Wish You Were Here has overtaken Thick As A Brick

Pink Floyd was over for me as a preference, right after the shows of DSOTM, and 1975 when I was already involved in a small way with Space Pirate Radio and the incredible inclusion of new music from Europe and everywhere else ... that (sometimes I think) that Progressive Music fans, do not appreciate as much!

I still saw them, and enjoyed the music, but the thrill and excitement of the music was surpassed by hundreds of miles by many other bands from Europe ... and those lists do not consider, or reflect that reality. After you choose something from YES or PF, you come back and choose another, because your listening is not as good for too many other bands in Europe ... you take one band you heard it (probably) 50 times less than PF ... thus your preferences can not improve and find/understand other musics and cultures.

I didn't dislike WYWH at all ... I was just disappointed because the 3 best songs that PF was playing during the DSOTM shows were not released ... WYWH was, which in many ways, not only copied the idea and format of DSOTM, and my take still is, that the record company wanted something that was closer to DSOTM ... because the other 3 songs weren't. One was a super space rocker that became washed out in Clorox, and the other 2 were fine, though I could accept Pigs got better, even though it almost followed the Money song design in its album version and was different in the original bootlegs. These bootlegs have been released now, but they have been placed in the wrong album, and it makes them sound wrong and the audience that likes WYWH is not going to enjoy something in that album that is so much in the original spirit of "Interstellar Overdrive" and "Astronomy Domine" ... and that "clash" of material, ends up stating that the other material was not as good, and thus, later, ANIMALS is half the album that WYWH became ... 

richardh wrote: ... I'm a massive ELP fan but really their albums can be hit or miss and many quite understandably will not rate their albums very highly.  ...

I kinda started in some of this because ELP was doing some classical music, and in fact the first album of theirs I got was PICTURES AT AN EXHIBITION, something that most Progressive Music fans, here ... it seems ... do not appreciate much ... and while it is not a poerfect rendition of the work, it is VERY GOOD, and much better than a myriad of classical versions by famed conductors.

My take, AT THE TIME, was that this was far out classical music done by the kids of our generation, you know the kids that will NEVER EVER get any recognition in any school and be appreciated for their work. And my appreciation and comments on it, have proven true to the umpteenth degree. When you hear Rachel Flowers do TARKUS and other pieces by Keith/ELP, you know right away that is one of the greatest pieces of piano music ever composed in the 20th century ... but that comment will not go anywhere, because folks here don't even know what a piano concerto is ... all they know is a song and a solo! f**k the symphony and the concerto! And any "admins" not understanding that, shows they have little appreciation for music, and that is what is hurting "progressive music" today ... no one knows music, except a song!

I'm not exactly angry ... just disappointed that folks "in charge" have no conceptual understanding of what they are doing, because if they did, they would not waste their time commenting on top of the pop songs, and not helping elevate the music ... it feels like Dean ... who stated to me ... that it's all pop music, anyway ... and we're going to keep it that way, to kill it. So, in the end, there was nothing different about "progressive" that made it stand out!

I can't help thinking that we've gone insane! 

NOT INSANE ... as the Firesign Theater would say! AND, of course, everything you know is WONG!

ok interesting thoughts especially about PAAE .That was the first album I purchased with my own pocket money as a 13 year old and I really hated it! (no songs!!) I would comment more but I need to go to work..

See? That's exactly what I mean ... you were already "conditioned" to "songs" ... and had no idea at the time that music was something else altogether.

And this is all I'm fighting, as we get older ... we still walk around like we don't know what "music" is ... and are starting to think/say that one song music makes ... and it doesn't. It takes a lot more and some value to the work at hand ... otherwise every goon that puts two notes on a DAW will be a composer and called progressive simply because the melody is not up front! Dumb stuff like that!

From a compositional standard, "songs" are not very good music, for the most part. I would like to help that get a better support, but can't if they remain "songs". When they become "compositions" as is the case of CTTE, and so many other albums/pieces of music, then things change some ... now you have a serious piece of music, not just a piece of fluff.

And, maybe, just maybe, that is the problem ... no band takes their creation of "songs" as serious music ... it's just a song! But I can tell you that some of those things listed on that top ten of ours were NOT considered "songs" in those days ... they were treated as a lot more ... that we are now trying hard to hide it lest it be shown that not only do we NOT know music, but that we actually don't care.

For PROGRESSIVE MUSIC to be remembered and take a massive step in MUSIC HISTORY, we have to define it and show it to be much more serious than just a song, on a top ten list ... and I am not sure that most of us here care to even give a try, about that ... our respect for the arts, per se, has disappeared and died, and we're making sure to keep it dead ... such a commercial attitude in favor of its own thing ... that we refuse to see and understand.

If you had seen FM radio be sold to the conglomerates from the mid 70's on, and how it hurt PROGRESSIVE music and all the stuff coming out of Europe to the point where people even say that "Progressive Music" died in the 80's ... you would have understood this a lot better ... my dislike for the conglomerate that tells you what to play and like goes way back to many Sci-Fi writers ... not just a song or two. I'm not a great fan of the Overlords of Society, even if they are just some Admins in PA ... doesn't mean they are "wrong" or "right", but that's not something that we will be capable of seeing today or tomorrow ... but the results will be clear in a few years. DEAD! (All of us, actually, not just the music!)

Well I don't what it's like in the USA but in the UK prog is as good as dead in terms of where it sits in the general consciousness. I remember lending a prog collection (of songs OMG) to a chap at work about 20 years ago who didn't even believe there was such a thing. His argument was that when you went into a record shop you didn't see a section on prog rock then it wasn't a thing.

My take on the whole thing is that there was only a short space of time in history when the stars lined up an everything was in place for free artistic expression. As we readily know the record companies don't want this. The music industry doesn't want this. The corporate idiots don't want it. It was nearly dead even on the early seventies launch pad and it didn't take long to crush it.

For myself I got beyond the need to listen to just songs but I still believe a song can be a beautiful creative thing. I am puzzled a little by your attitude towards songs. I mean I know you love Kate Bush like me and she is almost exclusively about songs. What am I missing?