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Topic ClosedIs classical influence essential to prog rock?

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ExittheLemming View Drop Down
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: February 24 2014 at 02:14
Originally posted by King Crimson776 King Crimson776 wrote:

Originally posted by ExittheLemming ExittheLemming wrote:

Originally posted by King Crimson776 King Crimson776 wrote:

We all know early Crimso is the best. Discipline is mainly prog, but certainly also new wave on a less integral level (whereas something like Magazine would be the other way around... or post-punk, it's basically the same. I use 'new wave' as the umbrella). It's the best album that has anything to do with that usually obnoxious style by an enormous margin.

We all know that sometimes our opinions appear to us as irrefutable facts
but that's just the nature of passion I guessWink. I'm not sure however that we all know what you mean by that usually obnoxious style?

What I get from your post is this:

1 - what I like
must have a connection to Prog or be predominantly Prog
2 - what I don't like
cannot be remotely connected to Prog or contains sufficient new wave influences to qualify as obnoxious.

Why do people on this site continually feel the need to seek justification for their tastes by their resemblance to limiting aesthetic criteria that flourished for a brief few years during the 70's? I love the Clash and ELP, I love Echo & the Bunnymen and Gentle Giant, I love Can and the Fall (so did Mark E Smith) I love the Velvet Underground and the Nice, I love the Sex Pistols and VDGG (so did John Lydon) I love XTC and Greenslade. Whenever I get pulled over by the fashion cops for such perceived offences, I have to say that for me there is no contradiction, one style does not negate the other, music is an indivisible whole that only marketing has tried to carve up by way of foisting artificial brand loyalties upon those consumers.feckless enough to believe their feelings have finally dissolved into facts.



You got some bizarre things out of my post.

I don't like minimalist, tinny sounding bands that lack in melody and dynamics, and nowhere am I seeking 'justification' for that. It's fine if you do. The police are not after you. You seem to be responding to some imaginary persecution you've felt in the past rather than to my post.


Ok, at least you are now describing music using parameters that exist independently of Prog Thumbs Up but anyone who describes artists they don't like as tinny sounding, lacking in melody and dynamics or obnoxious clearly has dispensed entirely with objectivity and will never free themselves from the trap of confusing their feelings with facts. My criticism of your original post centered around your dislike of new wave/post-punk based entirely on how much/little Prog it/they contained.If that's not what you meant then I would apologise but how else should we interpret your post?Confused
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: February 24 2014 at 02:15
nevertheless, "we all know early Crimson is the best" is a bold statement, and I am certain many people would disagree there


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Direct Link To This Post Posted: February 24 2014 at 02:35
Originally posted by BaldJean BaldJean wrote:

nevertheless, "we all know early Crimson is the best" is a bold statement, and I am certain many people would disagree there
I fear that assertion has slipped out of its original context. It was not early Crimson is the best of all music but early Crimson (as his screen-name implies ... everything up to and including Red) is the best of all Crimson eras, now the statement is not so bold, but merely a generalisation that only a few would disagree with.
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: February 24 2014 at 03:06
Originally posted by Dean Dean wrote:

Originally posted by BaldJean BaldJean wrote:

nevertheless, "we all know early Crimson is the best" is a bold statement, and I am certain many people would disagree there
I fear that assertion has slipped out of its original context. It was not early Crimson is the best of all music but early Crimson (as his screen-name implies ... everything up to and including Red) is the best of all Crimson eras, now the statement is not so bold, but merely a generalisation that only a few would disagree with.

that's exactly what I mean. "many" is by no means "all"


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Direct Link To This Post Posted: February 24 2014 at 03:30
Originally posted by BaldJean BaldJean wrote:

Originally posted by Dean Dean wrote:

Originally posted by BaldJean BaldJean wrote:

nevertheless, "we all know early Crimson is the best" is a bold statement, and I am certain many people would disagree there
I fear that assertion has slipped out of its original context. It was not early Crimson is the best of all music but early Crimson (as his screen-name implies ... everything up to and including Red) is the best of all Crimson eras, now the statement is not so bold, but merely a generalisation that only a few would disagree with.

that's exactly what I mean. "many" is by no means "all"
"few" is by no means "many".  Wink
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: February 24 2014 at 04:25
Frankly I wouldn't mind KC776's preferring progressive rock over new wave if it wasn't for his argument falling back upon aesthetic objectivism without making a particularly good case for it.

Other than that, the last couple pages have been really illuminating due to BaldJean and Dean going into detail about the specifics of how which classical composition techniques can and have been used in a rock context.
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: February 24 2014 at 04:57
Originally posted by Dean Dean wrote:

Originally posted by ExittheLemming ExittheLemming wrote:

Originally posted by King Crimson776 King Crimson776 wrote:

We all know early Crimso is the best. Discipline is mainly prog, but certainly also new wave on a less integral level (whereas something like Magazine would be the other way around... or post-punk, it's basically the same. I use 'new wave' as the umbrella). It's the best album that has anything to do with that usually obnoxious style by an enormous margin.

