Ian Anderson disses prog

wilmon91 wrote:   I think the whole thing depends a bit on the artists intent and approach. If you do pop but keeping all doors open to all kinds of ideas, the result may be more progressive than many progressive bands.

In that case, music that is taxonomically/evidentially pop can also be prog. I don't agree with such a distinction. It is not necessary that prog is necessarily 'truer' than pop and I'd highly doubt it was always the case in the 70s especially.  Further, as Happiness is a warm gun suggests, pop music can be proggy too.  Intermezzo no.1 is another good example of this.  I prefer to look at genres evidentially because it makes more sense to me that way whereas artist intent is derived from conjecture and inference and more unreliable, in my view.

wilmon91 wrote: Eh...I think that's your idea. I said earlier that I'm no "progger", just to point out that I'm not here to defend proggers or any such idea. You seem to have an attachment to a certain "role"  in a discussion, where in this case you have an idea of prog as some sort of community which you place yourself outside of, and if something sarcastic is said about "prog" , you feel good because "it serves them right", and prog is just some imaginary thing that some people cling to. But that's my theory about where you are coming from in this matter. You are outside of the imaginary prog community. That would be part of the "basis" to your opinion, in that case. Just my theories.

You have asked what I think of these bands, whether I think they are prog, whether I think JT are prog and whether I do not think Anderson's statements would offend PROG ROCK fans. So you basically want me to put myself in the shoes of hardcore prog rock fans.  So, the implication is the same for me. You can build up a thesis surrounding this imaginary progger thing and believe things based on that that you'd choose to but the fact that you reject the possibility of a neutral discussion suggests that you want a prog rock fan's reaction to it.  I mean, if I was or was not an Anderson fan would have no bearing on how I react to ELP-bashing. Only a prog rock fan would care about bashing those specific bands all together and apparently reinforcing a stereotype.  You may or may not be here to defend proggers but you certainly have urged at different points that I should look at how his statements would come across to prog rock fans and thereby also implied the question as to what would I be doing here if I wasn't one.

wilmon91 wrote:   It is unreliable, but that's always a problem with genres, really. To place music firmly in categories by "evidence" can be a bit like chasing shadows. Many artists are hard to pin down to a specific genre. It's an approximate thing.

Not at all, in rock or metal, there is a problem only with borderline cases and they are genuinely borderline as 90% of the bands are easily identified as rock or metal. Prog rock is quite evidently a lot more subjective than that, I am sure you'd agree with that. It is actually fairly easy to place music in categories evidentially so long as the categories are either very broad based or very specifically identified. Prog is neither, really. It ought to be broad based but people get confused between a prog sound/style and a prog APPROACH.