Why isn't prog popular?

Q: Why isn't prog popular?

Prog Music is like any other delicattessen. How do you think  taste snails, oysters, crabs, caviar... for the first time ?
You have you get accostumed to it and the more you educate your ears the more easy is that you like it.
I got into Prog Music, because a friend of mine gave a tape of Tool. I had no other in my car and began to hear it.
At first I could barely stand it, it was so strange for me !!!  But after I heard at it maybe 10 or more times I liked it.

Gerinski wrote: Simple music such as dance, techno and much of pop is cheap to make and more profitable.   If only it happened with music... but it's with everything, the big business corporations want people to like rubbish because it's cheap to produce and much more profitable than high quality products.   In food, they try to convince us that soja is a wonderful natural and very healthy food, but the truth behind is that soja is enourmously easy and profitable to mass-cultivate and can be added to virtually every kind of processed food. We are surrounded by crap food and we are pushed to like it (via advertisement, by adding some tasty flavour to snacks which are essentially just processed rubbish etc) because it's cheap and profitable.   TV programs are all cheap crap, not to mention teleshopping and astrology services by cell phone text messaging.   Most current toys for our kids are just crap, a few parts of cheap plastic made in China by an exploited labourforce.   Current furniture is crap, while the furniture of our grandparents could last 5 generations. Today nothing lasts so you have to buy again, and if it gets too old (e.g. if you insist in keeping using your 5-years-old cell phone) they make you feel weird until you buy a new one.   If things are cheap people can buy more of them and more frequently.

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What you said is pretty much spot on. However, I think it was more than just pot heads who liked prog. I think the potheads were more into the hard rock and proto metal bands like Deep Purple, Aerosmith, Black Sabbath and even Rush.

However, I will say this. I always thought the reason why "tubular bells" and "dark side of the moon" sold so well were because they were good albums to smoke weed to and get high to. I consider them to be prog stoner albums. I guess some other prog albums might qualify too but those two come to mind first for me.

Sorry folks. I don't think prog was HUGE in the seventies. I was just a little kid back then so I don't really know for sure but I really don't think it was. A few prog bands were but as an entire genre it was not super popular. In fact other than college kids and some high school kids probably most people didn't know about the lesser known prog bands even then.


Anyway, these days it's even less popular. The radio doesn't play it. You won't hear about it on tv or at school or see it mentioned in most magazines. You will see it mentioned sometimes in a few select music magazines but that's about it. Critics still haven't caught on to it and it's just not considered cool. It's still very much under the radar unfortunately. That said it still does have a pretty strong although relatively small cult following. A lot of this can be attributed to the power of the internet. Without the internet it wouldn't be much more popular now than it was in the 80's.

SMSM wrote: There is a certain reverse racism and sexism in the mainstream media and educational system that probably plays a part in many a negative review or comment about a prog recording or the music its self.   Simply put, it is politically incorrect to like White Male dominated music played by such "historically advantaged" individuals, especially when much prog is symphonic and owes a lot of it's influence to politically incorrect dead European White Male classical composers, who probably oppressed women, non-christians and non-white persons because they were white men.   Sorry, but that is the attitude of many guilty white males in the mainstream media and educational system today.

As far as the rock periodicals that appeared in the UK between say 1976 and 1981 went (e.g. Sounds, Melody Maker and the NME) this was the agenda that was transparently pursued. However I stopped reading said publications after that so couldn't comment if this is still the case (I would like to think it's not). Similarly it's 30 years since I was in a place of learning but have to say I never found any evidence of so-called 'reverse snobbery' in the education sphere. We do have to tread warily here when the issue is something as sensitive and emotive as race but I have to agree with the poster that there was a school of white middle-class music journalists who dismissed anything that didn't draw it's inspiration from popular black american song styles. Artists who assimilated elements and structures from white European art music (like classical, opera etc) were routinely scorned as stiff, soulless elitists with intellectual delusions of grandeur. (The dog-eared stick that was used to beat Prog with) The carefully engineered inference from such writing was that these artists were unwittingly complicit in propping up the iniquities of racial discrimination. Somewhat ironically, the best example we have to date of this type of self righteous liberal hand wringing was coined by 'folky hippy' Roy Harper in his anthem for the terminally right-on: I Hate the White Man from 1970. Even Lester Bangs would have been reticent to embrace such a sentiment.




