Mike Oldfield's category? |
Post Reply | Page 123> |
Author | ||||
splyu
Forum Senior Member Joined: September 06 2008 Location: Germany Status: Offline Points: 316 |
Topic: Mike Oldfield's category? Posted: October 29 2008 at 02:56 |
|||
I absolutely agree here. In fact, I feel that Hergest Ridge and Ommadawn (not even Incantations!) are among the only prog albums I've ever heard from any artist that contain no or next to no pop influence at all. Remember pop doesn't just mean 80s plastic pop. It initially meant The Beatles and the like, and The Beatles have influenced all of the early prog pioneers (name an exception if you can). |
||||
splyu
Forum Senior Member Joined: September 06 2008 Location: Germany Status: Offline Points: 316 |
Posted: October 29 2008 at 02:52 | |||
Sorry, this is simply not true. Genesis had pop tunes in the 70s - More Fool Me, I Know What I Like, Follow You..., Carpet Crawlers, and more. And they had prog tunes in the 80s and 90s - Dodo / Lurker, Home By The Sea, Domino, Fading Lights, and more. Not to even mention Duke which is a par excellance example of an album that combines prog and pop. How is that so much different from what Oldfield did? |
||||
russellk
Prog Reviewer Joined: February 28 2005 Location: New Zealand Status: Offline Points: 782 |
Posted: October 28 2008 at 20:08 | |||
^Fair enough, Dean - I wasn't really questioning the sub-genre, more feeling for its boundaries, I guess. I still haven't got a real sense of Xover, even though many of my favourite artists have found a home here. I wondered where Gazpacho had gone!
I guess the problem is my own. I hear pop music in most classic prog. It's further confused by the commercial success many prog bands enjoyed, even on the singles charts, in the early 1970s. For that reason I've always been strongly resistant to the myth that pure prog bands became pure pop in time for the early 80s - I don't think it was as fundamental a shift as that. There was pop in the prog of the 70s and prog in the pop of the 80s, it seems to me. This makes Xover a difficult concept for me to grasp. |
||||
Dean
Special Collaborator Retired Admin and Amateur Layabout Joined: May 13 2007 Location: Europe Status: Offline Points: 37575 |
Posted: October 28 2008 at 15:51 | |||
Not quite true from the Xover Team's perspective - we genuinely assess the music regardless of the intent. Some bands who use 'Progressive' as a catch-all tag on MySpace do not produce music that can be related to Progressive Rock as we know it, we try our best to assess those bands on their music, not their intentions. However, this approach is used for new additions, not for artists that were already extant in the Art Rock sub before the split... we could go through the entire sub and re-assess every band, but we do not have all the free time in the world to do that.
Individual cases (such as this) when brought up will be looked at - over the past year after re-assessing them we have moved several bands out of Xover while a few other's have been moved in (Gazpacho, It Bites, Paatos, Timothy Pure) . To date we (as a Team) have never blocked a move out of Xover and Mike Oldfield would be no different if another subgenre Team accepted him.
Xover was created around artists like Supertramp, The Moody Blues and Mike Oldfield who fused Pop with Prog, rather than bands like Yes, Floyd and Genesis who did both but not at the same time. A slight variation of this is the number of solo-artists from Prog bands who reside in Xover (Tony Banks, Keith Emmerson, Peter Gabriel, Steve Howe, Roger Waters, Alan White, Carl Palmer, Jordan Rudess & John Petrucci) rather than in the sub of their 'home' band because they produced Crossover solo albums rather than Prog Related solo albums (eg David Gilmour )
|
||||
What?
