Losing interest in prog

IMO for not having a boring debate, sometimes it's good to have some generalizations, it's actually may lead to more dynamic discussion.  

My theory is this:

The "best" (and by best I mean most appreciated by both critic and audience) music tends to come from this initial movement, because it's not forced. It's a natural evolution from what came before. It's not trying to be anything other than the musical expression of the people making it. Often, this music captivates so many people that it creates a genre, and imitators come in. These can be anything from cynics trying to manipulate the genre's success, to musicians wishing they'd gotten in on the ground floor, to artists who genuinely love the sound and just can't get enough of it.

I would say that Prog as we know it is actually a collection of three fundamental movements (though I'm certain that others will dispute this): Classic Progressive Rock (Yes, Genesis, KC, ELP, etc etc), RIO, and Progressive Metal. I realize that this is a rather ethno-centric collection, but imagine that RPI, for example, is a part of the Classic Prog; a sub-movement, if you will.

Regardless of whether you agree with that precise categorization, the point is that progressive rock, just like modal jazz, or Baroque fugues, or hair metal, is the result of certain musicians in a certain time making a certain sound, and a whole bunch of other people liking that sound and running with it.

So the purpose of all this in relation with the OP is that I find it completely understandable to be tired of modern prog - we've essentially taken all the possible directions that were laid out by these movements, and exhausted them. Now we're just sitting around, waiting for the next movement to come. In the meantime, those original pioneers still have all sorts of fantastic output (though I confess that, like others here, my iPod is now almost entirely jazz).

When you go to the point of calling a whole era of music "spineless" it's obvious that you haven't listened to enough artists. What makes you think that composers today are any different than the ones back then? They were boundary pushers back then and trust me there are a lot of boundary pushers today. 

It's not a question of anyone being butthurt it's the fact that are closing yourself to so much good music (if not better music- but yeah just my opinion bladididididibla). You are just discarding a whole bunch of great artists, that if you would've listened to them, you may not have liked them, but "spineless" would be such a stupid way to describe their music. 

It's a shame that by listening to the "enough artists" you have mentioned, you're closing yourself to some of the most mind-blowing, boundary pushing, challenging, thought provoking music ever made. There's bad everywhere, but when you decide to stop before you get to the good then you miss out.

 

 

But now, with the Internet making all forms of music more viable, I find this to be the most exciting time since the early seventies as a listener.

True. After I got frustrated about the direction Marillion and Dream Theater took around 1993, and fed up with 80's metal, I didn't listen to anything but commercial radio for maybe 6 years. When I 'came back', everything was different, and find ProgArchives made me discover a whole lot more. 

Then again, why would you force yourself to listen only to prog, or only to pop radio, or metal or whatever... Just a random few things I played/listened to in the past three weeks:

Janis Joplin

Geddy Lee

John Mayer

Paul Simon

Don Airey

Feedforward

Green Day

Iron Maiden

and a couple of Dutch bands you won't recognise so which I won't mention.

No reason to get bored there... and I think that if you get bored by a certain type of music, it's time to move on. More useful than making into a problem, which is not what music is about, and we have enough real problems to deal with already on this frikkin' blue marble.

There is a lot of spineless prog from the seventies....camel to name one....Gryphon too