What's So Great 'Bout "Close To The Edge?"

RoyFairbank wrote: What's So Great 'Bout Close To The Edge? (ITS RANKED #1, AND WAS APPARENTLY VOTED GREATEST ALBUM EVER ON THIS SITE IN 2006) Listening to it, it is obviously a well done album by a great band, but what is the purpose of Close to The Edge that so distinguishes it, what am I supposed to get from it that is so special?WARNING RUNNING WRITING: I know from Selling England By the Pound (to go to down the list) that Society is falling apart at the seams thanks to a loss of culture, I understand each story and mood that goes into it, and the magical sense of hoplessness of the bad- but adequately lyriced Firth of Fifth, the absurdity of trying to be tough and the corruption of everyone expressed in the nations youth from The Battle of Epping Forest etc.  I know from Wish You Were Here that we grow up to be F'ed and lose all our friends and have cold isolation from everyone because its an F'ing machine people! and I know from Thick As A Brick that the newspaper had a headline like that and I know from Foxtrot that the aliens are going to find nothing cuz were all gonna extinct ourselves and that history obliterates glory and I know from the Dark Side of The Moon that sanity is a construction to mask terrible hurt and conflict that we experience and I know from In the Court of the Crimson King that the 21st century sucks really bad and CLOSE TO THE EDGE IS RANKED HIGHER THAN ALL OF THEM!

I don't see why CTTE has to be analyzed from the conseptual/lyrical point of view to begin with. I believe that the majoraty of listeners, myself included, don't care much for understanding Jon Anderson's lyrics or they listen to them
passively. That's probably an importaint appeal of Yes and their music since you don't have to be an over-analyzing intelectual to appreciate their albums. ...more power to the people etc. etc. ... oops, got carried away there.
Personally I don't consider CTTE to even be Yes' best album but the majority have spoken and I respect that opinion.

RoyFairbank wrote: Equality 7-2521 wrote: Why does the album need a purpose? I'm pretty sure the purpose of the album was for the band to express themselves in a format that they enjoy. If you don't like it move on with your life. Albums, lyrics, whatever don't need meaning to be valid or even enjoyed. The lyrics sound cool. The images are cool. Or maybe the fact that they make no sense is cool. Who cares? "Or maybe the fact they make no sense is cool" I don't have a come back for that! I think this is the problem with ART in general -  I mean, look at Avant-Garde ANYTHING, lines of red on white, blue circles in a black field... statue of a triangle... So when we come to Avant-Garde (sic?) rock, Is that simply what they were doing? Obviously its WAY BETTER than pop music, and I like the album more than most albums on this Earth, but is it really saying anything or just fooling with my head? Everyone should listen to Desolation Row by Bob Dylan- then you know when someone is fooling with your head and knows it. In his case he had been writing clear-cut lyrics before he started suddenly writing crap. Dave Van Ronk said That whole artistic mystique is one of the great traps of this business, because down that road lies unintelligibility. Dylan has a lot to answer for there, because after a while he discovered that he could get away with anything—he was Bob Dylan and people would take whatever he wrote on faith. So he could do something like "All Along the Watchtower," which is simply a mistake from the title on down: a watchtower is not a road or a wall, and you can't go along it. EDIT NOTE: I cleaned up the first post, removing the references to Relayer to avoid confusion. For those who missed it, I said Relayer is a seriously cool Jam album with a hard groovin' electronic edge to it and I think its better than Close to Edge. The papers are in order, you may pass!

Equality 7-2521 wrote: Once again I don't know why people have such a lowly opinion of pop music.

Amen to that. Sure there is plenty of bad pop, but that's true of every genre. Really good pop takes just as much talent and creativity as any other style of music. That's why the Beach Boys and ABBA will always rank quite high in my estimation.

Kashmir75 wrote: CTTE is quite possibly my favourite Yes album, either that or the Yes Album.

The Yes Album ROCKS! It's the only Yes Album I actually went to the store and bought! I don't even have Fragile, Relayer or 90125 or Drama, the other albums I really, really like from them. The YES album is a more down-to-earth Yes, instead of big-headed cosmic Yes of Close To The Edge-Tales From Too Long. Then they started to come back down again with Going For The One, before hitting the ground (Tormato) and rebounding (Drama), and then being grabbed by Trevor Rabin's hand (90125).

I don't know also. I, personally, don't have the album in such high regard and i really think that yes did much better in other albums, as a  whole. The title track is great, but the other two songs are just a mood killer . . .

Anyway, just my opinion.

Alberto Muñoz wrote: CTTE one of the masterpieces of prog rock, lyrics inspired in the Herman Hesse Book Siddartha.   I recommend to you to read this:   http://www-3.unipv.it/britishrock1966-1976/pdf/covacheng.pdf

Personally, I think CTTE is rather dull, but I don't care if you like it. However, I do have to do take issue with this concept of it being based on Siddhartha. I don't know what was going through Jon's head, but I read Siddhartha, and the lyrics still don't make a damn bit of sense because they're an impressionistic miasma and since it's impossible to get any concrete meaning out of a single phrase, there's really nothing to connect it to Siddhartha other than the idea that it is connected to Siddharth.

Close to the Egde is a stander. It's a starter's point, though I wouldn't recommend it that much. The recording is quite ugly and the second site is not that interesting.

I think all these highest rated albums in our PA tot 5 are not the best records there are. They are widely know and considered to be the best records of some of our most beloved bands. The more reviews, the bigger it's influence.

In a top 5 I'd rather see:
Jan Dukes the Grey - Mice and Rats in the Loft
King Crimson - In the Court of the Crimson King
Van der Graag Generator - Pawn Hearts
Gentle Giant - Tree Friends
Khan - Space Shanty

TheGazzardian wrote: I don't get what your post is about, but if you're really curious about what Close to the Edge is about, I'd help you out, but I'm still trying to figure out what a Khatru is.  If you're really, really curious, google "Close to the edge" interpretation. The first result I got was: http://yhwh.com/ctte.htm

I could choose words at random for lyrics to a song, and get some grad student with a little mustache and a penchant for overpriced coffee to spell out what it all means in painful detail.

CTTE is the perfect cd of Yes, discography, period. Not a bad tracks, with 3 tracks!
I must have listened to this cd 200 times and i can't explain why and can't change others opinions.

Close to the Edge doesn't really claim to give you understanding, but some of the motifs and ideas lyrically are brilliant. Honestly, I don't pretend to think it makes absolute sense or has a didactic scheme but as someone who writes and reads poetry, I think there is certainly some sort of quality to Anderson's lyrics to the album. The word choice is usually interesting, and offers some unusual emotional effects. If anything, the album as a whole offers a sense/mood of spiritual growth (from the political in You And I to the more anthropological in Siberian Khatru), occasionally contrasted with a seemingly negative backdrop.

Much as I'm not Anderson's biggest fan, either as a singer or a writer, I think he was pretty crucial in making that album as great as it is. Besides, if you want to know why CTTE is too highly rated, listen to the music. Much as I'm not a huge fan of Yes outside of that album and Fragile, it's a musically fantastic and consistent album.

(and on the question of what we learn from albums... how would we fit into that scheme a lyricist as poetically able as Peter Blegvad who has no interest in teaching us anything, or albums by Magma whose lyrics have no discernable meaning even down to the word level for essentially all of their listeners?)