Genesis and Melody

^ Well after all the Lydian-loving threads you have to have a sense of humor about it.  Not mocking your tastes, just having a bit of fun.  If you post you may get responses, so deal with it.

Crimson is probably my favorite prog band and they even have less 'melodic' tunes than early Genesis.

If I want to hum along with a song...I'll put on the Beatles.

;)

Certainly has been the most musically stimulating discussion around here in months ~

Misenum hasn't visited since the 27th, wonder what he thinks .

Yeah.  And by no means was the costume thing something the band had always thought about.  It was Gabriel who did it of his own volition, surprising even the band, by first wearing a fox mask on stage and when it was received well, he took the idea forward and it became legend.  A lot of things, particularly great things, in music happen by accident and this is one such.  The polite official version of events is due to bad PA systems in the early days of Genesis, the audience had difficulty understanding Gabriel's lyrics.  So costumes became a part of the event both to entertain them and also to drop clues about what the song was about.  So mosh's summation, while unflattering in tone, is not entirely off the mark.  I don't often agree with him but we should indeed not indiscriminately bash him; he does have a point this time. 

I do respect KC a lot for the very reason he described.  They made it very, very difficult for the audience to find a hook in the music.  Ergo, those who still came to the shows necessarily had to be committed to just listening to the music...without demanding that the singer strut the stage like an alpha male or wear weird outfits.  The audience had to put up with the main man in KC being a bespectacled, scowling countenance crouched over his guitar.  That is the purest form of connection between musician and audience and I say this as somebody who obviously loves the Gabriel Genesis albums whatever mosh may have to say about that.