Rolling Stone's"Best Prog-Rock Albums of All Time"

^^^ Aw, come on, we've gone round and round about this by now!

I agree that a top 10 simply cannot accommodate everyone's likes even if it is just restricted to one album per band.  I am just saying the logic they offered to not include all DT albums that got voted into the top 10 sequentially sounds contradictory when they included multiple albums of other bands.  But maybe we should just trust RS to mess up one way or the other.  The readers did their job by voting in a good, if popular, selection of prog but RS decided to leave the mark of zorro over it.

^I still wouldn't qualify them as intellectual. Those you mention are of course pure muscle. Maybe DT lies somewhere in between. But what makes DT music what you call complex is technical skills, and those technical skills are in large part associated with dexterity and ability with your hands/fingers/feet/etc, obviously controlled by your brain. So I would still say that, more than intellectual, way more, they are muscular, though not shallow. 

Originally posted by dtguitarfan Originally posted by The T I like DT a lot (I used to be a fanboy even) but intellectual? Really? Muscular, sometimes I would rather say.  I think they do more than just flex muscles.  Dragonforce and Yngwie Malmsteen are artists that I would give as examples of muscle flexers.  Dream Theater does flex their muscles, indeed, but they do it in an intellectual way - they throw in complicated time signatures, sometimes different members of the band are playing in different time signatures than the other members, they use unusual chord progressions, difficult techniques, and they even invent new instruments.

What you mean is that DT are more sophisticated than Dragonforce and Malmsteen but muscle is still the standout quality in their quality.  Very fast and breathless passages over odd time is muscular, right?   I don't think muscular necessarily means "all brawn and no brain" and it is certainly very rarely the case in actually physical sports or martial arts. 

I call that music intellectual which is organised mainly to explore new musical concepts.   That way, I could not call much rock related music intellectual - and there's no reason why music HAS to be intellectual, so I don't see that as a negative quality - and DT is no exception.  DT is at the technical, complex end of the spectrum in rock music, just like many other prog rock bands and artists.   DT compositions are written around and in order to express specific lyrical themes and hand-in-hand build in passages to showcase the technical prowess of their musicians.   You may or may not agree with such a categorization of intellectual music but it's also the way Greig has framed it and Theo seems to have as well, so we are all just stating the general perception of the word intellectual w.r.t music. 


Edited by rogerthat - August 04 2012 at 23:22

Originally posted by IMPF Those are all harmless, predictable and inoffensive choices all of them. I don't see why anyone would be too disappointed with this list. I mean it's Rolling Stone magazine for f**k's sake, what were you expecting them to put? Some obscure Brazilian neo-prog group that has like only 3 ratings overall on this site?

Originally posted by TheLionOfPrague Does anybody have the "Best prog bands" poll they mention in the article?

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/pictures/readers-poll-the-best-prog-rock-bands-of-all-time-20110720

The inevitable question is: Why are there so many Rush fans?

^ You obviously haven't heard ABBA

Originally posted by Horizons Originally posted by Guldbamsen ^ You obviously haven't heard ABBA I'm afraid i have.

So the rumors that Rush fans are prone to ABBA worship are indeed false?

Dream Theater was basically just a gateway band for me. I tolerated some really drippy sweet yuck on their albums for a few nice tidbits. Now that I have heard so many other bands that do what they do so much more interestingly, I scarcely put any of their albums on.

As far as the Rolling Stone list goes, fairly close to what my list would have been 20 years ago.

Personally, i would have preferred a list something more like:


Amon Duul II - Tanz der Lemminge
Area - Caution Radiation Area
Art Zoyd - Generation sans Futur
Can - Tago Mago
Clivage - Mixtus Orbis
Comus - First Utterance
Davis, Miles - Get Up With It
Hancock, Herbie - Crossings
Magma - Kobaia
Univers Zero -  1313
Wakhevitch, Igor - Docteur Faust

But that's just me (oops, went over ten)




Edited by Logan - August 05 2012 at 21:25

Originally posted by HarbouringTheSoul Originally posted by TheLionOfPrague Does anybody have the "Best prog bands" poll they mention in the article? http://www.rollingstone.com/music/pictures/readers-poll-the-best-prog-rock-bands-of-all-time-20110720

Edited by Dayvenkirq - August 06 2012 at 01:06