Is Sgt Pepper Prog?

Bullsnot.  

" You know, the 4 people shot in Ohio in 1970 (way after the hippie scene was supposed to be dead, another myth) by the American National Guard while they protested the insane, illegal and immoral war in Vietnam. Shot and killed after placing flowers in the gun barrels of the Guardsmen's riffles. " - was a statement of presumed fact, not a bloody metaphor - if you meant it as a metaphor at the time you wrote it then that was not made clear until now - and frankly I simply cannot see it even after you've claimed that it was. Also, it was a protest against Nixon's announced invasion of Cambodia, not Vietnam, unless that was a sodding metaphor too.

If you do nothing else today, read the accounts of the Kent State massacre as I have this afternoon, and not just on Wikipedia either - read more than one article because even an event as well known as this is shrouded in inaccuracies and misreporting. 

And the mythinformation continues. I took your original comment to be a flippant rejoinder due to the implied sarcastic tone of the language used, but since you have altered that I now dispute your claim all together as I don't see that they were mimicking anything of the sort nor had they adopted any hippy values. And while on the subject of perpetuating myths, nor were they shot and killed after placing flowers in the gun barrels of the Guardsmen's riffles. While such incidents of putting flowers in gun barrels did happen, it didn't at Kent State on May 4th 1970 and the most iconic of those occurred 300 miles away in 1967 (and no one got shot as a consequence of doing it) - also it is highly improbable that any students would have got close enough to the guardsmen to do it on that day without being bayoneted first, as had happened on the previous day.

However, none of this is particularly relevant to the topic other than as an illustration of how memory isn't quite as exact as we'd like it to be.

I'm interested in the history of Progressive Rock, its foundation and its development. This is because we never think about documenting history as it happens so have to reinvent and rediscover it through a haze of half-memories, myth and rose-tinted nostalgia long after. When a claim is made about a subject I want to test the robustness of that claim - seeing if it stands-up to close scrutiny and has any documented evidence to support it that can be checked and ratified. When so much of what we know is based upon hearsay, reported anecdotes and huge slice of received wisdom I respond to unsubstantiated claims by researching the story behind that looking for the vestiges of truth and reality. If the claim holds up then I'm more inclined to believe it, but if it doesn't then I become interested in the source of the claim than the claim itself because it is just possible that there is a vestige of truth behind each of these misremembered anecdotes. For example it was once claimed that many Prog musicians were classically trained when closer examination revealed this to be far from the truth: very few of them ever received any formal music training, let alone in Classical Music. Yet once that myth has been dispelled we can then look at where the origins of classical music influence in Prog Rock really came from. If no one challenges these claims, however credible they sound, then the stories will enter into the "history" as undeniable fact. When people say Sgt Pepper is important I want to know how and why it is important and that means researching into something that I don't have a great deal of personal affection for but was alleged to be of huge influence to music from that time and since that I do like.

The other reason is I'm an opinionated arsehole who has something to say on practically every subject under the sun.

As to Slayer... Reign in Blood and Seasons in the Abyss are undeniably two of the preeminent albums in Thrash Metal that had a measurable impact on Heavy Metal in general but (compared to Metalicacaca or Megadeaf) perhaps not so much on Prog Metal directly, which I believe is closer to Death Metal than Thrash Metal in its stylistic origins. I've seen Slayer twice now and was bored to tears both times so I'd much rather listen to Tori Amos's cover of Raining Blood than Slayer's original but then that's to be expected as I've always preferred other forms of extreme metal to thrash.

Now, are there any other rock and or metal music genres you'd like me to comment upon?

And the myth continues - the four people murdered in the Kent State shootings were students not hippies. The hippy movement brought the anti-war message to the fore but it didn't own the monopoly on it. The Student unrest that occurred in the late sixties and early seventies was not a part of the hippy movement but in some ways was a reaction to the indifference of society as a whole to the message it preached. Sure there is correlation, but we should be wary of drawing direct conclusions from that because what those students were protesting about in America wasn't the same as they were protesting about in Paris and Munich.

My comment earlier was kind of tongue in cheek in saying that it's as proggy as a lot of other stuff that's listed here.