ForestFriend wrote:
I think it's also that prog's sort of the awkward middle child of music... it's too highbrow for the sex, drugs and rock and roll purist, and too lowbrow to fit in with nice, academic classical or jazz music. It's very easy to pick an extreme and attack it from either side.
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This is a perfect explanation. Most of the people criticizing prog are the "lower" levels of musicdom, the mainstream pop and rock fans, who don't listen enough to prog to understand it's not just about being weird and technical! I am 17 and I didn't know about prog enough at one point, thinking it was just a weirder version of classic rock, my first love, but I grew to love the genre after
many, repeated listens of a song - it was then that I finally "got" that prog is not trying to be as complex as possible, it's trying to be beautiful and immersing. Part of the problem of prog acceptance is not having pre-conceived notions of prog's weirdness (I had little knowledge of prog before I got into it, so I had an advantage), and the other major part of it is the lack of patience of mainstream pop/rock fans to listen to 10+ minute songs, plus the fact that it (usually) takes more than one, two, or three listens to get into a "non-catchy" prog song.