Did Punk Rock really kill Prog Music?

"New Wave" which derived influences from Punk, reflected upon music of the British Invasion period. The most internationally known press report in the world makes the connection between The Kinks and The Pretenders. The Jam were doing "David Watts" and several other N.W. bands took on the same role to a degree. Around that time..it was easy to make a living at playing Progressive Rock. A musician then...could form a unit, rehearse the music of Jethro Tull, Genesis, and Yes...and make considerable profit. Enough profit to invest in recording their original music in the studio. Enough profit to invest money for costs along the way to landing a record deal. Prog just continued to sink during this time because opportunities on the U.S. east coast for any musician that took music seriously had vanished. This is a little insight on the first rude awakening to progressive musicians. 

I remember getting off a bus, walking into the club with my gear...and the owner approaching me with a look of fear on his face. He said that The A's had played the night before and that it had taken him the entire day to clean the place up. It felt like a shock then, but today with the accountable violence in the media it equals zero value. It was strange to face Punk. I was in and out of cities every week and when I did run across a Punk band or the violence involved, I tried to remain discreet. Punk (and probably with no intentions whatsoever), killed the idea of being a good musician ..during the years 1977-1981..iN 77' it was a subtle attitude...by 1980 it was cemented into the music scene and "New Wave" ..although having some melodic Rock substances, accepted the attitude to be carried on further. I am only making reference to the United States East coast during these years. It was when the record companies/industry decided that by NOT playing your instrument so perfectly or decently, it could influence people/buyers, in a good way. And it did! The industry invested in "New Wave" which was a subdivision marketing aspect to Punk and in that sense...and only for that brief period in time, Punk was responsible for killing Prog by non-intentionally pushing away it's media promotion/backing. No more..did you see ELP and Genesis advertised on Channel 6 Action News. Films of the tractor trailers traveling cross country with huge letters printed on the side..ELP..or news media discussing at 6:pm, how Genesis was a Progressive Rock band and they were coming to your town. Punk destroyed the possibilities of that ever happening again. Maybe it wasn't intentional. Maybe it was a guy with a long white beard hiding behind the big white puffy clouds in the sky and he tossed a quarter... and Prog lost. 

Edited by TODDLER - September 30 2014 at 09:26

[Probably not enough to make a popular comeback, but enough for King Crimson to make money with a US tour. ]

Opening for a band like Tool doesn't hurt either.

I get what you are saying too. It sounds like you first got into prog in the 80's as did I. Even though I do believe prog is to some extent a generational thing(as in some age groups having more fans than others)it does seem like many more younger fans are getting into it and probably not just because they sneaked a peek at their parents King Crimson and Gentle Giant records. I think the way social media and the expansion of how bands are labelled(ie someone like Radiohead or Muse being considered prog not to mention Tool or Mastodon or Opeth or whoever)has had an impact also. It used to be something was definitely prog or definitely not. These days the defintions of what can be called prog has changed. It's not nearly as black and white as it used to be imo.

It isn't strange that Prog fell out of the spotlight after a few years. It would have been strange if it lasted longer. What form of music really lasts that long as a media interest before if finally boils down into a reclusive sub-genre? The Rock-a-billy of the 50's, the Sweet Soul of the early 60's, Folk-Revival, Prog, Punk, Disco. All out of the papers, yet they all still exist in some form.

I think the limit placed on prog rock in the late 70s (the perceived downhill slide) was that the musci created was very sophisticated and probably more so than most rock fans could understand. So up came the rise of punk.

I recall reading once (in a book recalling the days) that punk would have died in a day had it not been for the fashions. It wasn't realy a working class thing - it had it's UK origins in middle class West London and Chelsea clubs. It gave it self an "authentic" working class image as marketing appeal.

The disco thing was hardly new, tat had been a development on from soul and funk for ages. It gave people music to dance to (you can't really get down to TFTO can you? Anyway poular music exists to go with whatever drug du jour is around and cocaine was the disco thing while pot and acid went for the prog head. Not my observation but that of Simon Napier Bell in a doco with Graham Norton hosting. That was entertainment....

So really it came down to a requirement for the listener to become progressive to develop more listener sophistication. And active involvement with music is  - fun - but more for the muso than the fan.

Punk had it's moments when it became new wave and a new prog was born. Echo and The Bunnymen had a fine album with Heaven Up Here, The Cure and Magazine had and still have terrific efforts. But from all this I can now see where Radiohead are where P Tree should be thanks to the perceptions of the punk thing. It's a bit like having VDGG as popular as Pink Floyd is  who by comparison are only tolerably well known (hypothetically).

The press with  their misguided indulgences (wanting to be a journo punk super star) contributed. And when I say contributed I mean managed to ruin things a lot...

But if you want one thing that maimed Prog for a while- that otherwise incredible band ELP with the Love Beach album cover.

rogerthat wrote: Ah.  Yes, it could be that it also fits in with the spate of violent dystopian novels and movies.  Also, metal has become more commonplace now to the point of being incorporated in film background scores.  So the scenario is quite different now compared to the 80s.

^^^  Which is exactly why the 70s wave of popularity of prog will likely remain an outlier while it will probably never completely die out either, at least not before rock itself dies out.  Prog is just music for music's sake.  It is perfectly possible to treat punk as such too but it was made popular by positioning it as an alternative way of life, in opposition to the so called dinosaurs of rock.  I had noticed during the time I dabbled in metal also that there was a lot of pressure to conform to a certain metal way of life.  Not that anybody would object if you did not conform but the path to ultimate trve-ness lay in accepting the metal way unconditionally.  Obviously prog does not at all intrude in any comparable way in one's life.  It's just there in your collection, faithfully satisfying you whenever you seek it without asking you to submit to any musical belief system that may be narrow in its outlook.  In its fluidity, prog is, if I may, somewhat similar to Hinduism, the real essence of it, that is, and not the discriminatory practice of it that flourished and continues to flourish to a large extent.  So maybe there is some long winded connection between Eastern philosophy and prog rock which Jon Anderson endeavoured to make.  

It was me! I killed Prog (but like everything else I didn't too good a job) but, you wait and see next time...


.......if it wasn't for those pesky kids!!!.........

'Punk' didn't kill Prog, the critics did .......
......we, the public.......(but not necessarily us Progheads.....).

There seems to have been a clear anti-establishment and left-leaning strain in the worldview of punk artists of that time.  It is not so clear in the case of metal.  Arguably many of them, like Rush, were capitalist Ayn Rand nuts.  But as the old rock greats faded to be replaced by a dull corporate rock scene, metal provided the alternative to teens and adolescents thirsting for some 'real' heavy music.  Been there, done that. ;)