Avant-Punk

I think we should include avant-punkl artists such as Sonic Youth, DNA, and Mars. They're just as progressive as most of the bands on this site IMO.

^^ Nah, avant-punk strikes me as just a flimsy example of revisionism at it's worst (or a nostalgia for something that never happened in the first place?). Practically the entire roster of artists who appeared at say,  CBGB's in NY have been cited under this freshly minted tradition. There are loads of plain vanilla rock bands who have discernible avant influences in their work but experimental has never equated to progressive round these parts y'all.
However, I can certainly hear the influence of Sonic Youth throughout the entire so-called Post Rock oeuvre


Edited by ExittheLemming - May 19 2012 at 17:11

So what does categorize progressive music after all? Songs with odd time signatures? Because forward-thinking experimentation equals progressiveness in my book.

I find it weird that progressiveness is associated mostly with a certain signature sound than with it's own meaning. But I digress.

Perhaps the one band that embody such defining characteristics of the so-called avant punk appellation more than any other are the Velvet Underground, who have been suggested for inclusion on PA many times and been declined (correctly in my estimation and I ADORE the VU)
You've got the avant/drone and classical leanings of Cale who worked with the likes of Lamont Young, the literary influences assimilated by Reed (though textual references are spurious to this discussion) a fondness for daring dissonances, eastern inflected tonalities and modes, confrontational aggression, repetition and bludgeoning volume, unprecedented form and scale e.g. Sister Ray (a 2 minute song that gorges itself for 20 minutes, more Robbie than John Coltrane inspired alas, despite some gauche academics twittering 'intuiting developments 20 years hence' and 'astonishingly prescient atonal clusters' - which for me means it's just as lazy and sloppy as anything on Tago Mago (but that's my issue I guess)
The Velvets influenced practically every credible rock band post 1976 but they really couldn't be considered progressive in the sense denoted by PA and similarly for the Fall, Suicide, Wire, Pere Ubu et al I certainly can't discern their palpable signature in anything here apart from some Krautrock.

smartpatrol wrote: I think we should include avant-punkl artists such as Sonic Youth, DNA, and Mars. They're just as progressive as most of the bands on this site IMO.