|
||||
russellk
Prog Reviewer Joined: February 28 2005 Location: New Zealand Status: Offline Points: 782 |
Posted: October 28 2008 at 15:11 | |||
You're on to it, Desoc. Big can of worms here. Heaven forbid someone makes the argument that Genesis should stay in Symphonic because they're important, while Oldfield should stay in Crossover because he's not. It's not about how well regarded an artist is, it's about the music, surely. My honest view is that 'Crossover Prog' is a problematic genre. It doesn't describe the music, rather it describes the supposed intention of the artist. It's a result of the unhealthy obsession around here of people determined to separate 'prog' from 'pop' - as though prog isn't a subset of popular music. |
||||
Ricochet
Special Collaborator Honorary Collaborator Joined: February 27 2005 Location: Nauru Status: Offline Points: 46301 |
Posted: October 28 2008 at 12:01 | |||
No. Genesis played and (in our books) pioneered Symphonic Prog for 9 years. Oldfield made prog rock fans proud thanks to 5-6 albums. If you're willing to leave the Symphonic Prog genre orphan of one of the godfathers of Symphonic Prog, just because there was also pop in the band's career, it's your own view. On the other hand, Oldfield would be polished of everything non-prog in his music, which is almost a non-sense, since Oldfield blended somewhat constantly styles and such. That allows a few degree of "lesser-progressive" art in his music, but also makes the pop-rock (& others) more than just "plain rezidues" (sp?). |
||||
|
||||
Vibrationbaby
Forum Senior Member Joined: February 13 2004 Status: Offline Points: 6898 |
Posted: October 28 2008 at 10:23 | |||
|
||||
Desoc
Forum Senior Member Joined: December 12 2006 Location: Oslo, Norway Status: Offline Points: 216 |
Posted: October 28 2008 at 10:13 | |||
Ah, but that's a good argument to move Genesis to Crossover as well, isn't it? |
||||
Dean
Special Collaborator Retired Admin and Amateur Layabout Joined: May 13 2007 Location: Europe Status: Offline Points: 37575 |
Posted: October 27 2008 at 18:25 | |||
As Music of the Spheres went #1 in the UK Classical chart and #10 in the Billboard Crossover Classical chart it is fair to say it was squarely aimed at the Popular Classic market and the people who also buy Vanessa Mae, Star Wars soundtrack albums and that music from that advert on TV that goes 'da-dah-dah-de-dah-de-dah' - i.e. Not Prog. (and he's probably made more cash out of it than he ever did with Amarok)
|
||||
What?
|
||||
Vibrationbaby
Forum Senior Member Joined: February 13 2004 Status: Offline Points: 6898 |
Posted: October 27 2008 at 16:54 | |||
Well I listened to the new album music Of The Spheres in the music store. Music stores are lonely places these days with all this crazy dowlaoding. Why don`t we just call him Mike The Orchestra Leader. Good music to listen to in the dentist`s chair. Can`t really figure out what demographic he`s aiming at here.
|
||||
splyu
Forum Senior Member Joined: September 06 2008 Location: Germany Status: Offline Points: 316 |
Posted: October 25 2008 at 10:52 | |||
While this is true, it seems to me like it is more a certain sound that qualifies albums as "symphonic", rather than the way they're constructed. There are bands in "symphonic" whose tracks have pretty simple constructions, but that have the typical "symphonic" sound (e.g. Novalis). On the other hand, Oldfield's 80s albums may be constructed like classical pieces, but they don't "sound symphonic" (i.e. like a "rock orchestra"). I'm not saying I necessarily endorse that view, but that's what the situation seems to be from my observations.
Those three albums would probably be the only ones that would qualify as "symphonic" in the above sense (though even they sound different from Genesis and Yes).
True, but according to that reasoning, wouldn't Oldfield have to be shifted, to avoid having to shift all the others instead?
Very well put! Edited by splyu - October 25 2008 at 17:06 |
||||
russellk
Prog Reviewer Joined: February 28 2005 Location: New Zealand Status: Offline Points: 782 |
Posted: October 24 2008 at 22:15 | |||
Hmm. I wonder why not Symphonic. Curious only, and not worried about it. He began as prog-folk, of course, and there's still a fair bit of that in Tubular Bells.
Edited by russellk - October 24 2008 at 22:15 |
||||
Ricochet
Special Collaborator Honorary Collaborator Joined: February 27 2005 Location: Nauru Status: Offline Points: 46301 |
Posted: October 24 2008 at 15:50 | |||
^I was just gonna say that (Dean checked quicker than me).
In fact, here's the official statement of Oldfield moving out from Symphonic: Mike Oldfield (UK) - Not Symphonic, absolutely unique and hard to describe him, I’ve seen his albums in the Jazz, New Age, Rock and Progressive Rock sections of musical stores, some sites have created a new sub-genre based only in this band, another book case of Art Rock |
||||
|
||||
Dean
Special Collaborator Retired Admin and Amateur Layabout Joined: May 13 2007 Location: Europe Status: Offline Points: 37575 |
Posted: October 24 2008 at 15:48 | |||
(just trimmed your post for continuity, so we could ignore the dolt who posted just after you, not to dissmiss your reasonings)
The Oldfield/Symphonic question has come up in the past, before the Art Rock split (here: http://www.progarchives.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=25163) - the general consensus was Not. But as I say, that was before the split and before he was put into Crossover.
