Punk Prog?

Andy Warhol’s pop art was a kick start for American art. Suddenly here was something identifiable and unmistakeable for anything other than being American. Andy Warhol’s prints infiltrated US homes in a way no other US artist had done before, and he is often erroneously considered the US’s first great artist, because of this. It was cool to have a piece of American art hanging on the wall in your house, because this art looked “American”. Warhol. But this is where Mike’s point kind of comes in. There are a myriad of works of art from various media that have either been forgotten, or were unknown, simply because they didn’t capture the spirit of the time. In recent years, more and more of these are being (re)discovered.

Andy Warhol did very little that was truly novel, but he did manage to capture the zeitgeist. He was the right person at the right time, and because of this he was absolutely a key figure in US prog (which, as per earlier posts on previous pages of this thread, already had some key proponents, that I guess may have been the US equivalent of proto-prog). Even something considered somewhat revolutionary like The Exploding Plastic Inevitable was actually nothing particularly new. There had been shows that integrated film, performance and music before. But again, Warhol was in the right place at the right time.

I think it’s worthwhile remembering that prog is a bit of a retrospective label, with it being used very rarely (if at all?) contemporaneously. And at the time, bands like the VU and the Stooges were routinely described as progressive, in the same way that UK bands we now know as prog were described as progressive. However the prog tag was largely put on only the progressive UK bands, and others around the world that sounded similar or were influenced by them, leaving the US progressive bands estranged by semantics and semiotics.

As for the Stooges since someone will probably bring them up, they were mentioned earlier by me. But when people think of the Stooges, it is inevitable that people think of their recordings, which were not representative of what they wanted to sound like. John Cale has mused that the band might have had a completely different future had they been allowed to record the albums they wanted to, but their label would have never let them. They were a progressive band in the same way the VU were. Their biggest stated influences were Sun-Ra and Harry Partch. They wanted to call themselves the Psychedelic Stooges Their live performances were improvisational and avant-garde. At every turn, the record company was saying no to what they wanted, and boxing them into something they considered more marketable. So maybe the debut Stooges album doesn’t sound prog, but it’s not the album they, or producer John Cale, wanted to make. Iggy was driven into a circle of drugs and depression, and the resulting second album is a mess that none of the band were interested in, and all have expressed dislike and disdain for. But even within these two albums that are more usually ascribed the punk label, there are still signs of the full on (US) prog that the Stooges were capable of.

Again, it’s as Mike says, sometimes something is simply not heard because at the time record companies weren’t willing to take a risk on something they considered too daring or out there. In the US, this worked against the prog bands in a way it did not in the UK. Because of the recognised great history of art in Europe, and because most of the UK prog bands drew on classical influences, as daring and different as they might have been, they were still recognisable as being part of the greater European art history. American prog was more idiosyncratic and avant-garde - and arguably more progressive because of that. But put aside the semantics, and I think it would be foolish to suggest that the US did not have its own prog scene. The bands and artists that made it up may not be recognised now as being prog, but that’s only a label. Take away the signifier, and the signified is what is is.