The longevity of prog (and rock) music

Stool Man wrote: For an approximate idea of how today's (or yesterday's) music will be regarded in 100 years time, just consider how we currently regard the music of 100 years ago.

Here's the wiki page for music in 1914:

To make things worse i bet that list only hold a fraction of what was published those years.

Prog 74 wrote: Sadly one does not need to be able read, write or play music anymore in order to make it.  As long as you have a microphone, some vulgar lyrics and a turntable you're all set!

And then for some reason once you make it big and become a start you need 5 people to make your three-minute songs that are even simpler than the ones you made with your mic and turntable 

cstack3 wrote: ...I tend to think that Prog will likely hold up better than Justin Bieber... Sorry, just my typical JB slam!

Maybe if Chris Squire and Keith Emerson threw eggs at people's windows ..they would be remembered in a hundred years.

Atavachron wrote: The Dark Elf wrote: Atavachron wrote: The Dark Elf wrote: In 100 years I doubt very much there will be music as we know it, and that would include classical, prog, rock, bluegrass, etc. Those musical genres of antiquity will be relegated to the few schools of higher learning left that include such studies as art, literature or music (literary works will be written in a variant of Internet shorthand and phonetics, with brightly colored pictures). I doubt it. Why doubt it? One thing you should never do is underestimate human greed...or our amazing capacity for stupidity. The arts, already underfunded in many curricula, will eventually be defunded in schools as an unnecessary expense. Rap has all but eliminated blues, jazz and R&B in the black culture, and that trend is spreading. A century from now? No one will be able to write a grammatically correct sentence, let alone attempt a Vivaldi concerto.     Except I have no doubt a century ago people thought the same thing.   But I'm guessing your response would likely be "And they were right!!"   So I can see this exchange going in circles.   And BTW when has attempting to write a Vivaldi concerto been a benchmark of human culture?; Vivaldi was a benchmark, Vivaldi was a genius.   But there have always been and will always be far more people attempting his accomplishments and falling short.   Therefore what?   Not everyone can be a Vivaldi, sometimes not even a Mozart can be a Vivaldi.

There are a lot of good thoughts in this thread.the music will be available because of the digital age.
The question will be will people still find it appealing many many years to come?
I would argue that now most of the younger generation isn't interested in prog.But that doesn't mean it will die off.I see a lot of sub genres being picked up and played by young bands.I still see rock bands,blues,Blues rock,metal,still continuing on.So hip hop didn't kill as much of the past music forms off as much as rock did in the sixties.
I see high school kids wearing Hendrix,Zep ,and Beatles t shirts so some music is still having an impact way past it's inception.Now you never know if a new type of music comes along and renders everything else passé like rock did for popular music for the youth in the sixties and 70s.As far as prog goes I think for the foreseeable future it will still survive .The quality of the music will appeal to many more coming of age .Granted it may be a smaller nitch.

Atavachron wrote: ^ Bollocks. They had the same grasp of whatever "technologies" were a part of their lives. This attitude reflects the absurd notion that humans who lived in the past or during deprived times somehow didn't have the same intellectual or creative potential that people who came later had.   It is utter nonsense and indicates a lack of historical understanding.