Edited by ExittheLemming - January 30 2011 at 17:43

SMSM wrote: white men.

For what it's worth or not, I am "white" by which I mean my skin has no pigment other than freckles. 

timburlane wrote: SMSM wrote: There is a certain reverse racism and sexism in the mainstream media and educational system that probably plays a part in many a negative review or comment about a prog recording or the music its self.   Simply put, it is politically incorrect to like White Male dominated music played by such "historically advantaged" individuals, especially when much prog is symphonic and owes a lot of it's influence to politically incorrect dead European White Male classical composers, who probably oppressed women, non-christians and non-white persons because they were white men.   Sorry, but that is the attitude of many guilty white males in the mainstream media and educational system today. My initial reaction to this post is "No it's not! this is is complete paranoid tosh!" but I guess I can see how you came to this point of view. There is a certain section of the music media who think like this but on the whole i don't believe their opinion counts for much. In the UK the Guardian - middle class, liberal newspaper - has a whole slew of "right-thinking" journalists whose opinions about music of any sort mean nothing to me or any other proper music fan because their they're not proper music journalists. merely mouthpieces for a non-existant middle-class liberal elite. Only people who have coffee table books pay any attention to knobends like this. Ultimately I don't read publications that I know, as a matter of policy, will not give rock music a fair shot

Unfortunately, the general public does sort of buy into this kind of thinking.  Prog is so "un cool", jazz is for sophisticated elite people, punk/metal is for "real men" or some such dumb stereotypification, who exactly is prog for?  Prog is so very musical that people who look for some sense of social association in the music form dismiss it. 

AllP0werToSlaves wrote: SMSM wrote: There is a certain reverse racism and sexism in the mainstream media and educational system that probably plays a part in many a negative review or comment about a prog recording or the music its self.   Simply put, it is politically incorrect to like White Male dominated music played by such "historically advantaged" individuals, especially when much prog is symphonic and owes a lot of it's influence to politically incorrect dead European White Male classical composers, who probably oppressed women, non-christians and non-white persons because they were white men.   Sorry, but that is the attitude of many guilty white males in the mainstream media and educational system today. I would go so far as to say that any form of art or media that doesn't benefit the system in one way or another is looked down upon as frivolous. It's not so much racism as blatant prejudice against anything that doesn't generate revenue/make a small group of people wealthy at the expense of millions of others. Capitalism is a broken model for human beings to expect progress to emerge from. Ironically, the only true path to progress is to discard the old model and begin a new, much like progressive rock has done with Western rock music. If you can see how beautiful things can be with a little faith and positivity, there may be hope for humanity at large. This is not naiveté, as there will always be negative Nancy's trying to stranglehold all sorts of institutions, but the more aware the human race is, the better off we'll all be in the long run. The moral of the story is to not care what big brother or your government tells you is correct, beneficial, worthwhile etc. We live in a giant global ponzi scheme that's meant to keep the rich wealthy and everyone else just barely scraping by. Live your life, love your music, love each other and learn and grow.

I think he means that the same so called self indulgence that is condemned in prog is hailed in other, 'black' music like blues, funk.  I do agree, and that is just one example of that kind of discriminatory attitude. I do feel that the mainstream wants to intentionally begrudge credit to prog, whatever may be the reasons for that.

I like to treat Progressive Rock the same way I treat Classical Music. Prog is for the sophisticated modern music listener I feel. People who listen to prog are often intelligible about music (not saying people who don't listen aren't). Progressive Rock is directed towards "music listeners" and "lyric maniacs" who are glued to how awesome music is and the amazing things it's capable of. As a prog listener, I am less concerned with how popular the music is or what the scene is like, I just love the music. It is beautiful, Like artwork, yet colloquial and cool at the same time.