We all know that sometimes our opinions appear to us as irrefutable facts
but that's just the nature of passion I guessWink. I'm not sure however that we all know what you mean by that usually obnoxious style?

What I get from your post is this:

1 - what I like
must have a connection to Prog or be predominantly Prog
2 - what I don't like
cannot be remotely connected to Prog or contains sufficient new wave influences to qualify as obnoxious.

Why do people on this site continually feel the need to seek justification for their tastes by their resemblance to limiting aesthetic criteria that flourished for a brief few years during the 70's? I love the Clash and ELP, I love Echo & the Bunnymen and Gentle Giant, I love Can and the Fall (so did Mark E Smith) I love the Velvet Underground and the Nice, I love the Sex Pistols and VDGG (so did John Lydon) I love XTC and Greenslade. Whenever I get pulled over by the fashion cops for such perceived offences, I have to say that for me there is no contradiction, one style does not negate the other, music is an indivisible whole that only marketing has tried to carve up by way of foisting artificial brand loyalties upon those consumers.feckless enough to believe their feelings have finally dissolved into facts.

Picking up on Point 1 there Iain (and running off on a tangent)...
 
Generalisations are seldom a reflection of reality since post punk or new wave isn't a style of music but an umbrella term that encompasses a vast gamut of musical styles and influences that ranges from the mainstream commercial through to the underground fringe (much like Prog). We have this occluded view of new-wave as being a less musically adept genre that followed on from the "any one can play" 3-chord ethos of punk rock except it wasn't like that - the musicians from that era would have played Progressive Rock if that had endured into the eighties and if there hadn't been a media backlash against outwardly showy musicianship. Those musicians who could play at the same level of competence and skill as those from the seventies didn't not make music in the eighties and, contrary to the received mythos, they didn't grow up listening to The MC5s and The Stooges, they grew up listening to Prog and Krautrock and learnt their trade from those albums. They formed a subset of post punk where "punk" is a musicological misnomer, it is Post Art Rock. There are many high-profile new-wave bands that fit that description, and a huge pool of lesser known bands, but because of the broad sweeping umbrella-ness of the term they get lumped in with the multitude of Top 40 synth-pop hit makers from the eighties that rightly or wrongly receive our disdain.

A case in point is the band that's been mentioned, Magazine have that Teutonic undercurrent melding with a melodic 'art rock' ear: Dave Formula's piano and synth work is not perfunctory, one-finger playing, nor is it simplistic and untrained (he was in a short-lived Prog band signed to the Vertigo label in the 70s called Ankh that was the brainchild of Dave Rohl of the Mandalaband); and John McGeoch's guitar playing is as measured and as sublime as any technically proficient axe-wielder of the Prog era. I have oft called him the finest guitarist of his generation and I do not consider that to be an exaggeration, he is not spoken of in the same hallowed tones as Fripp, Hillage and Howe because it wasn't fashionable to display such technical prowess so openly in the eighties, yet it is there on every Magazine and Banshees track he played on and is as defining and as creative as anything Fripp did with Crimson or Bowie. Because of that the "cult of personality" that made bedroom-wall heroes of musicians like Gilmour, Fripp, Wakeman and Emerson in the seventies now focussed on the singers who were still permitted to "show-off" on stage, so that when we hear the name Magazine we automatically think of Howard Devoto and not Dave Formula or John McGeoch, and (at the time) in David Sylvian in Japan rather than Richard Barbieri or Mick Karn. If punk had never happened we would be talking about Magazine with the same reverence as we do Crimson and Van der Graaf because they would have slotted into the same "eclectic" Art Rock category. 

Not that this is a subversive call for Magazine and their ilk of that posited post-art-rock genre to be reclassified as Prog Bands since punk did happen and those bands evolved into a different flavour of art rock beast, as different to Crimson as Crimson is to Roxy Music. That evolution is evident in many of those "underground" new-wave bands from the late seventies through to the late eighties (and, with bands like Mansun, into the Brit-Pop nineties), and in those bands that began as synth-pop "Smash Hits" poster-boys who progressed into less commercial, more involving, art-rock music such as Japan, Talk Talk and The Icicle Works.

