But it frustrates me that I cannot find a mix that will include The Dan and exclude all the other "similar sounding" wreckage from the seventies. I can skip or dislike (to my heart's content) the IQ songs, but the Dan problem is that I'd use up my skips in about 5 seconds on a "Dan Channel". Well, I did get a Fagen song once.

Just throwing the line out there.

"General progressive music discussions" and I mentioned the problem with IQ in my prog music mixes. 

One of the very best pop/jazz/rock bands ever....with very biting and sarcastic lyrics at times...and imo progressive at times.

The fact that Pandora considers them muzak shows just how lame and uninformed Pandora is....imho of course.

 

 

http://www.allmusic.com/artist/iq-mn0001775814" rel="nofollow - This one is. And sometimes, (on Rhapsody, even paid), you get http://www.allmusic.com/artist/iq-mn0001513262" rel="nofollow - this one .

Both of them are rare, and it's hard to find either of them in an internet search, but I never hear anything from Subterranea or Dark Matter--nothing off of THE IQ I most see in searches. So even though they promote obscure bands, I've never seen a service that doesn't come up donuts on Glass Hammer or Ad Infinitum. 

I already have no hope that they understand the difference between post-Duke Genesis and prog Genesis, and that if I ask for Steve Hackett they're going to throw Sussudio and Invisible Touch in there, although I'm okay with most of Collins off of Face Value, and some of his second. But that's what skipping and dislikes are for. 

To me the most glaring is when I specify even "King of the World" and select the Countdown to Ecstasy album, I might get Peg or Hey 19 and then 70s pop from then on. Once in a while Boz Scaggs or maybe Fagen, 

I guess I was also wondering about some bands where the difference is too subtle--but for some reason extremely noticeable on a level of personal taste. It's like I know that some people don't think that Steely Dan even belongs in PA. But for my "credentials", Knots is one of my favorite pieces from Gentle Giant, and I appreciate some of Fripp's more abstract offerings. 

It's like deciding that I like Kandinsky, but Miro looks like an amoeba's interior decoration.

 

I assume then you are a Steely Dan fan...?

Your favorite track and/or lp..?

 

 

is it rural music?

It's like when they play Bowie during a classic prog (say Gentle Giant) mix--I haven't found that disturbing, because it's followed by VDGG, Camel or Yes. 

Love the dan.  Was lucky to see them on their first three album tours in L.A.

I waver on the Dan. My absolute favorite wavers between your namesake and Here at the Western World. Then again, there are sometimes when I feel that Royal Scam is the best song they ever recorded or Green Earring is the most infectious. Sometimes I like latter-day Dan more than some of their classics. I have actually spent periods listening to Two Against Nature and Everything Must Go more than Countdown through Aja. Although I like some stuff of Gaucho--and amazing myself, the disco-oriented Glamour Profession--Gaucho is as uneven as Pretzel Logic to me. 

I have the complete 1-per-decade collection of Fagen--before Sunken Condos which slipped out without my notice. And had Becker's 2 albums on MP3 until my backup disk bricked.

I think overall, the best piece of music ever put out by them was Dr. Wu, which really only ever gets put out of #1 by temporary appreciation of another Dan piece. 

One of my few reviews--with words--on PA is on Royal Scam. 

If I listen to my rips and downloads I get just the mix I want. Some Porcupine Tree mixed with SD mixed with Big Big Train, Genesis, Gentle Giant, Yes, King Crimson (its many incarnations), Carptree, Mars Volta... But I like the unexpected, say like White Willow in my BBT station, or the occasional inclusion of Yezda Urfa when listening to Echolyn-based.

Just tradeoffs, I know.

 

Which is why I rarely listen to Pandora or similar stations except at my son in law's house because he has very little prog and puts it on for me...the choices they come up with are really lame at times.

I have never considered Bowie prog  and imo he's no more prog than the Dan.

btw I have never seen any VDGG on Pandora...

 

I think the Dan have a number of really good lp's but I would go with Katy Lied....of course....though Countdown and Aja are a close second.

 

 

Yes.. ..but so do a hundred other bands who aren't in the PA  list of bands.

 

 

 

"Prog" doesn't mean anything at all. It has its roots in "progressive" from the 70s. But as I mentioned on another thread, I was in on the original capitulation to the people who wanted to listen to simpler, though stranger, music "progressive" because listening to "orchestrated crap from the 70s" wasn't. Later I saw "ProgRock Radio" when streaming started on the internet, and I talked to Jerry, its original creator.

He told me he used to have Steely Dan on his site but the purists complained until he took them off. Same thing was true of the guitar virtuoso Eric Johnson. Johnson was coincidentally his favorite guitarist, he wrote to me "That tears it, Eric Johnson goes back onto my site tonight!" And he said that if he got one more email that suggested the Dan was prog, he was going to put them back on, too.

It's odd how people can listen to quaint pop from Caravan and include them, and want to exclude some of the finest crafted note combinations and incredibly-timed syncopation on vinyl. 

But that's what prog is about (to me) mixing it up. Making it interesting. 

Love the discription:

ITunes wrote: Formed in the 1980s, IQ is comprised of Martin Orford, Paul Cook, Mike Holmes, Peter Nicholls, and John Jowitt. This prolific band has released 14 albums, beginning with 1983's Tales From the Lush Attic.....

 

Check

 

I always thought that SD would be better served in private, specially when those little pipes people were sucking on, with their band name on them, came around a few years back ... but what the heck! I know a lot of people thought was funny, and a lot of them didn't like it! I laughed way loud and hard because SD was not small!