The 80s..the worst era for prog.

HackettFan wrote: The eighties were awful, and I don't accept all the bright spots people have tried to pull out of it. It seems to me the best amounted to: 1980s Steve Hackett - Defector (other good stuff too e.g. Momentum, but not progressive) Marillion - Script for a Jester's Tear only (the others were sell outs) Rush - Moving Pictures only (the others were sell outs) King Crimson - red, blue, and yellow (for short) Discipline especially Adrian Belew's solo work Frank Zappa (if he's progressive. He never used to be called that.) Steve Vai - Flexable (is this progressive?) Peter Gabriel - Security only (I like So, but it's not progressive) ...oh and Passion too Jethro Tull in the eighties? ...well, the concerts were good Musical eras don't nice and neatly into decades, though. The decline into the dark ages I think began in the late seventies. The nineties and the 2000s are better. Made so for me by Steve Hackett, who has never been better. Otherwise, I'm trying to catch up on what's out there now.

 

HackettFan wrote: The eighties were awful, and I don't accept all the bright spots people have tried to pull out of it. It seems to me the best amounted to: 1980s Steve Hackett - Defector (other good stuff too e.g. Momentum, but not progressive) Marillion - Script for a Jester's Tear only (the others were sell outs) Rush - Moving Pictures only (the others were sell outs) King Crimson - red, blue, and yellow (for short) Discipline especially Adrian Belew's solo work Frank Zappa (if he's progressive. He never used to be called that.) Steve Vai - Flexable (is this progressive?) Peter Gabriel - Security only (I like So, but it's not progressive) ...oh and Passion too Jethro Tull in the eighties? ...well, the concerts were good Musical eras don't nice and neatly into decades, though. The decline into the dark ages I think began in the late seventies. The nineties and the 2000s are better. Made so for me by Steve Hackett, who has never been better. Otherwise, I'm trying to catch up on what's out there now.

HackettFan wrote: Rush - Moving Pictures only (the others were sell outs)

I'd rank them like this:

I'm among those who lived through the 80s. Progressive music was hard to find. When you found it, it was generally a fluke, because the music politics usually wouldn't allow a band to catch any momentum, aside from Zappa who was combative enough to just plough through by sheer force of will. The popular music was awful and spurred even many youngsters to prefer the popular music of the prior two decades. Many radio programming formats reflected this. The grunge music of the 90s was actually something I appreciated. Although people connected it somewhat tenuously with punk, grunge music came as a reaction against the predictability of the song structure of 80s metal and 80s pop. I don't want to be understood as advocating a genre with such poor musicianship, but this underlying motivation was the same as what motivated progressive rock in the mid and late 60s and early 70s, and had little to do with what had motivated punk. Ironic if you think about it, but the point is the music was awful whichever way you cut it. Even FM radio became very corporate. Very few of the genuine bright spots people have cited had ever seen any radio play. Rush, how many others?

rush, marillion, queensryche, fates warning...thats about all i can think of.

If you define prog. as music with strong roots in 70's prog. it was the worst period.But music in the 80's was not bad, just diffrent angles on how to evolve.

No one is convincing me that the 80s were not the worst decade for Prog. I am convinced that the 80s were not completely worthless (better than the fifties). The several examples people have given do not make the decade shine. I do not think that KC Beat and Three of a Perfect Pair are great examples to use, and are simply a case in point of what I'm talking about. These were very commercial albums by Crimson standards. Fripp himself talked about trading three years for one really good year (Discipline). The whole problem was not the musicians themselves, but the corporate environment that they had to deal with, which was altogether different from the Prog period (Check out Prog Brittania on You Tube for some historical perspective on the open-mindedness of the music labels of that period, or at least a tendency toward non-interference in the music). I acknowledge that you can find some pretty outlandish things in the 80s. Henry Kaiser's stuff comes to mind. I don't know about anyone else, though, but I did not find any Henry Kaiser stuff anywhere in any record store. I got that and other stuff like it through a rather obscure mail order company.

tszirmay wrote: went fishing and found these:   Al Stewart- Last Days of the Century

only just noticed that in your list. Tends to be an overlooked album but would easily come near the top of my list of 80's albums

Holy crap, my last post on this topic was in 2005 - time flies.