Sweet Prog-related?

Recently i have gone back to listen to some old vinyls had forgotten about , and i came apon Sweet's "Give us a wink" album and i was truly surprised at the level of prog elements in some of their songs such as "Healer", "Yesterday's rain",4th of July" Not to mention one of  their  best known hit (beside "Ballroom blitz" which is not prog at all)" Love is like oxygen"  which are both on different albums. If The Who are Prog-related in PA, i think Sweet could also get a nod, don't you think? 

 ^ well said

I think the albums, whilst I felt they were patchy, showed that they tended to really dislike the glam-pop material they did on the singles as hardly any of them appeared on the albums, save a few exceptions like 'The Six Teens' and 'Love Is Like Oxygen' and that grab-bag first one they put out for RCA which had those songs like 'Co Co' on it. That cover they did of 'Man With The Golden Arm' and a track called 'Medusa' are the most progressive sounding tracks on the albums I heard but there's no way their inclusion could ever be justified IMHO!

If think Sweet lays in the same category of thousands of 70's artists that sometimes did some technically demanding songs, some complex compositions and some unusual musical arrangements. But it was a reflex of the age and that is why rock was so good in the seventies. Apart from prog rock, hard rock, heavy metal, country-rock, glam rock, soft rock, folk rock and all the other genres of rock had their shining jewels in the seventies.

Ah, c'mon Ivan. There are as many good bands today as there was in the 70s. Give it 20-30 years & I'm sure some music fanatics will start their current day equivalent of PA and have no problem finding 1500 plus bands to fit their ever-expandable chosen genre with a never ending explosion of subsequent sub-genres.
The only difference will be that 70s bands were reliant on record labels, where today the artist has more freedom to get his music directly to the people. True , the million selling albums will be much rarer, but remember that the only "home entertainment" that competed with music in those "Happy Days" was the TV. Atari & Intellivision came out in the early 80s. VHS & Beta came mid 80s. From then on the consumer's dollar was starting to get split, but the booming economy made all expand in a big way.
The 80s, then the 90s with their respective massive trends (new wave, metal's comeback, pop/dance, hair metal, MTV, Grunge, Punk, pop Punk, Boy Bands etc...) provided record companies with a massive & steady stream of hot new fads that fed record sales as if they were steroids. Then Napster happened, the music fan saw a way to give the finger to the record companies that were pushing $20 hit albums comprised of one big single that you liked & 60 minutes of crap or filler. The major labels stuck their heads up their asses, refusing to even contemplate any change to what had been a gold mine of a business model. And the irony is that Napster offered them all licensing options. But no, they knew better (as said the dinosaur as he saw the comet streaking through the sky And here we are almost a decade after the implosion, and the P2P scene is still blamed for the precipitous fall of CD sales. Yet, no one of those music industry money hogs will ever mention, not to say acknowledge that the consumer's entertainment dollar has many available options open to it - Video games, Computer & Internet, Ipods, Cable and pay per view TV. Heck how come DVDs still sell well ? Because they've done everything they could to make the product of interest to its' potential buyers - extras, bonus materials, alternative cuts, outtakes, and most of all, they didn't wait 10 years to sell them at reasonable prices.
So look around at the many prog bands that have come out in these past 10 years & wonder how many you & I have yet to hear about, then figure if in 2020 we'll be back at PA debating as to whether prog is in as good shape as it was in the 00s.
Example - how many then obscure RPI, Prog Andaluz, Krautrock, RIO, Prog Folk bands are here ? I used to read quite a bit of music media back in the 70s. And a lot of the groups found here were not exactly filling up music mags. Just as many of today's acts pass under the radar of even the most diverse music fan.

P.S. this is in noway meant to support, condone or defend illegal downloads; merely to offer my insight as to why things happened as they did.
P.P.S. And while may of the groups today don't interest me, they may later. Who Knows. ALthough I could do without the "Post-XXXX" appellation that seems to try to indicate that the music more serious than what came before ...????

...Ha like that about Deep Purple VS Uriah Heep, would have been fun living in those years, really fun and exciting to go to concerts of my fave bands.



Edited by cacho - April 30 2008 at 20:26