Classic masterpieces, was the public aware?

Hi,

I have always had a very different take on music from most folks. For me, it was a longer piece of music that showed a lot more "value" in its experience, than a "pop song" did for me.

I say this all the time, and it may rub some folks incorrectly, but for me this was closer to classical music, and its "experiences" which, in rock/pop music we have replaced with "lyrics" that supposedly tell us how to think about the music. There is nothing more pretentious than that, since no one, has the same feeling about the music itself for any given period of time. There might be some similarities and most of these are along the lines of "conditioning" with the stupid designations that "major" is happy and "minor" is sad, or similar!

All in all, I still look at these as the classical musicians of my time.

The rest is just another song to help you "make believe" that something is right and tops or best, instead of allowing you to make that call for yourself!

Was it as known in its time as today? All I can tell you is that Guy Guden with Space Pirate Radio and all his hours on radio, NEVER missed any of these and played them all and then some, much to the chagrin of some folks that had no idea what "MUSIC" was and thought that a hit by bruhaha was more important than something new.

Did this happen to Mozart, Debussy and so many others? YES it did, and there are enough stories out there ... basically, a lot of the "public" is simply not in tune ... and most musicians already know that anyway and it shows here ... it's all about favorites and even some history is ignored by people that lack any kind of education to understand that the world is not flat and has more people on the other side!

It's also difficult to call it a "classic", since the same idea does not necessarily develop. We call all these a "classic", but we don't consider Iron Butterfly's a "classic" and in fact we don't even consider it "progressive" and it's design led to many other long pieces in the same format. Chicago's "I'm a Man" is the same thing! You probably never even heard it and it's a whole side long!

rogerthat wrote: What decides whether an album becomes an 'instant classic' probably depends more on whether it captures the proverbial cultural zeitgeist of its time. An album that is 'with it' in terms of keeping pace with ongoing trends in music culture or even anticipating them. ...

With one concern here. You are taking this all to be within a "generic" culture the world over and this is impossible and not do'able.

The cultural "zeitgeist", or "flavor" was diffenrent in London from SF, and from Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires, and Tokyo and Paris, and Rome. You have already seen some of that and how different some of these were, and they were not all done because of a cultural revolution, though it might be said in general terms that it didn't hurt some of the issues the world over were quite similar. In many ways the IRA thing was no different to America's issues with VietNam, for example, or the military coup in Brazil that also led to a lot of artists creating songs against it, and wanting a change!

rogerthat wrote: ... The ones that stood the test of time would appear to have fascinated listeners at the time as they offered something more to stand out from the crowd. Albums that only entertained listeners just as any number of popular albums faded away....

Again, you are making an assumption that the album that made it "big" in your hometown, also made it big in Rome, or Tokyo, and that is not necessarily the case. This is one of the biggest battles I face in discussing "progressive" because it is defined by "your home town" and not a scene that happened in more than one place in this world, and had its massive differences and influences in different places. In most of Europe at the time, specially those countries that were under the Soviet influence, there was no such thing as you "mention" ... but we already seem to suggest that those folks are not intelligent, musical and can not have any "progressive" anything except how they go to the bathroom and eat dinner! That's sick! That's also my worst nightmare, because I know that Brazil also had a massive "progressive" music scene that was manifested in many places, but it is not "saved" or "recorded" (like the murder of the indians for 500 years!) for you to see and appreciate.

The fact that you can name bands from more than one country should be a nice hint ... there is more out there than just one thing in "progressive" ... and we're not studying it, because most folks here have heard Genesis albums 100 times, and they have only heard half an album by Ange, because they can not conceive that another band could be better, or at least different!

The imperfections in the discussion is the saddest part of it all!