Gary Green and Malcom Mortimore, try expl prog

are their anyone who find this interesting 

yeah that stunned me also, that they remember all the things and the academy music has to write it down and play it on sheets, i would live to be a fly on the wall when the academic music students discussing the rock music of Gentle Giant

Edited by DamoXt7942 - April 21 2012 at 18:43

I watched the clip late yesterday and didn't have time to respond, but thanks for putting this up.  I think the sentiments of the musicians aren't a real surprise - and I think they echo what a lot of people here already know and understand, that "prog" is just a term of convenience (or its evil twin, laziness) rather than an actual thing, but that this term is nonetheless useful and practical for people like us.

The real treat was seeing Gary and Malcolm.  I like Gentle Giant and have their albums, but I'd never really seen what any of them look like before, outside of album jacket photos.  Eventually I'll probably check out a DVD - I'm sure they're a lot of fun to watch.


Edited by HolyMoly - April 20 2012 at 07:47

aginor wrote: ...  i would live to be a fly on the wall when the academic music students discussing the rock music of Gentle Giant

Gerinski wrote: HolyMoly wrote: The real treat was seeing Gary and Malcolm.  I like Gentle Giant and have their albums, but I'd never really seen what any of them look like before, outside of album jacket photos.  Eventually I'll probably check out a DVD - I'm sure they're a lot of fun to watch.   Ohhh, sure you have to, Giant On The Box and GG at the GG are really great, I recently found that GG at the GG is in full on YouTube so you have no excuse

I want to shake your hand.  Thanks for the tip!!

I still think Egg explains prog best

Snow Dog wrote: At the end of the day Gentle Giant are/were a Prog band. Whatever they say.

 

It's a natural impulse to classify things.  It creates boundaries of discussion that make meaningful discourse possible.  Would this place be more interesting if it were just called GoodMusicArchives?  As I said above, we KNOW that the term "Prog" is a fan-made construct.  What else could it be?  But that doesn't make it bad.  It's a useful term in that most of us have a general consensus as to what it means, and it allows discussion to ensue around a vague set of boundaries.  Or, as often happens, discussion of the boundaries themselves.

I have never met a musician who likes being labeled.  If I spent months making an album, and then someone wrote a review saying it sounds like King Crimson, one of my first responses would probably be, "But I'm me, I'm not King Crimson!  Don't you have anything to say about ME?"  So it's a natural impulse for artists to be ambivalent about their music being cordoned off into labels and categories. 

It would probably be more formally "accurate" for each band/artist to be judged and discussed entirely on its own merits, with no simplistic labels and genre categories to undermine the artists' individuality.  But our minds don't work like that!  As we gain experience listening to stuff, our minds naturally search for analogs, past experiences which resemble what we're experiencing now... thus allowing us to file these experiences away in more orderly "mental files" rather than a bunch of loose paper scattered on the floor of our minds.   As our level of experience grows, so grows the filing cabinet, as well as the specificity level of the mental files therein.  This is why, for example, PA has dozens of different types of progressive rock, while the average man of the street has only one or two.

So in conclusion, let the discussers have fun with their names and categories, and we'll all agree to understand the artists' protests to the contrary, finally arriving at the compromise to acknowledge that the labels are terms of convenience, but not "just" terms of convenience - they have real value in the understanding and discussion of music, and increase in sophistication the more music we listen to.