Prog Rock: A Noble, But Failed, Experiment

Lol

...outlandish costumes (capes, fox heads)...

Edited by cstack3 - June 15 2017 at 22:26

Yep, because there wasn't an artsy phenomenon going on all over the WORLD.. From Brazil to Italy, everyone was challenging each-other to create the next piece of modern art. Many fell between the cracks, many challenged politics and idealism, only years later to be appreciated.. 

It seems mainstream media wants to try destroy anything of creative value and replace it with mind numbing frivolous nonesense. I think that's what they want to achieve through articles like this. If it was lady gaga or Katy perry they'd be singing their praises.
Maybe they're scared of people having imagination and taking over the world.. haha.

Another non-prog band is Kiss with the painted faces and ZZ top with the extra long beards,.  Not quite costume I know, but still an effect on stage....

Edited by noni - June 16 2017 at 00:48

I seem to have read loads of articles like this over the years (and all after the fact of course.) What's crucial to any form of revisionism is new evidence and as we have come to expect, the author can provide precisely zero. Instead, we get a rather myopic scatter-gunning of 5th hand ideas that have long been dismissed as spurious even by Prog's most virulent critics. The mythical creatures, faeries, sci-fi, fantasy literature, dungeons and dragons stick routinely used on Progressive Rock simply simply doesn't fit the trumped up charges. The panto theatrics of say, Bowie's Glass Spider Tour or Madonna wannabe Lady Gaga are celebrated as camp, kitschy, sexy and irreverent fun while Pink Floyd and ELP are considered worthy of community service for unleashing an inflatable pig and armed armadillo to cause both impotence and vitiglio in their overwhelmingly male fan-bases. It's pretty easy to make any period of popular musical style appear ridiculous in hindsight but I suspect that yer typical 'keep it real for the kids ya dig bro' music journo holds Prog in particular contempt for what he sees as an attempt to turn inclusive entertainment into esoteric 'high art'. For the sake of clarity, I don't think Prog is 'high art' but certainly consider it a higher form of musical entertainment than many others. To be fair to Kyle Smith, I do give him credit for defending 'pretentiousness' as an inevitable result of ambition thwarted by ability but pivotal to the advancement of culture.


Edited by ExittheLemming - June 16 2017 at 02:03

This idiot is called "Kyle Smith" a more bland name I cannot imagine (but it suits him) , lazy journalism , just re-hashing all the hackneyed cliches he could find about a genre that he clearly knows little about! I can imagine that he would be a fan of whatever is currently hip (to get him laid, as he seems to think that prog rockers are all virgins!!) - with no real liking for any of the commercially pushed guff he lies about liking.

Sigh.... so let's just listen to Mustang Sally over and over again for the rest of our lives. 

Edited by Kepler62 - June 16 2017 at 06:56

Meltdowner wrote: Generating hatred to get views... I'll not click that link.

So you've read the article but not clicked the link?

With popular music you either get something to see and that's fine. or something to hear. That's fine too. With prog rock you get both. Too much.