Pink Floyd and Prog Music

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 WalterDigsTunes wrote:

This is a band in which the guitarist played three guitar notes a minute, the keyboard player held a note for eight minutes, the drummer played what were at best pedestrian patterns and the singer babbled on about his daddy issues. They managed to meander through various textures over the years, yet their music involves doing very little. Lazy musicians, more than anything else.

^This is either a person who does not understand what Progressive music is, or the process of writing and performing progressive music, or another troll.

Let's look at the points raised one by one;

1. Progressive music is NOT three hundred guitar or keyboard notes a minute or ridiculously complicated drum patterns. The complaint about numbers of notes or complicatedness (as opposed to true complexity) is irrelevant.

2. I fail to hear any references to Roger Water's "daddy issues" in anything the band released pre 1979. This reference to the lyrical contents of The Wall and The Final Cut is also irrelevant, because it is a sweeping generalism - ie, not actually true.

3. It's very telling that even modern bands ore frequently quoted as "sounding a bit like Pink Floyd" - yet none can accurately capture the atmosphere that the band created through their textures. Just possibly there is something very real in the textures themselves that are unique and carefully crafted? You appear to have unpeeled the onion and become disappointed that there is nothing inside, when you should have enjoyed the layers you threw away mistakenly, thinking they were only wrapping.

4. Among bands influenced by Pink Floyd are Opeth, Radiohead and The Beatles - but the list is virtually endless. If you could positively identify bands which influenced Pink Floyds' sound, then frankly I'd be astonished. We all know where the music comes from at a grass roots level - but the finished result sounds nothing like any 1960s Blues rock act.

For a band whose music "involves doing very little", they certainly had (and are still having) a huge impact in the world of progressive music.

The word "Progress" from your earlier quote is also misleading - there are very, very few bands around now  labelled "Progressive" who really are. It's become simply a label for a style and sound rather than anything literal.

If in your opinion the word should be taken literally, then, judging them on their first album alone, Pink Floyd are probably the very first progressive rock band, as well as being one of the best examples of the music. The first song alone seems to have come out of absolutely nowhere.

When you also consider that two songs on their second album were the a main source of inspiration for an entire progressive music scene in Germany, then I think you'll need some tomato sauce to go with your words 