Is 70's prog a nostalgia thing?

From dictionary.com:

Reggy wrote: The problem is that the Neo prog is just an nemesis of the 70's. There are no neoprog unless the term of "prog" detached from 70's. IQ, Flower Kings, Thriumvirat, Kayak, Van De Graff,  etc those are  trying to imitate the 70's. 70's Progressive  is finished when Gabriel left Genesis, or Anderson sings "Owner of Lonely Hearts..........TheNeo is not progs, but the evolution and metamorphosis..........

Might want to check your research when it comes to Triumvirat, Kayak, and Van De Graff Generator...

Slartibartfast wrote: From dictionary.com: a wistful desire to return in thought or in fact to a former time in one's life, to one's home or homeland, or to one's family and friends; a sentimental yearning for the happiness of a former place or time: a nostalgia for his college days. It's only nostalgia if you've been there.  If you are a younger person exploring the music of that era, I don't think it can be by definition, just appreciation for some good stuff.

Yes my post  had a complete different meaning for old guys like me! I will never know how different would it be my experience of discovering the 70's music in 2010.

Yayaya, but listen the tune...is it Yes.........nope !...prog always unpredicted..."Owner " is Yes turns Pops. The 70's is really prog, the rest.......they are just mix...:))))

Reggy wrote: The problem is that the Neo prog is just an nemesis of the 70's. There are no neoprog unless the term of "prog" detached from 70's. IQ, Flower Kings, Thriumvirat, Kayak, Van De Graff,  etc those are  trying to imitate the 70's. 70's Progressive  is finished when Gabriel left Genesis, or Anderson sings "Owner of Lonely Hearts..........TheNeo is not progs, but the evolution and metamorphosis..........

Atavachron wrote: Well I just bought a 2007 release from one of the 'quality new prog bands' brought to us by the Metal Mind label, and it may be the last thing I get from this ilk for awhile.. you know the type; a decent, well-produced band that otherwise probably wouldn't be able to professionally distribute their CD-- sounds like a good idea, but I just threw away $10 on a very mediocre product (that would've been twice that if I'd not got it used) My point?  Not sure myself, but I know I'm now quite put-off this 'brand' (if you will, and you can add InsideOut to that list) of modern Prog.  Maybe Transatlantic will be better, I've heard good things about them ...

I didn't particularly dig SMPTe, if I got the sequence of alphabets right.  It was not a bad album but there was no sense of discovery in the music for me.  A very professional, competently put together prog album but if liking SEBTP more than an album like this makes me a nostalgic for prog, I don't know what to say. 

  Perhaps, a bit part of calling 70s prog a nostalgia thing is a reluctance to accept that there may have been some music from the past better than some music of today, it's as simple as that.  There may be some other really exciting scene today  - Jamiroquai may have opened some modern doors for me, personally - but the listener may not get around to it...which is not hard considering how scattered and vast the music scene as such is today.   Would people say someone who appreciates Brubeck, Coltrane or Davis is necessarily a nostalgic for old jazz music...it may be that the listener found something great in those artists?  And by the way, is 70s prog just supposed to be symphonic prog?  What about Krautrock, Canterbury, Zeuhl?  Unless you've actually lived in that era, it's a bit hard to get nostalgic for all three (and/or symphonic!) because they couldn't be more unlike each other.

rogerthat wrote: Slartibartfast wrote: If you are a younger person exploring the music of that era, I don't think it can be by definition, just appreciation for some good stuff. This too. Would people say someone who appreciates Brubeck, Coltrane or Davis is necessarily a nostalgic for old jazz music...it may be that the listener found something great in those artists?

right--  I loved bands when I was young that were around before I was born, so it wasn't nostalgia

For those who, like me, were around in the 70s, the coming of the 80s has been a tragedy. Rock bands like Led Zeppelin replaced by Sex Pistols, Beatles/Stones replaced by Duran/Spandau. Also the disco became worse than previously. Prog bands disbanded, disappeared or tried to modify their sound to the new-wave standards by using the fairlight and electronic drums wherever possible. This affected between the others, Rick Wright, Camel and Yes. And forget what Genesis did in the 80s.

octopus-4 wrote: For those who, like me, were around in the 70s, the coming of the 80s has been a tragedy. Rock bands like Led Zeppelin replaced by Sex Pistols, Beatles/Stones replaced by Duran/Spandau. Also the disco became worse than previously. Prog bands disbanded, disappeared or tried to modify their sound to the new-wave standards by using the fairlight and electronic drums wherever possible. This affected between the others, Rick Wright, Camel and Yes. And forget what Genesis did in the 80s. More than nostalgia for the 70s I feel regret for the waste of vinyl and plastics of the 80s. This has caused a disconnection so that we now have a genre called neo-prog. A replacement instead of an evolution. It's not the 70s that are missed, we have missed the 80s and the following 20 years have been spent trying to restore the taste for non-commercial music.  This is simply my personal opinion: it's just how I lived it.

I also "lived" through those times and have a different view of it. I never saw Neo Prog as a disconnection, for me it was a natural evolution, aided perhaps by the post-punk era of New Romanticism of '82 onwards, it started several years earlier with albums like Going For The One (1977) and Wind and Wuthering (1976) where both Yes and Genesis pared down the "pomp" and ambition of their previous albums into something a little simpler, the same was true of Hawkwind who released Quark Strangeness and Charm in '77 as a marked departure from the aural assault of their earlier albums, similarly Kraftwerk shifted from the Krautrock with Trans-Europe Express the same year. 1977 was a turning point for Prog Rock after the unprecedented peak of 73-75. All modern Prog started then, not just Neo - Twelfth Night, Pendragon, Quasar and Marillion were all formed in the late 70s when Prog Rock was at its lowest "mainstream" popularity - the Prog "revival" of 82-86 was instigated by those bands being signed to major labels, not by the bands themselves who had been garnering a decent grass-root following in the years before then, aided by 80s formed "neo" bands like IQ, Landmarc and Mach One and "old school" bands like The Enid, Camel and Caravan.

A very good post by Dean, as usual.   I think so much is mentioned in the neo prog description in this website, but anyway the roots of this style can be seen in Trick/Wind and Wuthering or Spectral Mornings, especially Everyday.  Since you mentioned Ren, neo prog tendencies can be observed in the shorter songs of SFAS and in most of Azure D'Or. In prog circles, it is called their going-pop phase but as you rightly observed, between these and Karnataka/Mostly Autumn, there's not much difference (and the mistake is usually in comparing those bands' output to the more heavily orchestrated Novella or Scheherazade).  Other than this simplification by the older prog bands, another important trend of the late 70s gives the key to the evolution of prog metal and why it is largely the most sought after prog style of the present day - the ascendancy of Rush!  This was the REAL new prog, which through Queensryche eventually led to Dream Theater and prog metal as we know it.