Old Prog Beats New Prog in Song Sample Plays

As Yoda might say

" look not at how many are played, look instead to your heart and tell them just how old we are.  Knowing not what has come since is the reason for choosing that which is older" 

or to paraphrase

maybe our members are just OLDER

Thank god I'm still young enough to still appreciate contempory progressive music.Another 10 years & I will be stuck in my (listening) ways like the initial poster.I have made a concious effort to try & listen to as much of today's music.Even educate myself on the roots of new developements which has even ment I have had to listen to music that sort of gets close to punk i.e. Fugazi (very influencial group - some of their guitar interplay is exellent).

While I am in agreement to the extent that the "old prog" is what I prefer, I also recognize it for what it is: only an opinion.  Prog rock is a music form, not a time specific movement like NWOBHM.  What you - 88 meter - are saying is a bit like somebody claiming what is called metal today is not metal, and is just noise, because it doesn't sound like Black Sabbath (not strictly true if one only bothers to explore traditional doom and stoner with a little effort).  Black Sabbath was metal in the 70s and metal has moved on since then, drawing very largely from punk, a genre which hadn't come into existence - or so I believe - when Black Sabbath released their first album.  As a music form, prog today is as much prog as prog from the 70s, just that the bands are playing different tunes!  Also, I am ill qualified to speak on this, but people like Logan will tell you that prog from some of the other sub genres in the 70s like Zeuhl sound as much or more different from symphonic prog as, well, prog metal does from symphonic prog.  

Could it just be fans of the "new" prog bands just checking out the "old" stuff as they delve into the long history of progressive music ?
Could it be that certain genres are under represented because of 1) the wealth of still to listen to treasures in say, Symphonic ? 2) some genres aren't explored in more detail because of certain perceptions or biases of the listener, deserved or not ? 3) Constant references to & raving reviews of certain acts and albums may lead more to give them a listen ?
Then of course, the question is, why aren't these songs' albums ALL in the top 10, 20, 50 or 100 ?

Heck , you know what, if the technological logistics aren't overwhelming, could PA set up a poll for the top 100 songs ? Oops, wait, who's going to count all the suggestions, then boil them down to a list of choices that the community can vote on ? Then , who's going to care to argue for the next year what songs were unjustly left off due to their obscurity, complexity, esoterism, simplicity, commercial success etc ...

Glad to see people are interested in the topic. No italics for the FireFox users.

   Inspiration, dissonance, melody. Hmmm. these are aspects of all musics, form Bach to Phillip Glass and all rock in between.

   YES has some of the most inspired dissonances in their music. The intro to CTTE and side 3 of Tales, Gates, etc. There are a lot of folk-like tunes as well, All Good People, the classical guitar section of side 3 of Tales, etc. Genesis is not as dissonant, but the lyrics have a certain verbal dissonance. The Genesis melodies are very free in their movements.

ELP was certainly a dissonant band, the piano and organ playing especially, yet their melodic writing, with Greg Lake's tunes, was direct and durable.

   What makes the original prog proggier is the time and place of its origins. There was no precedent for YES, Genesis, Tull, King Crimson, ELP, Gentle Giant, and the like. They broke new ground, and used whatever instruments, musical materials, and lyric invention were at hand. Also, frankly, they MAY (laugh, but not out loud...)have used recreational drugs to some positive creative effect. 

Stone-ed-ness makes for some weird performances, but maybe it was the thing for writing words and music without inhibitions or feeling a need to conform to some preconceived notion of rock n' roll. Weed, hash and psychedelics make for more listenable outputs than coke, heroin and speed. (Don't make a big thing out of this statement, it is just an aside.)

   Prog was of a time and place, England in the early 70's. Just as free jazz was of the 60's in the USA, and serialism in classical music was post WWII, the best of each of these genres is from its inception. Free jazz has very little audience today, as does the music of Milton Babbitt and Charles Woerinen, (later serialists).

