Do you like most prog rock?

Hang on, it doesn't work like that. Prog is complicated music and requires a different approach from what you appear to be doing.

If you're more into jazz, you might have to slightly adjust your expectations. The path is different.

If, as you say, you pick up a prog album and listen to snippets of it here and there and then dismiss it as not being your thing, you're not going to find much. I realise that this works well in jazz, but not here. I might be wrong, but are you perhaps listening to prog in the hope of finding something that gels more with your jazz listening ears? That wouldn't appear to be very fair to a whole genre. You'll find some, but you’ll miss out on the majority. That's what seems to be happening here.

Prog has this strange habit of sneaking up on you, even if you don't like a recording at first. It warrants intentional repeated hearing until it grabs you and doesn't let you go; you have to sit down and concentrate several times in a row. I guarantee that in that way you won't dismiss forty-nine albums out of fifty, but perhaps four or five.

It's easy to listen to jazz recordings your way, because, to be honest, you can listen to a boatload of them and it doesn't matter which album or artists you're hearing in some particular jazz subgenre, they sound mostly interchangeable anyway (sorry, but that's how I feel). Either you like that particular style of jazz, or you don't. It's probably not the actual composition you're listening to, but the style. Pure jazz doesn’t offer compositions the way they’re understood in prog, but mainly (sigh) improvisation. In prog it’s nigh on impossible to record a ten album session in a week like Miles Davis (the master of the carefully placed poot that actually does sound like a high-pitched fart) etc. God bless them all, though.

Prog is different. In the majority of cases the music is carefully and painstakingly constructed in unusual ways, and because in many cases you have these complicated and unfamiliar structures, arrangements, and instrumentation which require familiarity through repeated listening to become acquainted with them. They require conscious effort.

As a recommendation: look at the top 100 list on this site and grab a handful at random, and then just sit down and invest some time on each one. You might very well find that what you disliked at first listen opens up unexpected and pleasurable experiences. That’s how prog works.

Edited by npjnpj - December 11 2016 at 06:16

This is a tangent, but I have always wondered why Kind of Blue is listed in the top 100.  I can't imagine that anyone outside of prog rock fans would consider this album as even remotely related to prog in the slightest.   I can see a case for something like Bitches Brew, but Kind of Blue?  And if Kind of Blue is jazz/rock fusion (silly, imo), wouldn't that open the door to albums like A Love Supreme and many others?  I see that Milestones is also listed in the archives.  Man, if that stuff is considered prog rock, then Genesis can probably be called bebop.   


Edited by Rick5A - December 11 2016 at 08:32

I absolutely do not love all prog---I ---like Rick--- think a lot of it is horrible---especially the AOR type or the extreme metal type---I'd rather be listening to jazz than this stuff. But when it is good---it is powerful music. And nothing like it---and like jazz it really depends on the talent of the musicians in the band. So for me there is great and horrible and some in the middle worth hearing. I honestly don't know where people find the time in a day to listen to all this content---so many bands---you'd have to listen to music from morning to night to hear it all 

definitely not- there is a lot of prog I dislike, just like there is a lot of non-prog that I like

Rick5A wrote: This is a tangent, but I have always wondered why Kind of Blue is listed in the top 100.  I can't imagine that anyone outside of prog rock fans would consider this album as even remotely related to prog in the slightest.   I can see a case for something like Bitches Brew, but Kind of Blue?  And if Kind of Blue is jazz/rock fusion (silly, imo), wouldn't that open the door to albums like A Love Supreme and many others?  I see that Milestones is also listed in the archives.  Man, if that stuff is considered prog rock, then Genesis can probably be called bebop.

I must admit that I agree on your point about prog singers. I don't think that outside this particular genre you hear such a large bunch of mediocre voices in one place. I have no idea who tells all these people that it's ok for them to sing.

Personally I don't have much beef with distinctive singers such as Peter Gabriel, Peter Hammill or Ian Anderson, for instance, whose range and/or technique is limited but utilized very effectively, but the pond is full of pathetic mumblers who'd be more than drowned out by a mild gust of wind, and the best they can do is hold a note.

If you're not able to get past these wispy vocals, then you'll have a problem with prog. On the other hand, it would be interesting to know whose vocals you appreciate.

For me it's a matter of concentrating on the music.

Edited by npjnpj - December 11 2016 at 12:11

Then, off the top of my hand, I would suggest listening to Magenta. Beautiful female vocals and music (beautiful music, not female music) 



Edited by npjnpj - December 11 2016 at 13:04

I like most (but not all) prog rock, and some non-prog. In the past, I have often fallen into the fallacy of denying prog status to things I don't like, but since then I have noticed how wrong that was. There is quite some prog and prog-related music I don't like much. I never could wrap my mind around Steven Wilson, and there is quite some rather bland prog metal on the market. All this is prog, but I don't like it.