Kati wrote: The Dark Elf wrote: Atavachron wrote: ^ Bollocks.They had the same grasp of whatever "technologies" were a part of their lives.This attitude reflects the absurd notion that humans who lived in the past or during deprived times somehow didn't have the same intellectual or creative potential that people who came later had.   It is utter nonsense and indicates a lack of historical understanding. Double bollocks back at ya, bud. Where exactly did  I say "<span style="line-height: 1.2;">that humans who lived in the past or during deprived times somehow didn't have the same intellectual or creative potential that people who came later had"? </span><span style="line-height: 1.2;">Don't tell me I lack historical understanding -- your perspective is entirely skewed, and you have an annoying habit of making things up as you go along (wonderful if you are a fantasist, but not so much while attempting sentient dialogue). Like your dim diatribe regarding Vivaldi.</span> <span style="line-height: 1.2;"></span> <span style="line-height: 1.2;">Most of the world's population 100 years ago did not have automobiles, owned horses as a means of conveyance and lived a rural agricultural lifestyle -- without radio, television, and in many instances electricity -- like generation upon generation before them. Hell, serfdom in Russia was officially abolished in 1861, but did not end in some provinces until 1892. </span><span style="line-height: 1.2;">It had nothing to do with people's intellectual capacity, but their circumstances and their means of economic survival.</span> <span style="line-height: 1.2;"></span> <span style="line-height: 1.2;">It is inane to think that people pre-WWI had the same outlook, technologically speaking, as anyone living today, because the necessity for such technology was unnecessary for the time. The pace of life has accelerated in lock step with the pace of technological advancement. I remember my grandmother crying as we watched the lunar landing on TV in 1969. She was amazed, and started to recall taking a horse cart with her father to market in downtown Detroit. It really affected her in a bewildering way that I, who grew up watching the space race on TV, could not then comprehend.</span> I have to disagree with you both, i.e. it has been proven/well known that people who lived East Germany conformed to their life's, everyday same thing thus no ambition whatsoever however West Germany were focused in progress each individual trying to exceed the other (as stressful as it might seem) they had a goal/purpose. When both sites united one was way more advanced compared to the other. I truly believe that the brain needs to be challenged and conquer to become more creative.

Anyway this is so obvious also in terms of Darwin's natural selection, if your life is consistent and easy there's no need to change/evolve. In the West is very much Darwinism too, it's the survival of the fittest, those who can succeed above others in a certain sense, all being a stressful competition.

Very good points by The Dark Elf.  I think we greatly underestimate the effect of technology on our lives, the ways in which it has transformed the world. In my opinion, without technology, pop/rock music could have never supplanted classical music in popular culture.  Not only recorded music but the means to transport record units quicker than before, whether by road or air, the swift dissemination of information through mass media, especially television, all played an important part in allowing pop/rock to overthrow conventional ideas about musical hierarchy and capture the imagination of listeners in numbers that classical no longer could.  And the lesson to be learnt from jazz's subsequent 'relegation' to a form of serious music with relatively fewer, if more 'elite', followers is also that the pop music business by its nature favours some measure of dumbing down.  It just has to be concise and 'with it' to give record labels the best chance of securing a hit.  There is no point in bringing bands like Magma into the argument here.  They may be non classical for the purposes of categorisation but they are way too complicated to satisfy the need to be entertained of most rock/pop listeners. Note that there is still great jazz music, for instance, for those who want to look for it. But it's no longer something the media would decorate as an 'event, as something people in general need to know about.  That is a crucial difference between pre-20th century or the first half of the 20th century and the subsequent period.     

Edited by rogerthat - March 20 2014 at 23:26

Sorry, I should have been clearer.  I meant that it is more organised in the commercial sense.  For the first time, you had whole corporations, some with interests (again, used in the financial sense of the term) in film/television, employing an army of executives to decide which albums would be made, which artists would get a chance to record.  The activity of promoting an album or selling it say in record stores or online also became highly professional.  Substitute all music or music related terms here with a word like cars or cosmetics and the above sentences would probably still make sense.  And that is what I am getting at.  Even if the music business in some sort of sense may have been centuries old, it was the quantum leap in technology in the 20th century that allowed music to be sold worldwide as a PRODUCT that fulfilled a NEED.  And that has a very significant impact on the kind of music that gets pushed to the forefront of culture.  The industry will make every effort to get you to listen to what THEY want you to listen to.  Because they are just like any competitive organisation being run for money.  We are still reluctant to acknowledge this even as the music business marks a decade of a steep decline in album sales (i.e. lurching perhaps towards it demise at least in its present form) because we do not like to believe our tastes could be manipulated by invisible corporations.  But it is undeniable, just as in any other walk of life today.  We have corporations competing to fulfill our needs and purporting to offer readymade products to satisfy those.  It takes a conscious assertion of our ability to make our own choices to step back from the marketplace and decide that we will only pay for albums we want to listen to and not necessarily the ones the industry wants us to listen to.  But they obviously bank on the fact that such people are bound to be in a minority and there will be enough listeners who are casual enough to be content with what is advertised in the billboards and on the TV channels as 'good music'.

Edited by rogerthat - March 21 2014 at 00:08