Fall of the House of Prog

Blacksword wrote: Snow Dog wrote: Or maybe a mixture of both! In some wys Punk was a good thing. If you looked at the singles charts at the time, they needed a good kick up the arse! Kids also wanted to be able to play music to and with punk it became easy to form a band. Instant self expression, it was great. OK Prog suffered, but bands were finding it difficult anyway to continue to repeat their successes. ELP virtually self distructed anyway, but even they had a major hit during the Punk years! Punk did allow free expression and did help purge the charts of cak! Thats for sure. The whole punk movement as it was presented to the masses was a bit of a fraud IMO. I dont believe punk started in Britain anyway. I see it as more of an American invention; with the Ramones and Iggy & the Stooges coming along some years before the likes of the Pistols. McClaren's movement seemed to simply be an attack on music full stop! Thankfully punk gave us The Stranglers, Siouxsie & the Banshees, The Clash etc, which compensated for the rubbish.. Early prog efforts seemed to predict punk anyway. Hawkwind, KC and VDGG all had a kind of 'punk' spirit, and this is probably what drew John Peel to these artists in their early years, even Jethro Tull, Roxy Music, Gabriels Genesis and Queen had his stamp of approval. It was only when they started selling records he turned his back on them.

Correct, British and American Punk were entirely different things, with totally different ideals. I feel that British Punk was far more political, anarchistic and anti-establishment!

Snow Dog wrote: Or maybe a mixture of both! In some wys Punk was a good thing. If you looked at the singles charts at the time, they needed a good kick up the arse! Kids also wanted to be able to play music to and with punk it became easy to form a band. Instant self expression, it was great. OK Prog suffered, but bands were finding it difficult anyway to continue to repeat their successes. ELP virtually self distructed anyway, but even they had a major hit during the Punk years!

Punk did allow free expression and did help purge the charts of cak! Thats for sure.

The whole punk movement as it was presented to the masses was a bit of a fraud IMO. I dont believe punk started in Britain anyway. I see it as more of an American invention; with the Ramones and Iggy & the Stooges coming along some years before the likes of the Pistols. McClaren's movement seemed to simply be an attack on music full stop! Thankfully punk gave us The Stranglers, Siouxsie & the Banshees, The Clash etc, which compensated for the rubbish..

Early prog efforts seemed to predict punk anyway. Hawkwind, KC and VDGG all had a kind of 'punk' spirit, and this is probably what drew John Peel to these artists in their early years, even Jethro Tull, Roxy Music, Gabriels Genesis and Queen had his stamp of approval. It was only when they started selling records he turned his back on them.

I would like to challenge the idea that punk killed off prog...

The hatred was surely driven by the media, and the likes of Malcolm McClaren and John Peel (once ironically a great advocate of prog) Many 'punks' seemed to be citing prog artists as major influences, and the likes of John Lydon, Sid Viscous, Hugh Cornwell, Siouxsie all hailed from middle class backgrounds and not from the rotting tower blocks, as conquering anti heroes of the oppressed, as their friends in the media seemed to be suggesting.

With this in mind, was the fall of the empire down to a media orchestrated campaign of hatred against music as art for arts sake? If so WHY? What did the media get from get from it?

Or did the prog artists themselves simply dissapear up their own arses in a puff of pomposity, losing all touch with reality..or was that just another media myth..?