Is Prog Rock the New Folk?

Master of Time wrote:   You know I just wanna say, I was going to try and jump into this argument somewhere and give my two cents but you have been able to articulate every point I would have made (and points I have tried to make in the past) perfectly. It's a pleasure to read your opinions as I have not found anything you've written that I haven't agreed with wholeheartedly but you seem to be able to put things much more intelligently than I ever could.

That's very nice of you to say, thank you.

That's an interesting angle I'm also disappointed this thread didn't discuss more. The last 200 years' history of Western art and culture often appears to have been an ideological tug-of-war between romanticism/symbolism and modernism/realism. It really is a "history repeats" scenario if you for instance look at how the Impressionist and Art Nouveau movements foreshadowed the psychedelic aesthetic of the 1960s and 1970s.

I think that backlash against the "true art is realistic" mentality accounts more for metal's return to mainstream popularity than progressive rock's, though. At the very least that's the case here in Europe, since it seems to be by far a bigger and more active genre if you look at the amount of new groups active as well as the amount of concerts held and new records released. It also might be relevant that a lot of the biggest names in progressive rock right now either have one foot in the metal stylistically or connections to the metal scene. I wager that after the original generation of progressive rock fizzled out in the mid/late 1970s, the at the time burgeoning heavy metal movement became the refuge for technically involved and ambitious guitar music with fantastic themes. This is in a Danish context somewhat ironic, because a lot of Scandinavian prog/psych-rock musicians looked down upon the early hard rock earlier in the late 1960s/1970s. Even today the progressive metal scene seems kind of culturally segregated from the rest of the genre, and a lot of people in the metal underground are suspicious of overtly intellectual music.

I suspect this also has something to do with how beginning with the NWoBHM, there was this DIY subcultural infrastructure built up in terms of specialized fanzines, record labels and so on even if it wasn't as independent as punk's. Then there's the fact that we're right now facing the same kind of horrific socio-economic situation as the classic 1970s/1980s metal groups did.

Dean wrote: HackettFan wrote: Dean wrote: Where is the "manipulation" in the amount of salt in processed food? Processed foods are high in salt - I get that - salt is a preservative and flavour enhancer - but how is this manipulating us? I really don't follow this line of reasoning at all.  The increasingly high sodium content has amped up the general population's baseline taste for sodium.  But that isn't manipulation as that would imply deliberate intent and collusion on the part of the food producers. We buy processed foods for their convenience, they contain high levels of salt as a preservative and to stop them tasting bland - I don't see how this is manipulation. Our need for salt in food is not the result of conditioning and manipulation by the food producers, our palates may have adjusted to food with high-sodium content but that is a consequence of our high consumption of processed food, not a deliberate ploy by the manufacturers. They make food that appeals to our tastes, they do not manipulate our tastes to like their products. When making bread I use a fraction of the salt recommended in the recipes but if I leave it out completely it tastes bland, we like salt in our food and always have. I made ragu bianco last week and while I made it to perfection (even though I say so myself) using natural salt-free ingredients I deliberately didn't to add salt during the cooking as I was finishing the sauce with two spoonfuls of marscapone cheese (cheese is a processed food that normally has a high salt content, when using naturally salty ingredients like dairy and seafood I don't add extra salt). When we came to eat it, it lacked flavour and tasted bland so we had to salt the meal after it was served, later I realised that the marscapone I'd used was a low-salt, low-fat variety. Cooking food (or producing music) is a matter of balancing flavour and seasoning to appeal to our palate. Manipulation in music exists, this cannot be denied, but I question the perceived intent of that manipulation and the degree to which it occurs. As David has said, we have it backwards, the music is manipulated to our tastes, our tastes are not manipulated to like the music. This is most evident in Progressive Rock where the artist deliberately produces music to appeal to their audience and this happens on all levels not just by those artists who re-hash a winning formula in the hope of continued success (Rick Wakeman, Ian Anderson, Steve Hackett, Mike Oldfield, etc.). Pop (and Rock) producers have found winning formulae that appeal to the tastes of the masses and they exploit those tastes but it is the music that is being manipulated, not the tastes of the buying public. The homogenisation of music is a consequence of over-applying a formula (seasoning) to enhance the natural talent (ingredients) of the performer - I believe it is a fallacy to assume from that that Pop performers and artists lack natural talent just as it is a fallacy to assume that the audience can be manipulated into liking a talentless performer.

