Did Punk Rock really kill Prog Music?

Prog rock the last laugh with Cardiacs and Knifeworld.

octopus-4 wrote: Slartibartfast wrote: Prog rock the last laugh with Cardiacs and Knifeworld. Mentioning Cardiacs is very interesting. I've always thought that they are the successors of "DEVO" which were more close to Punk than to Prog. robably Punk has killed some prog bands only, apart of ELP who killed themselves.

For me, the Cardiacs are closer to "Zappa meets the Beatles" than Devo. Devo's first era makes me think of Residents turning surf-rock and more accessible.
Furthermore, I don't remember neither the Cardiacs nor Devo claiming to be part of the Punk scene.

Going for the One is not a highwater mark of anything.

Punk? Not really - that is just a media bluff.

Joe Public cannot, I am sorry to say, walk and talk at the same time. Next time you watch an audience clapping along with a tune, you'll realise they can't even clap in time. 

King Crimson776 wrote: Toaster Mantis wrote: New Wave was a consequence of punk, though. That said I agree that if you listen to most of the music that's really popular right now you can trace it back to disco and not any kind of rock. Of course, that is complicated further by electronic pop being partly descended from Krautrock by way of the disco's appropriation of Kraftwerk thanks to Giorgio Moroder. Well, either way. Punk and disco are simple, repetitive forms of music and that is generally what has always been most popular. If anything, prog's popularity in the early 70's was an anomaly and the late 70's were just a return to the norm. Even pre-20th century, didn't the majority listen to folk songs rather than classical? The late 60's/early 70's really were an exceptional period. Still, who's to say the majority won't ever gravitate to cerebral, cathartic, meditative, introspective, etc. music again? When people are able to work less and have more leisure time, they naturally gravitate to more complex, thoughtful music (in the late 60's this leisure was superficial but it did the trick). Basically when society is doing well, more people make prog, classical and other substantial music. When it's doing badly, they make punk rock and rap. Pretty telling, isn't it? Those latter musics were created out of necessity, out of anything but ideal conditions. They have a visceral effectiveness and they served their purpose, but in a world we actually want to live in, they'd be all but gone.

I think people (prog fans) underestimate just how popular New Wave was in the eighties with record labels like Chrysalis (with Blondie), Virgin(with the Clash) and EMI (with Ultravox), amongst many others, cleaned up with NW.

However, the idea of a more genteel time resulting in calmer music seems, I'm sorry to say, nieve to me at best. I personally lived through the Vietnam and Watergate eras in America when prog was at it's best. Where was the peaceful world you spoke of then? I don't know how old you are so I take these types of comments with a grain of salt, but I'll give you an incite that keeps things in perspective for me when people refer back in time to some past calm utopia. I used to go folk clubs in the Village in NYC in the early sixties and actually listen to people like Dylan and the rest before they became famous and walk out and go to another club when they started going off on Vietnam in song. I've never even heard of that country before in my life when these people tried to tell the world about it in 1962-3. I wish I had listened because after the Cuban Missile crisis, I thought there was world peace. But I was just a kid, remember.

After that, I don't recall a time when the world was at peace.


"Doing the right thing is never superfluous."


Edited by SteveG - September 13 2014 at 15:01

^^^  I remember once reading an interesting article drawing a connection between the bloated welfare state in UK and the power of the unions with the thriving rock music.  Although...it had more to do with punk which was seen as a working class phenomenon.  But it is certainly possible that people had more time to spare for recreational pursuits due to the existence of certain conditions that could not be sustained.  I notice that while a lot of UK bands performed in the US in the 70s, the US prog rock scene was much smaller.  And rock and pop music in the US was already a lot more 'corporatised' than in the UK.  The decline of rock then probably has a lot to do with the British scene's diminishing presence in the mainstream.  Although there still are plenty of UK rock bands and even popular ones, their influence on rock music, let alone music as such, is much more feeble than in the past.  At least that's how it appears to me but I haven't lived in that time when all these great bands made their music in the 70s.

And as KC776 put it, if there is no time to contemplate, such contemplation in art is very difficult.  It seems that New York practically broke down in the mid-late 70s.  And yet it was in the late 70s that Fripp moved to New York, feeling that it had become a kind of Paris for musicians.  So this unresolved dysfunction, with a new direction yet to emerge (which would be the push towards market led economies in the 80s), perhaps provided fertile ground for such exploration, especially if there was nothing else to do.  The music of old down here was often thoughtful and profound and India was a mess then.  Not that it isn't now but there is now momentum and impatience for change where there isn't momentum whereas at that time people had made peace with an endless stagnation.  

But is it, really?  I wouldn't know if it were the case.  I thought there was a crest of popularity around the mid noughties when the economic situation was better.  I do not know that I completely go along with that for metal.  It makes more sense in the case of punk which in any case did not have the larger than life ethos of a lot of metal.  But as the world economy got better, underground metal got even better, say around mid 80s.  

Here in Northern Europe late 1970s/early 1980s-style heavy metal has seen a huge resurgence in popularity within the last 4 years, with the genre enjoying a level of mainstream crossover popularity it hasn't since at least the early 1990s. Just off the top of my head I can name Enforcer, Portrait, Ram and Wolf as examples from around my neck of the woods.