Why isn't prog as successful as metal as an indus

I've come to this late, but wanted to throw my penny into the well...

Metal is simply more popular with the young, and unlike say the early 80's has a degree of crebility nowadays across a wider crossection of people.

Metal, even among those who don't worship it, is less open to ridicule than prog. Prog is broadly regarded as elitist, twee, ridiculous and played by very old people who don't care about the listener, and are doubly clueless about younger listeners...and that's just among those who even know what prog rock is..

As far as popular music goes, metal is also a bit of an anomoly. It's timeless, appeals to multiple generations, is completely uncommercial and yet - in the case of many bands - enjoys healthy commercial success. Prog rock was of it's time, and is now reduced to an underground appreciation society among predominantly middle aged men.

I'm surprised anyone else is surprised that it is ignored. Why wouldn't it be?

@Kati and rogerthat:

I were obviously joking with those two posts, or at least thought my joking intent was obvious. I guess that kind of humour doesn't really travel that well on the internet, perhaps also depends on what kind of community I'm talking about. I should probably have made that clearer.

I'm just kind of annoyed at people here sl*g.ing off metal as a lesser artform than prog rock, when a lot of seemingly "lowbrow" black/death metal is at least as compositionally complex as much of the avantgarde/progressive music that gets praised here, and in some cases as profound or at least ambitious in lyrical themes despite its garish visual aesthetics. If you don't like the genre that's fine, nothing's for everyone after all, but a lot of the dismissal seems to be rooted in extremely specific and narrow definitions of art's purpose and role in society I see very few people I know subscribe to now because of how anachronistic they are within art history, not even within an academic context. There's probably also a generation gap or two I'm on the wrong side of and I might have forgotten that.

Keep in mind I'm from a country where even the more extreme metal subgenres command a significant amount of mainstream crossover popularity, and people who can't stand them still admit it takes quite a bit of instrumental skill to play that stuff or at least that there's often some pretty heady themes motivating the music. (if I didn't, I might actually have gotten more defensive than I did... the metal community here in Scandinavia doesn't have anywhere the same degree of subcultural patriotism as that in say Eastern Europe)

So quite a few of the sentiments aired in this thread just struck me as antiquated, or culturally elitist in a bad way.


Edited by Toaster Mantis - March 26 2015 at 15:22

Old-timers attitude to metal surprises me a little - we wrinklies invented the genre after all; those who followed Ironing Maiden et al in the late 70s are well into their middle-ages now and those who came to appreciate Metal in the 1990s are fast approaching their 5th decade on this planet. Sure those old metalheads can be very disparaging about Nu-Metal and other such modern creations, and probably not without reason given that they are not interested in that shouty rap style of vocal delivery regardless of what genre it is produced in. 

Toaster Mantis wrote: I don't think most music subcultures actually live up to their own proclaimed ideals that often, though, but that's another story.

A higher percentage of Sysops too for some reason as yet to be fathomed.