Intention is not necessary. Manipulation can occur entirely unintentionally from over zealousness or whatever. The dictionary definitions I have looked up require that the managing of influence be "skillful" but require nothing about it being intentional. Intention is a pragmatic inference that we may or may not make and may or may not be correct. Social manipulation is normally unintentional. Marketplace manipulation can be financially skillful yet so self-interested that the manipulation is not realized.

The issue with sodium came up on a past NPR (National Public Radio) coverage of a congressional hearing with food producers, I don't know when it was; sometime in the past year when I was driving to work. The claim that has been made that the amounts of sodium used in processed food are excessive, and that is changing our taste with regard to what we find minimally acceptable. I think you concurred with this, but assigned the change to our high consumption of processed food. My understanding is quite the contrary, that the amounts of sodium in products have increased over the years, but I don't speak from direct knowledge or any sort of research. Yes, people can get around it by consuming less processed food, but some people also have less access to unprocessed food.

I might also add that you can't use "bland" by itself as an explanation. A particular Native American population I live with generally prefers bland food, and those most entrenched in the culture do not like any of the flavorings that the Western World regularly adds. (There's even a religious prohibition against Peyote men adding salt on meals before and after Peyote Meetings). Those who are less entrenched in the culture by spending time in other locations are more in line with the Western attitude toward flavorings. I bring this up to once again try to point out that the things we like are not absolute and are not wholly generated internally from individuals independent of outside influences.

Back to music. I'm afraid I do think not only that music is often manipulated to our tastes, but that our musical tastes themselves are manipulated by a wide variety of culprits; the music industry generally, our social environments, MP3s, the context in which we hear music (during workouts vs. in the car), and so on.


NPR Headline Aug 7 2014: Your favorite songs abridged
"Last Friday, a Top 40 radio station in Calgary, Alberta, introduced listeners to a new format. As one on-air stinger put it, "90.3 AMP: Now twice the music." When they say "twice the music," though, they actually mean half the song."

"When you think about why songs are the length that they are, why are they generally between three and five minutes. It goes back sixty years. And if you were a musician back then, you wanted radio airplay, you needed to have a 45. So artists complied and created three to five minute songs. Really what we are trying to do is redefine what listeners want." -Steve Jones, vice president at the Canadian radio firm Newcap.

Potential thread relevance: Prog will not flourish if Steve Jones' experiment catches wildfire. Perhaps some forces will be available to counterbalance it. I don't know.

Edited by HackettFan - September 07 2014 at 15:07

^Well put, definitely.

HackettFan wrote: Intention is not necessary. Manipulation can occur entirely unintentionally from over zealousness or whatever. The dictionary definitions I have looked up require that the managing of influence be "skillful" but require nothing about it being intentional. Intention is a pragmatic inference that we may or may not make and may or may not be correct. Social manipulation is normally unintentional. Marketplace manipulation can be financially skillful yet so self-interested that the manipulation is not realized.

Edited by Dean - September 07 2014 at 18:54

Interesting how we go from soy to electric cars in only two paragraphs. Anyway, electric cars aren't exactly selling like hot cakes so to speak so to me I don't see that as a good example of the consumer getting what it wants. I'm not sure about the current state of electric cars but for a while there was a popular opinion that they could not go faster than 50 miles per hour. This by itself was enough to sabotage the industry(or at least partly so). I think when people heard this it made them loose interest in wanting to own an electric car. We do very much live in a "here today gone tomorrow" kind of world so the next big thing better be an improvement(or at least be perceived as one)in order for a trend to settle in or even a demand for something even if it's not the most popular. In other words something still has to have selling power in order for it to be an available option.

I don't really see a strong connection to prog here though. The music industry has changed a lot and prog is in a position to gain a lot more fans but in my opinion it has stalled. It missed the boat at least as far as being super huge or mainstream but I view that as a good thing. Prog is already starting to get too watered down. What passes for prog now would probably not have passed for prog 35 to 40 years ago. I'm an open minded music fan so it's not that big of a deal but I don't like the idea of young kids listening to a bunch of experimental indie bands and calling themselves prog fans when they have no clue who ELP, YES, KC, Flower Kings, Marillion, early Genesis and all the other bands commonly known as prog are. That is just how I feel though. In other words I don't want the definition of prog stretched too much just so it can appeal to those who would normally not give a crap about it. Again that's just me. ;) No one expects classical, jazz or bluegrass to change so leave the prog a lone also. :) The bottom line is prog had it's peak in popularity in the early to mid seventies. Many people still see it as a 70's genre and thus as a genre that is "time locked." I don't see that changing anytime soon. It has a dedicated medium sized following now and I am happy with that. Let's leave well enough alone and as King Crimson might say "be happy with what we have to be happy with."   

