How did prog rock become the laughing stock...

twosteves wrote: That Wakeman concert is hysterical ----maybe he should do a concept album on Game of Thrones --that would be current. It does make me think that Europe and other parts of the world --other than the USA---accepted more types of music.

Edited by Dean - June 04 2016 at 07:39

Quinino wrote: ^ "Don't believe everything you read in the press." Wisest thing to say, thank you Dean for putting it all in perspective with a single sentence.

WeepingElf wrote: I don't think that "punk killed prog". Nor did "disco kill prog". Punk and disco catered to different audiences than prog, I think. I'd rather say that the demise of prog was to some degree homemade - the prog albums of the late 70s were mostly of poorer quality than those of the early 70s, and there were some outright white elephants such as Works and Love Beach by ELP. Quite a few prog fans moved on to modern jazz or classical because they were disappointed about what was going on with the great prog bands, I guess. Or just kept listening to the old albums they already had. But it was also such that the times were changing to the worse: the optimism of the early 70s faltered, and the western societies were moving to the right, as evidenced by the election victories of Thatcher, Reagan and Kohl. And most of the rock press has been stacked against prog all the time and howled in triumph at the demise of the genre.

Edited by Dean - June 04 2016 at 07:36

Dean wrote: So when Punk arrived in late 1975 it attracted a younger audience even though the people who actually played it were somewhat older. As an 18-yo at the time I thought myself to old to be a Punk - despite being the same age as Susan "Siouxsie" Ballion and John "Vicious" Richie, a year younger than Johnny "Rotten" Lydon and David "Vanian" Left ... and much, much younger than Joe Strummer, Hugh Cornwell and Ian Dury (hence my contention that these Punk musicians listened to the same music as I did when they were younger).

Edited by WeepingElf - June 04 2016 at 15:15

Dean wrote: lostrom wrote: Dean wrote: lostrom wrote: It's rather silly that some try to make it that punk didn't dislike prog. Au contraire, it is merely common sense and would be not very bright to think otherwise. Punk (and one must assume you mean the musicians who made it) did not appear in from vacuum so would they have spent their teenage years listening to the same music as the rest of us. They would probably like you to believe that they listened exclusively to The MC5s, The Stooges and the Velvet Underground but that is a fanciful bit of elitist propaganda... (in other words, it would be a big fat lie equal only to the number of people who claimed to have been at the Sex Pistols gig at the Manchester Lesser Free Trade Hall in 1976)... the inevitable reality is, if a band was mentioned in the pages of Sounds, The NME or Melody Maker, or featured at one of the outdoor festivals such as Reading or Glastonbury during the first half of the 1970s then it was listened to (and subsequently liked) by practically every white teenage male in the UK at that time even if they later went on to be Punk.  No. Yes.   lostrom wrote: ster wrote: lostrom wrote: It's rather silly that some try to make it that punk didn't dislike prog.   It is silly. These people have no clue and haven’t been there. Punks hated prog and especially arena rock acts like Foreigner, Boston Styx etc. Maybe not ALL of them but the general consensus did. I have read countless interviews where punk artists would scorn others if they showed any kind of skill on your instrument. They were ostracized and called a fascist or a poseur. Remember that? Everyone that wasn’t punk was a fascist! Down with elitism! Very militant. They felt that rock n roll was becoming bourgeois or upper class because of the skill that was displayed. Especially the extravagant stage shows where they felt the artists were becoming too big for the audiences. I have read an interview with Adam Clayton from U2 and he said that during his punk days they hated when guitarists were perceived as these super heroes that had to be saluted.  Punk was a rebellion just like prog was a rebellion against sixties music. Don’t believe me? Bill Bruford had “Keith Moon Sucks" written on his sneakers. Prog rockers wanted to smash the formulaic pop music that came before them–and they did. Punk wanted to simplify rock and bring it back to the kids. You are correct. That's missed the point. (btw: I was there, and hardly any one in the UK listened to Boston, Foreigner or Styx). What Punk musicians said at the time of Punk was contrived propaganda and jumping on a bandwagon steered by manipulative media people (John Savage, Julie Burchill, Tony Parsons, Gary Bushell, Caroline Coon, Charles Shar-Murray, et al ... and lamentably previous Prog supporters such as John Peel and Ann Nightingale who owe their fame and radio careers to Prog). Of course they would never admit to listening to or liking any of the music that came before the emergence of Punk because it wasn't "cool" to do that. Don't believe everything you read in the press.

Dean wrote: One premise is that Prog was middle class because the musicians and their audience were middle class, and likewise Punk was working-class because the musicians and audience were working-class. The big problem with that is the youth-population of Britain didn't suddenly go from being mainly middle-class to mainly working class in between the end of 1975 and the middle of 1976. Which raises two related questions: what were the working-class listening to before Punk? and what where the middle-classes listening to after Prog? For there to have been a class-divide between the two genres of music would have meant that they could have (and should have) co-existed without one affecting the other. That the (disaffected/unemployed) working-classes suddenly developed a music of their own would have had no bearing on what middle-class college students listened to when toking on a spliff in their halls of residence or student digs. Prog and Punk appealed to young people of all classes. The only "class" that hated Punk were the middle-aged, middle-class middle-Englanders...

Especially good point.