TODDLER wrote: It's possible that Ronnie James Dio read books on demonology or witchcraft and it's obvious that he was more creative dipping into the subject matter with his lyrics. Ritchie Blackmore may have similar interests, but the point is they were both doing something more creative and sincere..if anything. Eric Bloom from B.O.C. once said that in the beginning of their career, record executives gave them books on witchcraft and science fiction to study. Eric Bloom made it clear that the band received orders to study the books and write around the subjects. Ironically, in this particular case, the band produced some fine concept albums relating to the underworld and gaining a decent fan base in the end. This is an exceptional case because many Metal bands were just writing something dark to get attention and not exactly interested in the subjects they were singing about short of doing what they were told to do by the record companies. Obviously the difference between the popularity of Metal and Prog was based on the fascination people had with the occult and how they could apply an image to their own lives by dressing the part, (usually in black), and wearing occult rings and pentagrams around their neck. As a point of interest, this activity displayed the surface fringe kind of cheapness within the occult and was commercially designed to make money. On another note , several youths died in Satan cult killings and the press attributed their deaths to the lyricism of Metal. The deaths were serious and a problem when consulting Senator Gore's wife...however she placed the blame on the artist, but when the artists revealed that they would tow the line so they wouldn't lose their more than stable income, it was then revealed to her that the record companies had something to do with this. She forced them to use a restriction method with album stickers, but still blamed the artists for the material, when in fact the material was often contrived by the record executives. Point is...she would judge the Metal artists by putting them on the stand, while she sat rubbing shoulders with the record executives. I played for audiences like these...for many years and touring, observing their behavior from a distance and sometimes, unfortunately...up close. Many kids were completely lost. They were lost because they weren't personally interested in the underworld, but played up to be by dressing in this certain code, listening to Metal and flaunting the underworld. Some of the young victims and murderers from cults committed suicide when incarcerated. The reason being that they were connected to a Satan worshipper's sect and a real sect does not tolerate whistle blowers if it involves a full scale police investigation. They were depressed on the inside and would be tracked down and killed on the outside. This was all connected to the influence of Metal music. A real sect does not want to make contact with a young teenager that worships the devil. It's very debatable, but there are cases where it has occurred , such as the young offspring of the family sect listens to Metal, and forms he/she's own Satan cult , someone gets murdered in a sloppy way, crap hits the fan, a journalist gets involved and then only God knows what the real story is right? But seriously, this has occurred in history and the kids will take their own lives before revealing the sect. If the sect is investigated and rare evidence is revealed, instead of hours of interrogation and de-programming methods to obtain evidence from witnesses or victims,  , leading the police to the suspicion of a certain sect,  the evidence never holds water in court and the detective on a mission is almost always presented as a person with half bent theories or accused and characterized of being a person on a mission to make themselves famous and not truly worthy of bringing justice to the world.  Metal music , no doubt...inspired these events to a magnitude of global interest, but it's important to know that the same kid who destroyed himself after crowning himself with "Better By You, Better By Me" is the same kid who might put a gun to his head if he heard "Strawberry Fields Forever" because he/she is so delusional. This is how the Metal musicians defended themselves. This was part of their theory to prove that it's up to the individual as to how they will relate to a song. It's not the song written to be blamed, it's how you are written or made up as an individual that has to be blamed ..if that in fact is where it all stems from ..which would equal a person who has been deprived of music all of their life and still goes out and murders someone because they are psychotic. People who are wealthy and are members of a Satan worshippers sect find this entire series of tragic events to be laughable because their life is a secret and someone is making profit over revealing it. Most of the time they are not worried about justice when they make films for S.R.A. victims or runaway victims of the "Children Of God" for example. They sensationalize it so much ...that it seems to be farce and it has that air about it to the intelligent person who quickly doubts it's content on the journalistic aspect and the overall hyped up presentation of the subject alone. Cults do exist, Satan worshippers sects exist and I openly admit that I am a victim, but truly they are making Hollywood out of it.

Edited by twalsh - March 26 2015 at 14:03

I like metal alot too, but prog is harder for more people to get into into. Metal kind of appeals to more of the people who want to have fun where prog is more for people who like to think about things alot, then they kind of meet in the middle. I dont mean that metalheads are idiots at all though many of them are intelligent.

Now, as for the cultural difference between prog and metal? Here in Denmark, according to Jens Jam Rasmussen's 2010 book on the history of the Danish metal scene at least, there was a certain cultural distance and even mutual rivalry between the avantgarde/progressive rock movement back in the 1970s and the psychedelic hard rock scene which later turned into heavy metal.

The former scene as represented by groups like Blue Sun, Burning Red Ivanhoe, Secret Oyster were made up of classical/jazz-trained musicians who had usually attended art school, conservatory or university where they'd get into contact with much of the cultural and artistic avantgarde's cultural frame of reference. As a result, they had often made up elaborate philosophical background concepts and were very focused on expressing those in their music with a strong focus on instrumental interplay in a group setting.

On the contrast, the "concrete rock" scene as they called it here in Denmark before the heavy metal/hard rock label stuck, were made up of self-taught basement/garage jammers who just wrote about what they thought were fun... with their cultural frame of reference just as often being drawn from exploitation film, pulp genre fiction and other "low culture" art forms. Bands like Far Out, The Old Man and the Sea and Sensory System can be mentioned as examples. Likewise, their music was often focused more on guitar heroics than on instrumental interplay.