It is true that industries and corporations do manipulate public opinion and play a role in shaping tastes. This is because they have a lot of money and can buy advertising. The prog scene is where it is now in large part because of the internet. It has an underground kind of following and as such has not been a victim of commercial manipulation(unlike say in the seventies). I say the fewer prog bands on major labels the better. The more prog becomes commercial the more it has to live up to the standards of those promoting them. I like it just the way it is now(for the most part).

Edited by Prog_Traveller - September 07 2014 at 22:31

HackettFan wrote: Dean wrote: Manipulation that is unintentional is not manipulation, if you mean the unintentional change in people's taste then you cannot use the word "manipulation". Manipulation is a deliberate act, so in being deliberate it is therefore intentional. The dictionary definitions that I looked up use words such as shrewd, dishonest, deceiving, unscrupulous and unfairly ... all these denote intent. In the context we are using the word manipulation with regard to Pop music it can be nothing but intentional. I see that a lot is falling upon the meaning of 'manipulation'. I disagree wholeheartedly with your inclusion of intention as a necessary condition in the word's meaning. Intention is a pragmatic inference attached the word. I pulled the following instances of actual word usage off Google and Google Scholar. None of these instances involve intentionality, and each sounds fine to me: “All of this design information is necessary to translate Figure 1 into Figure 2, as the C ++program has the same general design, but makes explicit that the program is manipulating points, calculating distances, computing averages, and so on.” (http://scholar.google.com/scholar?start=10&q=%22is+manipulating%22&hl=en&as_sdt=0,37) “Nanotechnology is manipulating matter at nanometer level and the application of the same to medicine is called nanomedicine.” (http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22is+manipulating%22&btnG=&hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C37) “Otherwise, the MMP is manipulating a valid ACM message and must process its body one line at a time, beginning at decision block 610.” (http://www.google.com/patents/US6256666)

I think manipulation is too strong a word to use and assumes condescendingly that most people are sheep.  No, they are not, but at the same time they are not necessarily spending all the time in the world looking for the solitary needle in a haystack.  They want the kind of stuff they like delivered on a platter.  Corporations try to second guess this and push more and more quantities of say the particular genre or sub genre that is enjoying a wave of popularity at that time.  It would be pretty deluded to believe they don't and just randomly produce albums hoping for success.  They don't hope, they are usually fairly certain of succeeding and that is why unsuccessful entertainers don't get too many chances to make a comeback.  "A singer is only as good as his last concert" holds good here (that no singer, in reality, is that perfect and good here only implies commercial success is a different issue).  And the more unpredictable their reach, the more conservative the corporations get.  Today, big production houses in India are able to cover a lot of screens at a low cost due to digitization and hence don't mind taking a few risks once in a while.  But in the 90s, when physical prints still had to be transported to every cinema hall and cinema halls only had one screen, they were hyper-conservative and made us watch practically the same film with a few minor re-arrangements of the cliches over and over again.  And films still ran well.  In fact the biggest hits of that time achieved an ROI that would be unthinkable today because films now get yanked off screens within a few weeks at the most.  

Gerinski wrote:  They liked all of it at the time they bought it, but they bought (and therefore 'liked') mostly what was put in front of their nose.

They are not led to believe anything in particular nor are they being controlled.  They just don't care.  They don't HAVE to deal with whatever is not at the top of the charts and prog isn't.  Of course, prog fans don't like the implied inference that most music listeners are simply indifferent to prog (rather than being somehow hypnotised by the media into believing it doesn't exist) but that's how it is.  There may have been a time and a place when prog was popular but that time is long gone and changes in the tastes of listeners are at least as much responsible for that as the corporations.  Large numbers of people didn't so much like prog rock as they did a few popular prog rock bands.  When these bands either lost audiences or just went commercial, no new bands, barring Rush, were able to take their place commercially speaking and in the meantime punk and new wave happened which caught the fascination of the public.