late in my so far short life, during college in fact.  Those who knew me from before that time were a bit taken aback because I used to dismiss rock as noise earlier and they also wondered how much I had changed.  I told them I had only changed the music I listen to and hadn't changed as a person and my still cherubic countenance convinced them that this was indeed the case.  Art is just something that happens to interest me and provoke thought in me.  For somebody else, it could be shopping, could be gadgets, could be cars. To identify oneself with the art one appreciates is dangerous imo, UNLESS you eventually MAKE that art yourself in which case it makes perfect sense. Oh, and I am a shaky driver and at the same time get too immersed in the music I listen to ever think of listening to death metal or any music I am passionate about while driving.  I would probably play popular radio (or Camel ) just to insulate myself from the cacophony of horns on the road in rush hour.  Everybody who knows me in person will tell you I am a normal chap and I am on the right side of the law. In fact I didn't take up audit practise after becoming a certified accountant because I am uncomfortable about being pressurized by companies to sign cooked books. And wait, a good friend of mine listens to tons more of death metal than me and he's as much of a nice guy as I am.  Extending your logic, every death metal fan should be a closet anti social thug and I don't think that is the case.

I dont disagree, I was only talking about a level of statement sending, not that it would often qualify

Edited by tamijo - September 06 2009 at 06:39

Maby You are right, hopefully You are.

Nuke wrote: when I say a band is solidly in one genre, I don't mean that absolutely nothing creeps in (I hear classical ideas/aesthetics in averse sefira for example), but rather that they don't overtly take from other genres. What seems to work for metal is taking a little bit from other genres and then running with it.

Thanks for the recommendation, firstly, never heard of them before.  Now, as for fragmentation, what you suggest seems reasonable but I think fragmentation in metal goes well beyond that and as ToasterMantis mentioned, there are sub-sub-sub genres where we get into very narrowly defined styles combined with a fanatic fanbase that insists that bands rigidly stick to such a style.  That is what I think could be detrimental. I would of course have to sample Averse Sefira to make sure that you and I are not perhaps talking about the same thing because it could be that what they are up to is perfectly acceptable to me - in terms of originality, that is, likeability is a subjective issue anyway - and not what I would consider as focusing too much on one style. 

Interesting discussion tamijo and rogerthat have been having... the reason I didn't drop in that this week I've been really business with college-related activities.

Anyway, to that entire business about people's musical tastes being dictated by their identity and the social statements they wanna make I think there's some grain of truth to that but it's nowhere as simple. I do think that the entire institutions of "the classics" and on the opposite end of the axis "the avant-garde" play a role in what tamijo said, especially but definitely not exclusively in genres that have an associated subcultural identity. That's definitely a factor and this isn't just in music... a while ago I read a column in the book review section of Information (a Danish newspaper) about the Japanese author Haruki Murakami that explained his success as being that he was far enough out of the mainstream to appeal to yuppies who want to think of themselves as more sophisticated than the "hoi polloi" but not so downright out-of-left-field to completely throw those people off. 

On the other hand... well, well, well. A lot of people probably have that compulsion, and it does often make sense to generalize from people's general (sub)cultural tastes but that's rarely a complete picture. I've met people surprised to find out I listened to Eurythmics as well as people surprised to find out I listened to Motörhead. I basically think most people will be able to synthesize their own opinions on music and art in general at some point independent of any identity-dictating canon or at least distance themselves from the formative stage as they get older... could be getting more narrow taste, wider tastes or more refined in the sense of for example listening to more different genres and moods but having a higher standard for quality, however that is defined.

It's probably more accurate to say that people's musical/literary/cinematic tastes are products of their personalities and the personality includes things like social identity.


Edited by Toaster Mantis - September 09 2009 at 14:59

This reminds me of someone that used to go on another site I used to go on. A die hard avant garde fan. 

Main annoyance with him is he was one of those "This is good music.  This isn't." types that ram his opinion down your throat. I swear he fished for reasons to dislike bands, because his excuses were very desperate to say the least. Anyway he had this strong hatred for prog due to it all basically "all being the same."

  Yeah.  You read right.  I mean fair enough if he isn't a fan of it.  A lot of people aren't anyway.  But he was essentially what people usually consider a "prog fan stereotype" (rants about how his taste is superior etc etc), only as an avant garde fan instead


Edited by Repner - October 08 2009 at 22:58

la Volpe wrote: Well one good example of fanboyism is Progarchives. Everyone trying to put in the list their favourite non-prog band just because they would die if they had to acknowledge they like something that is not progressive rock...

Yeah, it was mentioned a couple of time earlier by Raff. It's the categories "proto-prog" and "prog-related" that are good ideas in theory and useful but in practice often end up functioning as weasel-words... at the same time, there are some bands I'm surprised aren't on the archives (Soundgarden, for example) but maybe that's a subject for another thread and even then I'm not sure if I care enough to make a bit fuss about it. I mean, haven't we have enough "exactly what is progressive rock" threads?

Yeah actually.  That would be an example.

Nuke wrote: I think prog fans ought to get out and become elitist in other genres and then come back to prog. I left prog and became a metalhead of the obnoxiously arrogant sort when I was younger. It is true that metalheads are a bunch of genre chauvinists. Interestingly, lots of metalheads are also interested in classical music because they see it as a relevant genre, kind of like proggers except metalheads often bizarrly shun jazz. Anyways,I swear being a metal elitist for 2 years really helped me exand my musical ideas and so when I came back to prog (although deep down I still see metal as a superior genre) I actually had a far more open mind. Interestingly, I feel that somehow this opened the door for me to reaccept pop music, although I don't know exactly how. I guess my point is that if you just forget about prog for a couple years, you will come back much more openminded.

To the best of my recollection, I had an experience as a metalhead (ether in the 1980s or '90s) of wondering off into other genres for a good long stretch of time and then going back to metal, and finding the energy of the music to be enhanced or revitalized. There's a benefit.

No elitism is necessary to me. Just self honesty and giving ones self the permission to wonder.

Toaster Mantis wrote:   People insisting that other sub-genres of rock'n'roll don't have proficient musicianship or ambitious concepts at all. Treating progressiveness or stylistic complexity as something that's good in itself rather than as a means to an end. Endless nitpicking over what's "really" progressive and what isn't, which starts to look like an excuse to dismiss artists and albums out of hand if they don't live up to some arbitrary and possibly revisionistic standard of what progression really is. Whenever someone doesn't like progressive rock, it's treated as a sign of either some malicious conspiracy or stupidity on part of whatever group of people that's perceived as not appreciating progressive rock enough. Only really liking music from other genres (e. g. jazz, metal) on the condition of how much it resembles (or is influential to) progressive rock. In general having a very "sacred cow" attitude to artists and albums that are seen as classics of the genre.

Edited by moshkito - February 14 2011 at 21:04