   Inspiration comes with a zeitgeist that reflects its time and place. Yet, relying on it is not a substitute for perspiration, the hard work of discovering what musical possibilities lay ahead. Beethoven was the first art music to really have staying power for the mass audience. He worked really hard at composition, revising all the time and keeping notebooks full of themes, ideas, and variations. He was also an accomplished improvisor. 

   All this is to say that the first progressive rock music was unfettered by previous music, and this advantage cannot be reproduced, at least in this genre. If a band or songwriter came along that had some entirely new way of making music, we prog fans might not see it right away, because we already have our favorites. It would also be of some other time and place, which would make it seminal and the standard by which other music that followed would be judged, just like early prog-rock.

   I rambled, imagine that...

88melter

Well, 88melter, you've definitely sparked a lively discussion.  While I am an old guy like you (I will be 50 in April), I have appreciated some of the newer prog for some of the "dynamic" that they are putting into the genre.  After all, "progressive music" should reflect a progression of dynamic.  Certainly, some of it seems like plain rock, but others (like "Eritarka" from TMV) definitely reflects an interesting - and melodic - progression in the music dynamic.  I still prefer early- to mid-70s prog as my favorite, but some of the new stuff is definitely worth a listen before tossing it aside...

Edited by prog4evr - January 26 2009 at 06:42

Henry Plainview wrote: darkshade wrote: IMO many musicians today have no soul, or they do, but do not utilize it in their music. and im 21 Everything is dying. Except when it's not. maybe prog rock post-1999 should be called Nu-Prog I hate that name so much.

It's still better than "a post-Scenes From A Memory world".

88melter wrote: Notice, the posts for all sorts of categories relate to new prog bands, whose music has some following somewhere, I am sure. Then look at the most played song samples list. It is almost exclusively titles from 25 or more years ago. I think the definition of what makes a band's music PROG is wide enough so the relative art-lessness of most new stuff can duck under the bar.    Symphonic prog is the standard by which all genres now considered PROG ought to be judged. The other styles are good rock music, but it is the symphonic-ness of these vintage trax that makes people want to hear them repeatedly.    Yes, I am 53 yrs. old, as of today, Jan 21, as a matter of fact. I grew up listening to the music I am championing, and I am sure the young people of today will root for their generations efforts.    What say ye, current young people? 88melter

Even when downsizing the font, leaving it in Italics still makes that post horrible to read. For some reason Firefox doesn't let me un-italic it.

One thing I never understood, you get all these 'progheads' that listen to stuff because it's 'different' and not pop music, but yet, if it's not melodic/melodic enough, they give a miss.
If people want to actually listen to the most far removed music from pop music, why would you go to Symphonic prog, which is full of melody and sometimes pop music like hooks?

I don't want to sound like an ass, but the whole "needs to be melodic and symphonic music otherwise it's just noise and horrible to listen to' line of thinking seriously gets up my nerves.

If all I listened to was Power metal and Yes all day long, I would go insane because I can't stand listening to that much melodic music, it just gets boring.
Haven't people heard of balance? Like umm, mixing up atonality/dissonance with melody to give a broader range of emotions and musical colors?
Why limit yourself to purely melodic music when you get a wider range of emotions from a broader harmonic palette of adding in atonality and dissonance and mixing it up with melody as well?
Why limit yourself to something that has hooks and catchy moments in it?
There is extreme emotion outside melody and (what is typically though of as) melodic hooks and catchy bits.
If people don't choose to look beyond that, the only thing that can happen is that you lose and the rest of us that don't mind listening to less melodic music and music that doesn't rely on what we typically think of hooks, well quite frankly we win because we get a wider choice of music to listen to.

Moatilliatta wrote: darkshade wrote: IMO many musicians today have no soul, or they do, but do not utilize it in their music. and im 21   I think you're just not looking in all of the right places. So much music from the 90s and 00s is dripping in passion and soul. Surely there are many bands in any genre that are uninspired, but just as surely there are many bands who are extremely inspired. But of course, we all interpret things differently.

no plenty of musicians out there have soul, but there's many many with little or none

darkshade wrote: IMO many musicians today have no soul, or they do, but do not utilize it in their music. and im 21