Well, this is a good discussion and I'm happy to see that at least a few people are also taking my side now. Kudos to Pangaea, it must take serious effort to make such a mammoth post. However, please no one else quote the entire post, it makes it hard to look through the page. What I'm seeing in these arguments is a disturbing degree of snobiness. Like I said earlier, we can't even agree on what quality is, so how can we claim to make such assessments of quality? Why do you have to elevate your music on this mystical scale that trumps all others? Why can't you just talk about what you know, like originality, emotional resonance, complexity, technical difficulty, aesthetics, or depth? All those things seem very related to quality, but at least you can talk about them in a somewhat more objective fashion. 

I think there is often a degree of laziness to those writing off music as inferior to other music. Threads of this sort always seem to degenerate into mindless pop music bashing. The posh music-litarati types will exclaim "Oh, but that is just music for the masses, whereas I listen to the obviously superior music made for thinking folk like me!" First off, if you are listening to prog rock, that's not the "thinking man's" music. That music is classical music. You talk about how pop music doesn't last 40 years, but forget that prog music doesn't last 400 years. I shouldn't be giving advice on how to be a proper elitist, but there it is, go listen to Beethoven's 3rd, not Yes's Close to the Edge. If you don't want to be a proper elitist, then perhaps you should look a bit more carefully at pop music, because pop music is actually one of the most meticulously constructed music forms. Many of the best and brightest in the music industry are working on this type of music. It's easy to make fun of Britney Spears, but there is a reason she constantly tops the charts, it's because of the really talented songwriters supporting her underneath. 

I've said elsewhere (but I am generally lazy these days about finding my own citations) that I think that what prog is really about is about what art is "really" about.  This is difficult to define but it has been attempted and I like the following definition.  This comes from an audio tape I have of the great comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell giving a lecture on the main works of James Joyce (Wings of Art).  You can definitely see James Joyce's work as "progressive" literature in that his writing was highly complex, highly experimental and relatively inaccessible to most people's reading tastes.

There are two kinds of art (my friends)...

1.  Dynamic art that seeks a certain goal: consciously or unconsciously motivates you towards a particular action or belief

2.  Static art that seeks to arrest the mind before the profound mystery of the world.  Art that is simultaneously relevant to meaning and yet does not prescribe action or opinion but rather inspires a new awareness of the world that is not expressed better than in the form in which it is experienced (as there is no higher perspective from which to make this judgement as the form is as necessarily rooted in the particulars of the composition as it is transcendent of them)

So for music this means that a song or album collectively does not make a political point or recall a simple emotional perspective primarily.  What it does do is evoke a mood that is composed of feelings/beliefs/sounds etc... that shows those things collectively in a transcendent manner; transcendent of their simple worldly referents.

A concept album is probably the best structure in which to accomplish something like this.  In Genesis' "The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway" there is a self-conscious awareness of this quality (read the lyrics to the last song "It").  Other albums which evoke a complex mood as a whole may contain songs that work a theme usually the theme is merely a vehicle for the communication of that higher mood in which (as a Freudian might say) the manifest content is simultaneously symbolic of a more abstract content, the struggle of the instincts versus the social needs, etc.  In presenting problems, true "static" art does not provide answers, it shows the deepest character of the issue and anyone who comes away inspired by the work to a particular belief or action has either identified a limitation of the work or has underestimated it.

MaxerJ wrote: Nuke - Let me start by saying it was never my intention to completely write off 'inferior' music. We all like a bit of raw, quick, dispensable music. I couldn't live without my extensive Tom Morello collection. Now, i'll highlight things that are important so you can skip my digressions.... You've got a couple of problems. First off, the whole 'quality' thing. Did we say anything about quality? Let me see... ctrl+f.... okay, everyone who has mentioned quality has stated that it is impossible to define... What I am trying to say is that 'we' - the collective being ProgArchives users - shouldn't bother arguing over 'x is better than x' in terms of 'proggyness' or 'quality'... instead, let's take a page out of the Lit criticism book and work on defining music - not just prog though - as 'literary'. Sure, you could say 'art' - it's the same thing, different schools of thought. Art students like to think of it as art, Lit students like to think of it as literature. What's important is what it signifies. You yourself said that people understand literary books to be better because 'the smart people told them so'. To millions of educated - and i use the term to talk about people with more than five years in school - western teaching has emphasised certain books and authors over others... We haven't denigrated the books that were 'not literary', we have just said, 'Well, that's a good read!/That's a bad read!' But when people read the books seen as canonical 'literature', they talk about how it changed their lives... admit it, as much as mainstream music is fun, bopping, and consistent, it won't have the same effect (on me at least) as VDGG's 'Lighthouse Keepers'. I'm going to shrug that music off the same as i shrug off David Eddings books -they're entertaining books, but i don't feel any different after reading them... This is another bad example and i have digressed quite a bit. Let's just remember that no one has said anything about 'quality' apart from your infatuation with it... I think it's time for the Formalist speech. Right. Once, there were these cats called the Formalists. They came from Russia. They thought that books could be 'rated' (for lack of a better term) by their own merits, discarding the author, or what the reader thought. They measured off originality, style, flair, poetic-ness, and loads of other things... They were shut down by Structualists, but that's irrelevant. If you want to do this, lets do it. Let's be music Formalists. I would like that. But don't pay out others because they are more extreme Formalists than you. We're all in the same boat, otherwise you wouldn't be on this forum. As for classical music... i don't know about you but I listen to equal shares classical and progressive. The point is that we are still searching for something else - 'leaving home' as moshkito put it... We just get there in different ways... but it's still better than not leaving at all. There's always speculation as to what Beethoven would do if he were alive today, but you must realize that cultural and economic settings are completely different. Have you ever read anything from Elizabethan/Victorian era? Austen, maybe? Books from that era show how their entire days consisted of walking around, watching the servants do all the work. Beethoven probably had so much time on his hands that Anderson and Howe in similar circumstances would write CttE five times over.... Seriously, people in 1700/1800's didn't do anything all day... And finally, Nuke wrote: If you don't want to be a proper elitist, then perhaps you should look a bit more carefully at pop music, because pop music is actually one of the most meticulously constructed music forms. Many of the best and brightest in the music industry are working on this type of music. It's easy to make fun of Britney Spears, but there is a reason she constantly tops the charts, it's because of the really talented songwriters supporting her underneath.  Yes there is a meticulously constructed form... it was made twenty years ago and has been rinsed and repeated ever since. Fantastic. Many of the best and brightest are working there either because their fantastic Kraut rock band couldn't sell albums or because they actually enjoy their work. (Examples of these people you talk about please.) The reason Britney tops the charts is because the charts are made for Britney. That's like asking why Mugabe is still the president of Zimbabwe. You must realise ALL IS INTERTEXTUAL. Then we can work out how to unplug the stereo.