[600 words into this post and I've not mentioned the most obvious Krautrock/Art Rock influenced band of the late seventies, Ultravox!]

just chipping in cos I am a huge Ultravox fanatic - nice to hear em get a mention here


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Direct Link To This Post Posted: February 24 2014 at 05:08
Originally posted by Dean Dean wrote:

Originally posted by BaldJean BaldJean wrote:

Originally posted by Dean Dean wrote:

Originally posted by BaldJean BaldJean wrote:

nevertheless, "we all know early Crimson is the best" is a bold statement, and I am certain many people would disagree there
I fear that assertion has slipped out of its original context. It was not early Crimson is the best of all music but early Crimson (as his screen-name implies ... everything up to and including Red) is the best of all Crimson eras, now the statement is not so bold, but merely a generalisation that only a few would disagree with.

that's exactly what I mean. "many" is by no means "all"
"few" is by no means "many".  Wink

"many" and "few" are relative terms. even if only a minority of the people would be of the opinion that early Crimson is not the best it still could be a lot of people


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Direct Link To This Post Posted: February 24 2014 at 05:17
Every Friday night I have a few too many and experience uncannily similar symptoms to those induced by reading this thread on Saturday morningWink
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: February 24 2014 at 06:05
Originally posted by ExittheLemming ExittheLemming wrote:

Every Friday night I have a few too many and experience uncannily similar symptoms to those induced by reading this thread on Saturday morningWink

ah, but you probably get the feeling that the "few too many" were actually many too many, right? Wink


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Direct Link To This Post Posted: February 24 2014 at 06:42
Originally posted by BaldJean BaldJean wrote:

Originally posted by Dean Dean wrote:

Originally posted by BaldJean BaldJean wrote:

Originally posted by Dean Dean wrote:

Originally posted by BaldJean BaldJean wrote:

nevertheless, "we all know early Crimson is the best" is a bold statement, and I am certain many people would disagree there
I fear that assertion has slipped out of its original context. It was not early Crimson is the best of all music but early Crimson (as his screen-name implies ... everything up to and including Red) is the best of all Crimson eras, now the statement is not so bold, but merely a generalisation that only a few would disagree with.

that's exactly what I mean. "many" is by no means "all"
"few" is by no means "many".  Wink

"many" and "few" are relative terms. even if only a minority of the people would be of the opinion that early Crimson is not the best it still could be a lot of people
Really? I guess that is some seriously whacked-out power to believe. After all we are talking about 80s and 90s King Crimson here since that is the only possible alternative to "early Crimson". While there were a couple of gems in that era, it's not universally recognised as being their "best" era by a group of people that could in any way be considered to be "a lot" in any relative terms that you care to construct. Unless, of course, we start counting people who don't believe any Crimson era is the best, or who simple do not like any Crimson at all, and frankly do we give any value to their opinion in this instance? Wink


...ps: I'm just messing with you.Tongue
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: February 24 2014 at 07:04
Originally posted by BaldJean BaldJean wrote:

Originally posted by ExittheLemming ExittheLemming wrote:

Every Friday night I have a few too many and experience uncannily similar symptoms to those induced by reading this thread on Saturday morningWink

ah, but you probably get the feeling that the "few too many" were actually many too many, right? Wink


Yep Dead
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: February 24 2014 at 08:51
Originally posted by BaldJean BaldJean wrote:

nevertheless, "we all know early Crimson is the best" is a bold statement, and I am certain many people would disagree there
 
I'm with you on this.
 
It does have one of the best senses/view of the time and place, than many other records, other than Chicago 1 and Chicago 2 fo rmy tastes. Every piece of music was about that day and time, and the events surrounding it that we were seeing in the news. It's blatantly "political" or at least "socially conscious" without slapping you with it. I don't think that people still understand the loss of friends and family and acquaintances in things like VietNam, or even the IRA conflict in those days. Like no one got hurt in those bombs! And that is what the song is about, which today, for a rock audience, or even a PA audience, has no meaning whatsoever, compared to their "metal" likes, for example. It's like the meaning takes away from the depth of the music!
 
Yeah!
 
However, this is something that begins falling apart and dissipates as time goes by, and people do not see it. We kinda know that 20th Century Schizoid Man was written about folks like Idi Amin at the time (for example) and others, but today, no one gets it, and the 3rd dimention in the song gets lost!
 
The same thing would happen to what we would call a proper influence from previous music's which I don't thin can be helped since that is how you learned, but nowadays, a couple of schools of music here in Vancouver, closed because the kids were not interested in learning about the Saints Marching In, which kinda tells you that's an old teacher.


Edited by moshkito - February 24 2014 at 09:03
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: February 24 2014 at 08:59
Originally posted by moshkito moshkito wrote:

Originally posted by BaldJean BaldJean wrote:

nevertheless, "we all know early Crimson is the best" is a bold statement, and I am certain many people would disagree there
 
I'm with you on this.
 
