Celebrating Pop-Prog

I'm beginning to turn around my attitude toward the music that the early prog bands played when they caught the wave of pop that seemed to arise and descend in the 80s.  Although these songs do not carry the depths and highs of the prog that came before it, this "pop-prog" still has more in it than pop music in general does. 

It's prog infiltrating the mainstream. How could that be bad? ;)

Love the Rush and Genesis, and the Yes too, even though I'm not the biggest Yes fan in purely prog terms, 9274830 has to be one of the best prog-pop-prop-poge albums ever. And of course Mike Oldfield. (I guess I should make that last sentence my signature...)

sealchan wrote: And it would, after all, be a strange limitation if prog artists couldn't take on pop music styles along with all the other styles that have found a niche there.

And that is very true.


Edited by splyu - August 29 2009 at 16:48

I'll always celebrate good music, no matter the genre or source. And I consider Genesis's pop stuff to be mostly great, and a lot of Yes's pop stuff to be WAY better than Tormato. Gentle Giant's pop period isn't bad either. But hey, I prefer ABBA to Dream Theater. I'm clearly insane...

When dealing with Pop-Prog I would recommend:

I was thinking today about 90215 & Big Generator and how that project was initially a separate band to be called Cinema.. I think it would've been better to call it that rather than Yes which it sounded nothing like and lacked Steve Howe's crucial aspect, same with Fripp's Discipline project becoming another KC incarnation, cool but those bands were quite different and would've done without the name recognition (to boost sales presumably)..  anyway yeah, I liked much of the 'pop-prog' of the time including Robert Plant's first four, U2, Cocteaus, Peter Gabriel, Saga

SonicDeath10 wrote: I'll always celebrate good music, no matter the genre or source. And I consider Genesis's pop stuff to be mostly great, and a lot of Yes's pop stuff to be WAY better than Tormato. Gentle Giant's pop period isn't bad either. But hey, I prefer ABBA to Dream Theater. I'm clearly insane...   But the Mahvishnu Orchestra is better than either ;).

That makes two of us then. Micky and I (we're husband and wife, in case you didn't know) walked out of their ProgNation performance at the end of the third song, feeling as if someone had been bludgeoning us over the head for half an hour.

However, when I think of 'pop-prog', rather than Asia or 90125-era Yes (though I love that album - Asia not so much), I think of the likes of Roxy Music, Supertramp, ELO or 10cc - or even some modern bands like The Tea Club or 3rd Degree. At any rate, I'd rather listen to some good 'pop-prog' than to excruciating, 80-minute long albums full of instrumental w***ery, and devoid of anything resembling good songwriting.

Does anyone here consider A.C.T. pop prog?

If a melody is good, you want to hear it repeated. Pop melodies can be extremely strong (or extremely derivative) and this makes hearing the melody often great fun. I'm a defender of pop, but that's mostly on a forum like this. A lot of pop is completely derviative, gross, and uninteresting. Just like a lot of prog is derivative, gross, and uninteresting. It's just all that in a different way.

SonicDeath10 wrote: Raff wrote: That makes two of us then. Micky and I (we're husband and wife, in case you didn't know) walked out of their ProgNation performance at the end of the third song, feeling as if someone had been bludgeoning us over the head for half an hour. However, when I think of 'pop-prog', rather than Asia or 90125-era Yes (though I love that album - Asia not so much), I think of the likes of Roxy Music, Supertramp, ELO or 10cc - or even some modern bands like The Tea Club or 3rd Degree. At any rate, I'd rather listen to some good 'pop-prog' than to excruciating, 80-minute long albums full of instrumental w***ery, and devoid of anything resembling good songwriting.   You have a good point: Roxy Music, Supertramp, and especially 10cc are basically prog pop. Formerly prog bands doing pop isn't really the best example, I suppose...   I consider a lot of ABBA's output to be more melodically and harmonically complex than most prog music.

These great posts really do take me back. I was listening to, and enjoying, 10CC & Roxy Music before I got into prog in 1977, simply because I had more exposure to them as a child on Top of the Pops on BBC1, and you are right, they were very basically pop prog. You could also describe a lot of Bowie in the same manner from that period, and, of course, before them The Beatles, Who, and Stones were massively successful commercial artists.

I always really admired Deep Purple's stance over singles being successful in the 1970's after Led Zep set a bit of a sad trend, which survives to this day, that commercial single success was something of a sellout. It's not. As Micky said, if its great music, people will listen to it, and there is a lot of great music out there.

BTW - as regards Abba, my son recently asked me to buy a compilation CD after he saw the film on DVD with Meryl Streep. I'd almost forgotten just how great their pop music was, and I have absolutely no shame in admitting that.

I still find Genesis's "Invisible Touch" to be my favorite of their 80s output. I consider it to be their most progressive from that decade, with songs like "Domino", "The Brazilian", and "Tonight Tonight Tonight" being the best examples.