Magnum Vaeltaja wrote: Rick5A wrote: This is a tangent, but I have always wondered why Kind of Blue is listed in the top 100.  I can't imagine that anyone outside of prog rock fans would consider this album as even remotely related to prog in the slightest.   I can see a case for something like Bitches Brew, but Kind of Blue?  And if Kind of Blue is jazz/rock fusion (silly, imo), wouldn't that open the door to albums like A Love Supreme and many others?  I see that Milestones is also listed in the archives.  Man, if that stuff is considered prog rock, then Genesis can probably be called bebop.    Yeah, this is a frequent question we get. The short of it is: if an artist gets added to the site, their whole discography gets added to the site, and all of these releases are filed under the same subgenre. In the case of Miles Davis, I'm 97% sure that he got included almost exclusively for Bitches Brew. As per the artist addition policy of the site, though, this got his entire discography filed under jazz rock/fusion. Hence, Kind of Blue got added under jazz rock/fusion, too. And, of course, because it's a popular, historically significant, and very well-done album, it's gained a lot of praise on the site from all of us prog fans who care for a bit of jazz on the side. Hence, Kind of Blue, a completely non-prog album in just about every respect, has its place in our top 100. I don't see much of a problem with it, though, because our top 100 list isn't so much a list of the "100 best prog albums", as much as it's a list of "prog fans' favourite albums".

I really don't like that complete discography policy. Miles Davis has a lot of JRF worthy albums, and I do wish that Kind of Blue was not in the top 100, though that's a fair way to look at it. Anyway, his studio albums: In A Silent Way (1969), Bitches Brew (1970), A Tribute To Jack Johnson (1971), On The Corner (1972), Big Fun (1974), Get Up With It (1974), plus his live albums Dark Magus (1974), Pangaea and Agharta (1975) as well as various outtakes I think cement his extreme value to the category. Although Bitches Brew is a historically very significant album and was important to the add, I don't think he was added almost exclusively for that.

Kind of Blue is a very good modal jazz album, and has general appeal, but I don't know many people who are big on the Jazz-Rock Fusion category who consider that to be their favourite album of his. My faves are Big Fun and Get up With It, and of his pre-electric Miles albums I like Sketches of Spain the most

Incidentally, I suggested Donald Byrd for JRF not long after Davis was added who has a Bitches Brew inspired slice of great JRF called Electric Byrd, but due discography concerns, they did not want to add him.

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As for the initial question, I don't like most prog rock and actually consider myself to be more of a progressive music lover than a prog lover. Most of the music I really like under the prog umbrella falls outside what is most widely identified with the prog movement. For instance, I tend to prefer bands in RIO, Krautrock, Canterbury and Electronic Prog to those in Symph. There is music I like to be found in all of the categories, though. I'm not big on metal, although some bands that incorporate metal I like. I'm not a Neo-Prog fan and there is plenty of arena rock and AORish bands that I don't like. I tend to favour more experimental ones to the more mainstream ones, and am often attracted to one with a psych influence. Give me Comus over Marillion, Art Zoyd over Dream Theater, Tangerine Dream over Porcupine Tree, Magma over Magenta, Igor Wakhevitch over Yes, Robert Wyatt over Neal Morse etc. I also do tend to favour older music, though I enjoy plenty of new music in avant prog.

Frankly I like most music period.  And I don't mean something like "I like most of the music I listen to" which would be vacuous.  I mean "If you were to play cuts or albums for me from the entire pool of recorded music completely randomly, I'd like the vast majority of it."  The only caveat I'd make is that that's limited to "professional" music--basically people who did or who were seriously, persistently trying to make at least part of their living with music.  If we were to add in all of the stuff that's been recorded by amateurs/hobbyists, the percentage of stuff I like would go down significantly.

I do have genre preferences, but there are no genres/subgenres where I don't like at least some of the music that falls under that genre/subgenre, and there are some genres (like jazz for example) where there's close to nothing I dislike.

There's a smaller percentage of music that I love, music that I get really excited about, in all genres, but as prog is one of my favorite genres, it has a relatively high percentage of music that I love.

So, it's still the case for me that I have to listen to a lot of stuff to find what I consider gems, but I enjoy most of the stuff I hear while I'm looking for the gems.


Edited by Terrapin Station - December 12 2016 at 04:46