It does have one of the best senses/view of the time and place, than many other records, other than Chicago 1 and Chicago 2 fo rmy tastes. Every piece of music was about that day and time, and the events surrounding it that we were seeing in the news.
 
However, this is something that begins falling apart and dissipates as time goes by, and people do not see it. We kinda know that 20th Century Schizoid Man was written about folks like Idi Amin at the time (for example) and others, but today, no one gets it, and the 3rd dimention in the song gets lost!
Eh? One more time with feeling...

Are you seriously saying that later Crimson is best?
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: February 24 2014 at 09:08
Originally posted by Dean Dean wrote:

Originally posted by moshkito moshkito wrote:

Originally posted by BaldJean BaldJean wrote:

nevertheless, "we all know early Crimson is the best" is a bold statement, and I am certain many people would disagree there
 
I'm with you on this.
 
It does have one of the best senses/view of the time and place, than many other records, other than Chicago 1 and Chicago 2 fo rmy tastes. Every piece of music was about that day and time, and the events surrounding it that we were seeing in the news.
 
However, this is something that begins falling apart and dissipates as time goes by, and people do not see it. We kinda know that 20th Century Schizoid Man was written about folks like Idi Amin at the time (for example) and others, but today, no one gets it, and the 3rd dimention in the song gets lost!
Eh? One more time with feeling...

Are you seriously saying that later Crimson is best?


I don't know about Pedro, but I've definitely met people on this forum that hold this opinion.
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: February 24 2014 at 09:11
Lost in the discussion on the various interpretations of few v/s many is the thrust of Toaster Mantis' argument.  Which was that Fripp, having broken up KC in 1974 and criticising prog's excess at the time, brought back the band for Discipline.   He was obviously enthusiastic about the then new developments in rock music.  So there is no point in trying to rewrite history to tally it with personal preferences.  Even if Talking Heads or Police may "utterly pale into insignificance compared to King Crimson (the early one)", they did offer something very different from the likes of Boston, Styx or Foreigner and played an important role in rejuvenating rock.  

Now if the argument, further, is going to be that Fripp played on I Zimbra purely for money and not at all out of any enthusiasm for the music, then that does not reflect well on him and by extension (since he seems to be the holy deity of prog-dom), prog as such.  
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: February 24 2014 at 09:38
Originally posted by rogerthat rogerthat wrote:

Lost in the discussion on the various interpretations of few v/s many is the thrust of Toaster Mantis' argument.  Which was that Fripp, having broken up KC in 1974 and criticising prog's excess at the time, brought back the band for Discipline.   He was obviously enthusiastic about the then new developments in rock music.  So there is no point in trying to rewrite history to tally it with personal preferences.  Even if Talking Heads or Police may "utterly pale into insignificance compared to King Crimson (the early one)", they did offer something very different from the likes of Boston, Styx or Foreigner and played an important role in rejuvenating rock.  

Now if the argument, further, is going to be that Fripp played on I Zimbra purely for money and not at all out of any enthusiasm for the music, then that does not reflect well on him and by extension (since he seems to be the holy deity of prog-dom), prog as such.  

he is not the holy deity of prog for me. and neither do I recognize "In the Course of the Crimson King" to be the first prog album, by the way


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Direct Link To This Post Posted: February 24 2014 at 09:41
It was a dig at KC776 anyway.  Yeah, agreed ITCOTCK is not the first prog album.
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: February 24 2014 at 09:44
Originally posted by Dean Dean wrote:

 ...
Eh? One more time with feeling...

Are you seriously saying that later Crimson is best?
 
I've never really enjoyed anything after Red/Starless at all.  I kinda think that Robert lost his desire to do anything worth while with King Crimson after the first couple of albums. Even the 2nd album was almost a copy of the 1st, which we know is a record company issue, and demand that happened to everyone, and KC was not immune to it, and I think that it might actually be the straw that started making him unhappy.
 
It was hard to believe that after the mix of styles and work in the 1st album, that the 2nd album had nothing new!
 
I much prefer his solo work and stuff with Eno, Cluster, Toyah and others, than anything else by King Crimson.


Edited by moshkito - February 24 2014 at 09:52
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: February 24 2014 at 09:48
[Formerly there was here a quote made unwillingly by mistake]
 
As I said before - NO influence is essential for an artist, but man ... the word 'influence' is ultimately one more elementary 'ingredient' of the damn recipe that any inspired composer uses! So, what does he mostly listens or listened to?? classic rock, jazz, jazz fusion, rap, funk, folk, metal, pop and classical? ..... because I don't believe in the fairy tale that a talented composer is used to listen to likely everything in this world. OK, no wonder that 70's prog featured damn original music, but you'll lol if a writer (f.e.) says that he never read to a single book in order to be f******g original.
 


Edited by Rick Robson - June 07 2015 at 15:58


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