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Thread: Where is Pink Floyd in David Weigel’s history of Prog Rock?

  1. #51
    Member Vic2012's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by JKL2000 View Post
    What's the least white music made only by white people? Maybe early Red Hot Chili Peppers.
    Average White Band, from Scotland.

  2. #52
    Highly Evolved Orangutan JKL2000's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Scrotum Scissor View Post
    Mostly not at all, seeing how both of those are somehow perceived and portrayed as harbouring a set of ideal and noble virtues of creative human authenticity - while progressive rock is "false" due to not complying with the standards of rock music as token to such an authenticity.

    Progressive rock as very concept is despised for its esoteric and exclusivist sense of communicating "authenticity feats" - emotion, anger, aggression, vision, you name it; these sentiments are allegedly all artificial when channelled through the maze of a "rock" work emphasising form above or next to substance. This is how the story goes, except for the obvious logical omission that substance actually emanates from form. Which of course brings us to the main point; most people who genuinely detest progressive rock are factually unversed in the music itself, merely relating to the concept it is thought to be a harbinger of.
    I didn't mean that I actually think they don't like jazz or classical (I don't know or care if they do or not). Just that they ought to be equally disdainful of anything as "pretentious."

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    Quote Originally Posted by JKL2000 View Post
    I wish I had a dollar for every person who's written badly about why they don't like progressive rock then promoted something like The Ramones. I assume those people think more or less the same about jazz and classical.
    Quote Originally Posted by Scrotum Scissor View Post
    Mostly not at all, seeing how both of those are somehow perceived and portrayed as harbouring a set of ideal and noble virtues of creative human authenticity.....
    Yes.

    I suspect that the Hip Rock-Critical Elite mostly ignore classical music and jazz. Neither seems to speak to them, and they probably don't understand or listen to either, so they remain silent. Plus, writing about either requires more than a delightfully snarky prose style - it requires an actual technical understanding of music and an informed knowledge about its history that many of them don't have.

    However, if they did write about either and wanted to be consistent to their own standards, they'd have to unleash their full barrel of snark, since both fly in the face of their great touchstone, authenticity. Classical music, after all, was funded by various upper classes - the nobility and Church prior to 1800 or so, middle-class and upper-middle-class ticket buyers after that, and government and foundation grants in the 20th century - who set the standards, it was the product of highly-trained professional musicians, so it was never the product of the people. ("The people" being defined as rural subsistence farmers.) And jazz compromised the blues - the "true" voice of the black man - with Western musical training and Tin Pan Alley tunes and forms, so it bartered away what authenticity it ever had.

    Yet - unlike rock and pop, where everything's a matter of opinion - jazz and classical music are generally considered to be of high artistic value. Start dumping on either, and you'll revealed as an ignoramus, even though they are both fatally flawed genres by elevated hipster standards. What to do, what to do? How do you make sense of that impossible conundrum?

    Here's the answer: Both jazz and classical music are the product of genuinely great artists. Now those artists should have been rural village musicians, working in traditional forms, and leaving legacies of anonymous traditional laments, love songs, and dance tunes. But they were lured away from their true role as the voice of the people, lured away by regular paychecks, the artistic challenge of more complex forms, and the possibility of musical immortality. So Bartok, for example, became a revered classical composer instead of the village fiddler of Pusztaszabolcs, whose tunes would still be played at weddings and dances. Duke became one of the Founding Fathers of jazz instead of Charley Patton's accompanist. They were all pulled away from the true path. Yet, because of their genius, they created great music - even though they did so within false genres.

  4. #54
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    I'm a little late to the piling-on party, but what a stupid article. Sorry just had to get in my $.02.

    Why write about something you don't like in order to make fun of it? Particularly when the heyday of that "thing" is about 40 years ago and 99.8% of todays American population doesn't give a shit one way or the other?

  5. #55
    Jazzbo manqué Mister Triscuits's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Bucka001 View Post
    Cream and Procol Harum gave us "White Room" and "A Whiter Shade of Pale" respectively.
    Ironically, in the very next sentence after dropping the "whitest music ever" turd, Parker indeed brings up "A Whiter Shade of Pale" as an example--which anyone with half an ear could tell you is equal parts Bach and Percy Sledge.
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    Highly Evolved Orangutan JKL2000's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by arturs View Post
    I'm a little late to the piling-on party, but what a stupid article. Sorry just had to get in my $.02.

