Should XTC be considered Prog Related?

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 uduwudu wrote:

Prog related doesn't tell me anything. Iron Maiden are prog related? I thought they're a heavy metal band. This is a bit like the 21st Century misnomer 'classic" rock. Bands from the 70s like, er ACDC and Simon and Garfunkel are all classic rock.

Thing is XTC were a new wave band that moved on though the years. Maybe make more use of the art rock label. 

Prog rock is classical historical techniques allied with rock approaches. Art rock is a song based sophisticated rock approach. 

maybe think of visiting this site as an outsider wondering if XTC ae like ELP or Yes or not. Prog related is not a style. You can't play a prog related guitar lick now can you? Well, I can but that's my problem. ;)

Point is you have to describe the music style not take the equivalent of a government department approach to labeling (you know, faceless, meaningless, futile and useless to anyone normal). Crossover prog is nearly as bad... Folk, metal, symphonic, electronic etc usw describe what the music is rather than being wishy washy. 

Yeah sure, put XTC in but with a commonly understood music label not a sub-sub-sub-genre site only description. I mean Radiohead are here and there was a band that were really anxious about not getting the prog rock label. Which incidentally I wouldn't; notwithstanding despite my dislike I'd put them in as an art rock band, although to me they are alt.rock oddly closer to XTC. This is all the fault of punk rock and Malcolm McLaren.

Of course first we could have a definition of prog rock (I say classical rock fusion). Start at the top. 

As you have been visiting this site almost as long as I have there is no need for me to tell the entire history of the Prog Related category here, however, for the benefit of newer readers and more recent members, I'll quote the opening paragraphs of a post I made last year:

 Dean wrote:

A history...

Prog Related is a compromise. Between 2004 and 2006ish (before the genre teams were created and before the categories of Prog Related and Proto Prog existed) a band could be added into the archive by any Special Collaborator without discussion or evaluation. This resulted in a number of essentially non-Prog bands being added for a variety of perfectly valid reasons, such as non-Prog solo outings by members of established Prog bands, non-Prog Art Rock bands, and bands that were either influential on or influenced by Prog Rock or Prog bands in some way or other, or simply because the person adding them believed they were Prog at the time.

When it was deemed that a clean-up was necessary the Admins and Collabs had to decide what to do with these artists. Basically we had a whole bunch of artists that didn't fit in with what most people would regard as Prog Rock and in a perfect world we would have just deleted them. However, Max has a policy of not deleting bands once they have been added, so the ability to delete artists is unavailable to the Admin team, therefore the compromise solution was to create a couple of non-Prog categories for them. 
(the full text can be read >here<)

The same thing happened to ill-defined sub-genre of Art Rock, which around the time you joined was split into three "made-up" sub-genres of Heavy Prog, Eclectic Prog and Crossover Prog¹. We make no secret of the fact that we invented these sub-genres for our own use and at the time they had no meaning or definition outside the PA. We had the situation where King Crimson, Rush, Be Bop Deluxe and Mike Oldfield were all grouped together as Art Rock and that didn't make a great deal of sense. So the aim here was to remove the sub-set of Progressive Rock bands from the broader Art Rock classification and give them more appropriate homes, as a consequence of that a few non-Prog Art Rock bands found their way into Prog Related (again, because M@X would not permit their deletion). I cannot be bothered tracking down specific threads that discussed this but suffice to say, not all Prog bands are Art Rock and not all Art Rock bands are Prog.

The number of bands that have been added to Prog Related since then is notably very small. This is no accident.

The addition of Iron Maiden has also been discussed and explained at length in the eight years you have been visiting here, so again for the benefit of newer readers I'll summarise that: Their inclusion here is primarily in recognition of their contribution to the development of Progressive Metal. As we do not have a category for Proto-Prog Metal (nor do we want or need one), and do not differentiate between Prog Related & Prog Metal Related, (not do we want to), putting them in Prog Related was a rational solution - not ideal but acceptable in the general scheme of things given there were secondary considerations towards their addition.

¹ I'm not a fan of the name "Crossover Prog", and speaking as an ex-member of the Xover Team I would have preferred a less ambiguous name that would have retained some of its Art Rock heritage. But that is by-the-by - Crossover is an indicator, it's the "Prog" bit that's important.