|
||||
What?
|
||||
Dean
Special Collaborator Retired Admin and Amateur Layabout Joined: May 13 2007 Location: Europe Status: Offline Points: 37575 |
Posted: October 24 2008 at 15:36 | |||
The new album is Crossover, but Crossover Classical (à la Vanessa May et al) not Crossover Prog. Very strong Tubby Bells flavour to it though.
|
||||
What?
|
||||
russellk
Prog Reviewer Joined: February 28 2005 Location: New Zealand Status: Offline Points: 782 |
Posted: October 24 2008 at 15:35 | |||
... but if he is to be categorised by the albums for which he was added, surely he'd be ...
(here I advertently reveal my ignorance - as opposed to all the times I inadvertently revealed it) ... symphonic prog? More accurately, OLDFIELD’s progressive work is Symphonic Prog with one or two latter-career exceptions. In fact, I believe OLDFIELD is the absolute exemplar of Symphonic Prog, and it astounds me that his classification here seems to be driven by his non-prog material. As a long-time lover of 'classical' music, I've yet to find another artist that more closely approximates the structure of concertos or symphonies in his compositions. Even in his supposedly 'commercial' albums he still spins out album-length themes, reworking them and adding variations. The disco 'Guilty' is a variation on the main 'Incantations' theme. 'The Lake' contains elements of 'To France'. He does this on every album. But the most obvious examples are his second, third and fourth albums. 'Ommadawn' is about the most perfect thing these ears have heard, and I've never thought of it as anything other than symphonic. Having said that, we can’t shift OLDFIELD: if we do, the whole Crossover sub-genre will be unpicked. YES, GENESIS, GENTLE GIANT, ELP – all the greats – allowed the sounds of the late 70s and 1980s to influence their work (which many call ‘mainstream’ or ‘commercial’). So, merely using logic, these bands ought to be classified as Crossover. They’re not so classified: so what has influenced their current classification? Something other than logic. OLDFIELD never fully surrendered his progressive past. Until ‘Earth Moving’ he nearest he came to letting go of prog was on ‘Discovery’, but the fully prog ‘The Lake’, a twelve-minute instrumental, was enough to remind us of his prog talents. Also, the whole of ‘Discovery’ reprises his main theme: this symphonic trick (used in other albums such as ‘Ommadawn’) welds the album together and makes it something more than a collection of unrelated pop and rock songs. I said that already, didn't I. It’s an understandable mistake to think that the long tracks ‘Taurus II’ and ‘Crises’ are more ‘commercial’ than his previous extended prog compositions. They use contemporary instruments, and embrace the sounds, techniques and production of the early 1980s. But they are every bit as prog as his earlier work: the underlying compositions take a varied selection of influences and meld them into extended melodic tracks that build to a symphonic climax. Just because they sound like the 80s doesn’t mean they’re built like the 80s. OLDFIELD for symphonic! You may be derisory now. |
||||
Ricochet
Special Collaborator Honorary Collaborator Joined: February 27 2005 Location: Nauru Status: Offline Points: 46301 |
Posted: October 24 2008 at 15:03 | |||
The new albums have nothing to do with prog - and Oldfield was never added here for those... |
||||
|
||||
Vibrationbaby
Forum Senior Member Joined: February 13 2004 Status: Offline Points: 6898 |
Posted: October 24 2008 at 15:02 | |||
Here`s my two cents. Why not just call him New Age ? That`s where he`s found in many music stores now. Haven`t heard the new album yet though. I`ll check it out today.
Edited by Vibrationbaby - October 24 2008 at 15:03 |
||||
clarke2001
Special Collaborator Honorary Collaborator Joined: June 14 2006 Location: Croatia Status: Offline Points: 4160 |
Posted: October 24 2008 at 11:00 | |||
|
||||
Ricochet
Special Collaborator Honorary Collaborator Joined: February 27 2005 Location: Nauru Status: Offline Points: 46301 |
Posted: October 24 2008 at 10:25 | |||
Definitely, my axiom was always "Van der Graaf Generator and Peter Hammill are awesome, and I won't allow any other genre to have them. (Especially not James' genre.)". |
||||
|
||||
Post Reply | Page 123> |
Forum Jump | Forum Permissions You cannot post new topics in this forum You cannot reply to topics in this forum You cannot delete your posts in this forum You cannot edit your posts in this forum You cannot create polls in this forum You cannot vote in polls in this forum |