Prog and Cars

We never owned a car when I was growing up (lived in NYC with great public transportation) so the whole romance-of-the-open-road thing for me was restricted to reading Jack Kerouac.

jude111 wrote: All of that is great that you wrote, especially the sex angle

Dean wrote: I suspect that the (historic) association between Rock and Cars is essentially a coming-of-age or rite-of-passage thing that reflects the youth culture of the day. This was somewhat aspirational since owning a car (or motorcycle) was a symbol of freedom from childhood that went hand-in-hand with ownership of a style of music that was specifically created for (and later by) them. Writing songs about those motor vehicles (or inspired by them) was an inevitability, no different than writing about the school hop or their sweethearts. So the Little Deuce Coup was a status symbol of being a teenager in the 1960s but, like Baby You Can Drive My Car and the car-songs by Marc Bolan, it was also a euphemism for sex (just as the phrase "rock and roll" was). This does not exist in Progressive Rock because it wasn't a youth-culture per se, when Hawkwind wrote about a silver bicycle or driving along Damnation Alley they were not writing "Car" songs in the same vein as Little Deuce Coup or even Red Barachetta, they were just vehicles in their science fiction based lyrics.

Love this topic as getting my first car get meant freedom and it went hand in hand with listening to Rock music. I live in a tourist town and in the Summer I would drive around the beaches to see and be seen while having the tunes cranked, usually AC/DC, RUSH, BLACK SABBATH, PINK FLOYD and IRON MAIDEN but certainly lots more than that. This was before I knew about Prog and I drove a '79 Trans Am with a four speed tany and Hurst shifter, wide tires on the back, jacked up with Crager rims and an upgraded stereo of course. The times of my life. I still remember the first Prog cd I listened to on my 50 minute drive to work. I didn't know what to expect as I put on "A Change Of Seasons" by DREAM THEATER but quickly was blown away to the point of laughing out loud at what I had discovered. It's rare for me to leave the house without grabbing a Prog cd for the drive. I'm now driving a five speed standard transmission Mazda3, it's a 2008 and a lot of fun.

A very interesting question; I love the discussion that's going on.

jude111 wrote: DDPascalDD wrote: I'm always really interested in such theories! Though this seems a little too far to me... I think there aren't many prog songs about cars. Maybe because cars was a often used topic in pop songs, prog bands didn't want to write about it. Also it seems like a subject which isn't that interesting if you want to give a certain message with a song. That's cool that you're in the Netherlands, a place which was horrified by car accidents and pedestrian deaths, especially of children, fought back against cars, and built amazing bike-friendly pedestrian-friendly infrastructure. Do people listen to rock when riding bikes?

Living in the Netherlands for the past 11 years, I don't get the impression that society fought back cars because of the "accident and pedestrian deaths" issues. Bikes ruled well before cars appeared and the historical city centre structures were simply not built to accomodate cars, period. Numerous canals throughout every city also made very difficult for many car transit. Plus riding around in bikes in very cheap, which goes fittingly with the Dutch's proverbial stingy-ness, but on the other side of the medal, it gives a generally healthier population. Of course density of population (highest in Europe, only second in the world after Taiwan) made it impossible for many city citizens to own a car as well. Flat lands are also a major factor in the use of bikes. Don't get me wrong, I love the bike space offered in Dutch cities.

But contrary to many other Western European countries, Netherlands is still putting billions in extending its highway networks or trying to solve permanent trafic jams (Utrecht, Leiden, Rotterdam, etc...). Traffic jams are soooo institutionalized that highways have portiques every 500m (yes, twice a km) for giving indications about safe speed because of traffic density and saturation. In general in other countries, once you get to the end of traffic jam, you see the remnants of the accident that created the jam in the first place and here you rarely/never see an accident (and this is good, of course) , because it was sheer saturation peaks that caused.


And yes, plenty of people are listyening to music on bikes, which horrifies me, because it's rather dangerous to cut yourself from vital aural/sonic informations while being so vulnerable on the road.  Even worse, now you've got teens texting while riding , not even looking at the road anymore

Nobody mentioned Roundabout yet?

jude111 wrote: emigre80 wrote: I always think of prog as kind of urban music, not really compatible with rural areas and long car rides. Although I do listen to prog while in the car. I never thought of prog as urban music. I think of hip-hop and jazz fusion and funk music as urban, certain kinds of dance music like techno and house. Like, Genesis is all medieval knights, Victorian drawing rooms and hunting foxes at the country manor; Jethro Tull is about minstrels on heavy horses singing songs in the woods; Camel's music conjures caravans and the moon over a desert oasis; Yes: "in and around the lake mountains come out of the sky"; Pink Floyd does the ocean (Echoes) and the creepy countryside pretty well (Cirrus Minor, Grantchester Meadows, and axe-wielding serial killers named Eugene); Rush does songs about trees in forests vying for sunlight, with Tom Sawyer off skipping stones across the river...   This is really interesting to me. Which prog bands or albums would we say are urban? I know many of these bands were in fact from the city. I think Hawkwind were in the city; yet their music seems to be about exploring outer space more than urban spaces... I'll have to think about this  ** One album I think of as urban is Marillion's Brave, and certain tracks, like Invisible Man.

This works when driving in the vastness of Wyoming under the Big Sky

Edited by timothy leary - November 07 2015 at 18:38

emigre80 wrote: I always think of prog as kind of urban music, not really compatible with rural areas and long car rides. Although I do listen to prog while in the car.

Edited by jude111 - November 07 2015 at 17:12