Prog's not prog.

Oh man, the crunge is pretty serious funk right there. I can barely stay seated listening to that one! LanCieHE, thanks for the story. It is so interesting to hear yarns from back in the day about music. My dad used to have great stories to tell me about marching band and pink floyd concerts and whatnot. It is so fun to realize how universal yet changing music is. I imagine it will be the same in the future too, when I get to pass on the family saxophone to my grandkids and tell them about the time my mom ran it over with a van, and they ask me what a van is. By the way, how did your group tackle the end of like a prayer where there is that choir part? As for Matte Kudasai, I think you might be right. I think yesterday by the beatles has that kind of really melodic slow melody, but it seems to have gone out of style in any pop from the last 20 years. It's like the melodies are shorter phrased these days. I'd consider Matte Kudasai to fall into the category of "obsolete pop ballad"

Actually there is a category for the song Matte Kudasai by King Crimson, it's called "Progressive Rock."   The Beatles came out with Yesterday in 1965 and there was no Progressive rock then as of yet.  I know that you younger guys think that everything is Progressive.  Then again, mabye that's true when you compare the rock and pop of today to the manure that is spewed over the air waves these days.  

  

LanCaiHe wrote: When you don't have a choir, you don't have a choir, or at least you have some mellotron samples. ;-)  Of course good melodies would go out of style since most music is "spoken" word nowadays i.e. rappppp!   Melodies today, if you get them, are usually simple fragments of minor pentatonic scales, or blues scales, with lots of grace notes added (if you are lucky enough to have them), but then again most singers today soundlike human bagpipes!    "Yesterday," a great song with relevant lyrics....especially for my life!  LOL  Nuke wrote: Oh man, the crunge is pretty serious funk right there. I can barely stay seated listening to that one! LanCieHE, thanks for the story. It is so interesting to hear yarns from back in the day about music. My dad used to have great stories to tell me about marching band and pink floyd concerts and whatnot. It is so fun to realize how universal yet changing music is. I imagine it will be the same in the future too, when I get to pass on the family saxophone to my grandkids and tell them about the time my mom ran it over with a van, and they ask me what a van is. By the way, how did your group tackle the end of like a prayer where there is that choir part? As for Matte Kudasai, I think you might be right. I think yesterday by the beatles has that kind of really melodic slow melody, but it seems to have gone out of style in any pop from the last 20 years. It's like the melodies are shorter phrased these days. I'd consider Matte Kudasai to fall into the category of "obsolete pop ballad"

It's classy:

haha, yes, thank you very much, I know that this is on here, but I guess it was a personal thing.  I wonder if Nuke has read this page? 

Dean wrote: LanCaiHe wrote: OK, now I see where you are coming from.  "Forward Thinking" is something that I feel is all relative.  If you compare anything that any prog band does to works by classical or contemporary classical composers you will find that there is nothing really "new" about what they are doing at all.  In other words, it's all been done before.  It's when it is blended with rock that it becomes progressive rock.   I think that for rock to be progressive rock, it has to have some of these basic characteristics:   1.  Song Length longer than 3 minutes, (around there, the standard allowable pop song length).  this doesn't mean that it can't be under 3 minutes, the Residents do this type of thing all the time.  Prog musicians do not write for the masses, if they were in it for the money, they wouldn't be playing prog. 2.  Rooted, or based upon Western classical music, not a heavy emphasis on the blues, i.e. lots of blues scales and funk motifs rhythmic or otherwise. 3.  Lyrics that have subject matter about things other than "I love your hips, I love your thighs, they make me high."  LOL  Prog lyrics are very programmatic or come from an entirely different point of view. 4.  Players that have a greater than average technical skill at playing their instruments.  This has always been the case with Progressive Rock. 5.   Of course things that have a lineage back to what I call the real Prog of the 70's, related to Gentle Giant, ELP, Yes, PFM, etc.,   Maybe many of you might add to this list?  or you could just paraphrase this: http://www.progarchives.com/Progressive-rock.asp#definition

Apparently, for air play length there is a limit to how long a pop song can be....I mean a top 40 song more specifically.  It is 3 minutes and some odd seconds.  It has to stay within this limit or it doesn't have an icecube's chance in hell for airplay.  Or, so I am told.

Nuke wrote: Oh yes, I read it a while ago, although I think I kind of ignored it when I read it because I still suffered under the misconception that progressive was an adjective and not a noun. I think the most important factor in calling something prog is the lineage, because with prog being inherantly creative, it's never going to confine itself to a list of characteristics, however your list does seem to cover well the prog of the last 40 years, so I can assume it will remain accurate for a while. But why 3 minutes? Even most pop music is longer than 3 minutes, as a matter of fact I can't think of a pop song less than 3 minutes off the top of my head. I think that making songs much shorter than 3 minutes is getting dangerously short, actually, something a progressive band might try...