Those heavy metal musicians who did come from the former prog/psych background did in part jump ship because by the mid-1970s the progressive rock scene came to appear to them a cultural dead end or had exhausted its possibilites. Notice that two of Mercyful Fate's members, Michael Denner and Kim Ruzz, came from a prog hard rock group called Iron Space which I'm not sure ever recorded anything. Apparently they were inspired most by Atomic Rooster and Jethro Tull's harder songs, but a couple of their own songs were later reworked very heavily into MF songs. (can't remember exactly which ones) King Diamond's first band Black Rose, whose demo recordings have actually seen a re-release, were somewhat in the same vein just more to the Deep Purple/Uriah Heep direction. They had by then come to find the prog/psych movement's aspirations to high culture a creative straitjacket and its motivational ethos of New Age-y utopian idealism rather naïve... instead gravitating more to a Nietzschean heroic existentialism. (which most Satanism consists of at its philosophical core, just with added) However, especially Mercyful Fate did keep the things they kept: Elaborate instrumental interplay, ambitious songwriting often built around the adaptation of classically inspired narrative structure to rock instrumentation, fantastic subject matter with nonetheless a genuine philosophical substance as underlying concept... notice that they were the first serious occult metal group of note.

I think that later aspect is where some of the conflict comes from, the earliest heavy metal subculture around here came from people who weren't satisfied with mainstream society but did not really like the existing countercultural milieu either... often as a result of not coming from quite the same sociological demographics. Same thing with the glam rock movement that arose at the same, later turning into punk by way of The New York Dolls, The Sweet or for that matter David Bowie befriending Iggy Pop. The heavier end of that scene, like Slade and The Sweet, were after all both proto-punk and proto-metal.

The overall point is that by the time of the late 1970s when the New Wave of British Heavy Metal rolled around, the hard rock/heavy metal movement had built up its own culture with its own norms and ideals with its own aesthetic reflecting those. Same thing with punk, which had also built up its own subcultural infrastructure of independent record labels, underground concert venues etc. which the metal scene would soon follow suit with despite not taking the entire "do-it-yourself" work ethic to the same. This is nonetheless something that the punk subculture had created with the specific with not being as reliant on buying into the mainstream music industry's corporate structure as the progressive/psychedelic movement was, which ended up killing it once the big labels lost interest and pulled the plug. The Rock In Opposition movement, to its credit, also embraced that independent music ethos as they were an active move away from the mainstreaming of progressive music back to its avant-garde oppositional roots. Punk and metal were also moving in different directions away from both mainstream society and previous countercultures, and generally don't reflect quite the same ideals either though there's some overlap. (here in Denmark, and probably also Sweden, the death metal milieu is at the grassroots level made up of the exact same individuals as the more extreme punk subgenres - crust, grind, hardcore etc)

Does all of that make sense? The "too long didn't read" version is that since psychedelic/progressive rock as a cultural movement preceded both heavy metal and punk, much of those two subcultures' formation tried to get right what the psych/prog movement got wrong and correct the reasons that one didn't really work out in the end. They're also based upon different systems of ideals, even if they sometimes overlap, both on the level of how the aesthetics of the style is put together and the deeper philosophical/ideological aspect the stylistic conventions have evolved to express, that also appeal to somewhat different demographics.

I think it took several hours for me to type this. I'm getting flashbacks to writing my master's thesis last year...


Edited by Toaster Mantis - March 27 2015 at 06:34

Regarding the question of crimes related to Satanism and the occult, I found an interesting article about the subject a while ago but unfortunately I can't locate it right now. Anyone interested in it?

Toaster Mantis wrote: Regarding the question of crimes related to Satanism and the occult, I found an interesting article about the subject a while ago but unfortunately I can't locate it right now. Anyone interested in it?

No. Not with regard to music. You can find occult symbols anywhere if you look for them, and the few references to Satan worship in metal are nothing but guff. Just using darkness as entertainment.

Now, if you want to talk about the relationship between Satanism/occultism and the establishment, then I'm interested, but that's a different thread for a different forum I would say..