Dean wrote: Of course, therein lies the problem with Prog and why we find it so hard to define, classify, and compartmentalise. Whether through accident or intent, it lacked that cohesive common-ground to unify and define it - so it was easy to ridicule Prog because anything chosen to illustrate how pompous and overblown it was automatically became representative of the whole genre, even when in reality it wasn't. For example Genesis taking hampers of food on tour with them is used to show that they were aloof and middle-class, whereas the truth is they couldn't afford to feed themselves in restaurants and bars every night. I would suggest here (and this is just a theory) that Prog musicians distanced themselves from any form of subculture in direct reaction to the post-hippy come-down and the death of the Summer of Love - Prog was a leaderless anti-hippy freakdom of music devoid of all that non-music baggage whose only ethos was individuality and self-expression.

And furthermore it began as an underground movement, and some at the time simply knew it as underground music. It was cultivated by an active underground. By the late 70s Prog had lost any relationship to the underground and all the cultivation it had to offer. New Prog bands had to rise the hard way without a scene. Yes, Genesis, ELP and so on played big arenas and were so busy trying to get noticed that they had no motivation to cultivate new talent.

Dean wrote: If Punk ever honestly rebelled against anything, it was that - Anarchists in name only, Punk was actually conservative and conformist - to be a Punk meant adopting the whole shebang: the art, the music, the style and the uniform dress-code - right from the tippy toes of their Doc Marten boots that Mummy bought for them to their tooth-paste spiked hair and the "I, Individual" tattoo drawn in biro on their foreheads - One cannot be simultaneously left wing and libertarian, and there the whole class-divide comes crashing down because class and politics are only loosely aligned - bands such as Sham 69 had as many right-wing skinhead followers as they had left-wing, no-wing punk followers... On the political spectrum what came after Punk was ten years of Thatcher and Regan Conservatism, not in reaction to Punk but as a direct disaffected consequence of it - the people who voted for them were the same people who pogo'd and gobbed to Anarchy In The UK and God Save The Queen four years earlier.

Right on.

Dean wrote: The "classing-down" of Punk and its musicians was a media invention that snowballed because it sold newspapers and (eventually) records. In retrospect it made bigger "stars" of the music journalists who wrote it than most of the Punk musicians they wrote about. Middle-class Punk musicians latched on to this because it was a lucrative bandwagon to climb aboard - all free publicity is good publicity and when the music press is "on your side" then it would be daft to deny that it was true.

Most likely so, I expect.

Dean wrote: [And seriously, I couldn't give a flying fart what Johnny-come-lately Jello Biafra said or thought three or four years after Punk had officially curled-up its toes and died...]

No comment on the flying fart.

What about The Stranglers? They were a band of punkish outsiders who could play their instruments very well. They were not really punk, but their first 2 albums had punk leanings.

Anyway, they had prog tendencies in their extended Doors like instrumental sections, and their first album had a superb 7 minute 'epic' with 4 sections - very prog for a so called punk band in 1977. Their third album Black and White even had a loose concept.

They may have been considered outsiders to the punk genre and looked down on because of their musicianship, use of keyboards and longer songs, but they had the punk attitude.

So whilst punk cleared tables of EPL etc, there was still a prog undercurrent (Stranglers, Television etc) in the punk/new wave music that replaced it.

That's my take on it anyway.

the music industry played a big part too. in the late 60s and early 70s record companies were looking for bands to add to their stack and left them their artistic freedom, which is why the music of that time is still so refreshing (though the deals the bands were given were highly exploitative). that's why albums like the only release of Arzachel were possible. later on the music industry took control. why, even the so-called "punk revolution" was nothing but a clever market stratagem, even if the early punk bands truly felt they were rebels

The Monks were led by 2 former Strawbs Richard Hudson and John Ford, and were a punkish band from around 1980.  They had a big hit single "Nice Legs shame about the face" in England that got kaiboshed on its way up the charts when somebody or other exposed them as having had non punk origins and therefore not legit.  In the meantime, the album went multi platinum in Canada where most of their presumably very young fans had not heard of Strawbs, or they had but didn't care.   When the Monks came over to Canada to tour, they got in on the act by kind of decrying what they had done in Strawbs as being less authentic, thereby siding with the very fashion that had limited their UK success.

Edited by kenethlevine - June 06 2016 at 12:27

 Well my opinion is that there are many factors which led to that demise. To begin with, in the late 70s most prog bands changed their sound (and not for the best). I could say that before that they were hated for their theatrics, the dress-ups, the concepts of their music (both lyrically and musically) but personally I believe that punks and ''generic'' audiences consider prog to be elitist exactly because prog artists succeeded in what punks failed. Prog artists have absolutely no regard towards the audience, they will play whatever they want, i mean listen to Starless and Bible black, with the exception of The great Deceiver, all the rest of the songs are pure Fripp craziness, he definitely didn't aim for the audiences approval. And many of these bands , which initially didn't care about fame fortune but worked to bring music a step ahead, are now considered as the ''musical authority'' concerning rock. I guess that's what makes em mad, that prog is a different notion, a part of music that is different from all the others and that lives autonomously without having much in common with other genres. Basically i guess prog actually succeeded into being different and original but based only on the music ( i mean , i'm 22 and i've seen many dvds, lives and whatever of prog bands, and yeah, the theatrics and dress ups are ridiculous, but i listen to the music, who cares how they dress or behave?).  Punks tried to be different by simplifying their music, (i mean, what's so different and revolutionary about a 4/4 track with heavy distortion guitars, not tuned right for the ''i dont care about rules'' effect, and a blast beat?) and actually a lot of theatrics. Like the braking of guitars, the clothes, the alcohol, the drugs.. what? isn't that all marketing? Well acting like a monkey on and off stage definitely doesn't make you a real rock n roller  Johnny rotten . I don't know what makes you a rock n roller, but i know what makes you a musician, hard work, decades of practice, infinite musical stimuli, and the desire to push music forward.