Good post, I wasn't able to reply right away because I was busy and I knew this post didn't merit a reply that took 5 minutes to write. To start with though, this quality thing had me worried a bit that I'd set up a straw man, but it's not true. You guys either explicitly stated it (using terms like "good" and "bad" which means the same thing as "quality" in this context) or implied it with talk of distinctions between literary work and entertainment. Now I see you want to use the term "literary" instead of "quality," which is a point I admittedly missed the importance of the first time through (the discussion didn't end up focusing on this distinction.) But what does that boil down to? It's dressing the distinction between good and bad in different terms. The distinction between literary and entertainment, in my eyes, is just as bogus as the distinction between quality and non-quality. The difference is that it is much more vague and thus more difficult to challenge. Just because VDGG's "lighthouse keepers" had a stronger effect on you than Lady Gaga's "the fame" doesn't mean it won't go the other way with other people (and it does). Besides, a yardstick of how much effect something has on you is unfair to the many examples of brilliant music that is meant for fun. Mozart often wrote fun songs that wouldn't change anyone's life, but to claim it is less "literary" than the many more serious works out there seems silly to me. If you were to claim that and the majority were to agree, then I would argue that the term "literary" means nothing.

My point as it relates to the formalists would be actually against the formalist position. I'm not terribly familiar with Lit Crit but I think my arguments would be more understood in the post structuralist sense, where the work must be interpreted in the cultural and societal context of both the author and the reader.  In other words, overarching judgements like "this is literary, this is not" reek of formalism, wheras the post structuralist view would be that "whether or not something is literary is subjective and depends on socio-cultural context." If I'm completely misunderstanding Lit Crit, feel free to correct me. 

Personally, I don't listen to too much classical music these days. I really appreciate the music, as a member of my college wind ensemble and choir I play it all the time, however modern music is more my comfort zone since I can relate to it so strongly. Not to say I don't challenge myself, because I do, but I also like to enjoy myself so more often I listen to prog rock, heavy metal, pop music, basically stuff written in my musical language. I find myself challenging myself more often by listening to the experimental wings of those genres than by listening to classical music, although I certainly have to spin at least 1 classical album a month. That's completely irrelevant though, so sorry, and I'll get back to the point. I agree that "leaving home" is an important experience and that most music appreciators should try this. I just don't think this implies anything about literaryness.

As for an example of these people that work underneath pop stars, consider Max Martin. He's the one who wrote "Hit me baby one more time."  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Martin_production_discography - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Martin_production_discography - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Martin_production_discography - Here is his production and songwriting discography. I don't know how old you are, but if you grew up at the same time I did, you'd realize that he's probably responsible for more top hits than the Beatles and Elvis combined. Now that takes serious talent!

Lol, I believe prog emulating pop has been done before several times, and with failure rates of around 90%. ;) If anyone wants to be convinced that it's actually hard to write good pop music, they should just listen to what happens when the supposedly better prog bands try their hand at pop! To be fair, there is deeper and more insightful pop music, often by prog bands (king crimson wrote some great pop in the 80's.) It hardly makes a dent on the charts though, people don't want insightful music to dance to. 

Maxer J - I think we're mostly in agreement then. I'm still not sold on literary and entertainment even being different ends of a continuum, as I see them as independent of each other, there existing literary entertainment, non-literary entertainment, literary non-entertainment, and just plain bad ;). I'm not sure there's as much stagnation as you think either.  At least not in the mainstream, where formulaic hits seem to get surpassed by non-formulaic hits quite often. I think a lot more of the stagnation comes from niche genres actually, like "jazz vocalists," techno, or whatever you call that genre with all the bands that sound like nickelback.

No i didnt know that,