What is art rock?

Sean Trane wrote: Progishness wrote: The Dark Elf wrote: A lot of Bowie and Roxy Music I consider art rock rather than prog. I'd also consider the likes of 10cc, ELO, and Kate Bush to be art rock - i.e. artists on the fringes of the more general prog genre who create a unique sound with intelligent pop/rock crossover songs (crossover in the sense they appeal to a more mainstream music audience). I would add Queen to that list (and Roxy). However, I would suggest not bands like Supertramp or Floyd , who despite have mega-hit pop singles, they also have pure-prog epics (Queen has only Rhapsody) , even without tricky time-sigs.

Yes Queen, certainly on their first three or four albums... as for Floyd not withstanding they have been my favourite band for 50 years or so and I'm so familiar with their output, I'd suggest that like Bowie and Bush, they transcend all established genres and inhabit their own unique spaces. To me the real Floydian spirit is to be found on their early albums, up to around Meddle and for the want of a better classification for them probably do belong in Psych/Space Prog.

Supertramp to me are/were a clever pop/rock crossover band, but maybe not quite as sophisticated as 10CC (I refer to their output up to How Dare You, and the subsequent split).

I disagree. Usually I've seen art rock mainly only apply to 70's bands like Styx, 10CC, Roxy Music, Bebop Deluxe, Eno, Bowie, Supertramp, etc. Sometimes it has been applied to arty folky artists like Sufjan Stevens or Arcade Fire. It's rare that I've seen it referred to as something that envelops prog. But I guess we all have different experiences and thus opinions.

(sorry that this has become a bit long)

siLLy puPPy wrote: ^ it's a hierarchical tree of narrowing down definitions. It makes total sense to me. It's a phylogeny tree as in biology. (...) Music has adopted this system for hierarchies of description

Not at all, but really not at all!

First, "Music has adopted this system..." makes no sense. Music adopts nothing, it is not a living being, but an abstract notion referring to a phenomenon in our world. Human beings adopt.

Second, a horse belongs to one sole branch of that classification system, whereas for example Jazz-rock could be sub-genre of both jazz and of rock. This would be impossible in the biology classification system you refer to. You cannot project a classification system coming from the natural sciences just like that upon a cultural phenomenon.

Genres are often ill-defined because they have several different origins: producers/distributors, critics, audience feedback (and only very few catalogers or theorists contribute - in their capacity - to the labeling or definition of genres), and they are not, or hardly generated within a classification system. And most of these originators are not very much preoccupied by a definition, for them the label itself is most of the time enough. The classification systems emerge afterwards and there is not one authority that determines that this or that system is the authoritative reference to use (like for example the Dewey Decimal Classification system for libraries). It is total anarchy.

In these discussions here you can already see a confusion between two different takes on "genre": a synchronic (snapshot) approach, which defines a genre based on a more or less stable set of shared characteristics (patterns, style, structure...), versus a diachronic approach, which places a genre in its historical context and evolution. Not being aware of the differences in approach makes these discussions - fortunately - endless.

The total anarchy is well exemplified by Rate Your Music's list of genres: more than 400 sub-genres for folk, more than 250 for rock just shows a lack of a systematic approach. Too many contributors, no clear framework (classification system) leads to a kind of classification (we'd better call it a list) that is very, very far away from the classification system used in biology.  

Not that all this is bad - it's how things go. But there is much confusion in these lists between "genre" and between "tags". This also feeds the endless discussions here (which is a good thing! :)

I'm not a music historian/theroist, but with the example of Art Rock, we see that some intuitively have some kind of definition for it but list very little of that set of characteristics that should theoretically define the genre. Others refer to the emergence of the notion in a period when rock music was not as diversified as it is nowadays. Art Rock was used in a context where there were still very few sub-genres defined for rock. So, in that sense (and as an example), Art Rock could be considered as a relative genre to distinguish works from - say - Pop Rock. With the diversification within rock music and the emergence of other sub-genres Art Rock has maybe become too overarching and too much overlapping with other sub-genres that it looses it's (historical) sense and pertinence. The definition that RateYourMusic gives exemplifies this in an interesting way:

rateyourmusic wrote: Art Rock Aspires towards a level of experimentation and creativity that expands the bounds of Rock while remaining within the bounds of conventional structures that Experimental Rock ignores.

Now, all this said, and underlining the relativity of all genre classifications, normally - I think - we would all consider Prog as a sub-genre of Rock. Here on PA it has become a category on its own and as such it can list sub-genres (like what we would normally call "electronic music", Jazz Rock, a.o.) that in other more general genre listings would not be considered a sub-genre of Prog, but either a category on their own or a sub-genre under an other category.

Anyway, long live anarchy!





Edited by suitkees - July 13 2023 at 04:01

While I think, there's some deeper meaning with it.