    Why write about something you don't like in order to make fun of it? Particularly when the heyday of that "thing" is about 40 years ago and 99.8% of todays American population doesn't give a shit one way or the other?
    I'd like to see The Atlantic run something about how bad rap is.

  7. #57
    Quote Originally Posted by Baribrotzer View Post
    ... jazz and classical music are generally considered to be of high artistic value.
    Jazz is respectable now, but back in the day it was considered by many as gutter trash - the music of whore houses and gin joints.

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    Quote Originally Posted by A. Scherze View Post
    Jazz is respectable now, but back in the day it was considered by many as gutter trash - the music of whore houses and gin joints.
    True, but it's been more-or-less respectable for the last fifty years. And I think you'd have to go back more than a century for "gutter trash" to be a commonly held opinion among the artistically aware.

  9. #59
    That's Mr. to you, Sir!! Trane's Avatar
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    What's wrong with whitest of white music anyways??

    Should we be ashamed?
    my music collection increased tenfolds when I switched from drug-addicts to complete nutcases.

  10. #60
    Quote Originally Posted by Trane View Post
    What's wrong with whitest of white music anyways?? Should we be ashamed?
    The purported "shame" lies in the assumed implications; progressive rock claims optimal creative freedoms yet somehow (allegedly) presets the most narrow concept of human context. By demonstrating/revealing/exposing its (apparent) exclusiveness in that department, its worth as art is somehow also unconditionally compromised.

    Pitiful. The "writer" in question here knows progressive rock on about the same scale as Mr. Dufus "gets" jazz.
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    Part of that view has to do with the liberal intelligentsia's romanticization of poverty. Specifically, their romanticization of impoverished, marginalized, and minority communities as somehow more "genuine" than those of more privileged folk. Such as themselves. This goes all the way back to Rousseau, and uncomfortably skirts on the "blood and soil" musical nationalism of Wagner - the concept that the "real" musical soul of a nation may only be found in its oldest and purest folk music. And you see a version of that today in urban hipsters' obsession with roots music. To them, it's the "real deal" (as is rap), whereas more schooled and polyglot music has lost the way.

    There may be some truth to that: if you come from extreme poverty, your music might have a certain desperate intensity missing in the work of those from easier circumstances. And it will reach people because it has to, you must make it reach them or they don't pay you to play and you don't eat. Kamasi Washington has talked about how jazz, for him and his the friends he grew up with, was their one shot at getting out of Watts and away from the gangs - they had no backup plan, so they had to become first-rate musicians, had to put in ten-to-twelve hours a day mastering their craft and their instruments.

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    I read the book.
    I liked the book.
    Far from perfect but a nice look back at a simpler (and way more awesome) time.
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  13. #63
    My post on the thread: 've been listening to Magma for 41 years and they are laughing all the way to the bank, having just played a show last night in France, and with shows set for Brazil later this year. It is interesting that the author simply repeats the same old story about Magma, that Christian Vander created the Kobaian language, which is a story so old this author is really third generation in bringing it up. But the sheer idiotic pugnacity here is nothing more than click bait. You don't like the music? Fine. You think punk ended it? Wrong. Study history, follow trends and listen a lot harder than this article indicates you can. https://www.youtube.com/wat...

    This is tiresome. People who don't listen to it, commenting on whether it is good or not. Punk ran for a couple of years in its heyday before most of the punk bands transmuted themselves. Not much experimentation in punk, though the Minutemen played with its tropes a great deal. Green Day is mainstream today. I always liked the Ramones- since I grew up listening to the MC5- but I thought they were pretty derivative. And they were part of Bill Martin's blues orthodoxy, which is what the critics (i.e. Christgau, Bangs) thought was "real" music.
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  14. #64
    As far as prog books go, I personally like the The Strawberry Bricks Guide To Progressive Rock (new edition). The author (Charles Snider) actually did some "scholarly" and statistical analysis of what prog rock is. But there are other reasons I enjoy it.

  15. #65
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    Quote Originally Posted by Vic2012 View Post
    Average White Band, from Scotland.
    "Normal is just the average of extremes" - Gary Lessor

  16. #66
    Btw the Ramones is one of the greatest rock'n'roll bands ever, imho. And this opinion is coming from someone who appreciated their music long after being initiated to the delights of progressive rock music. Denigrating the significance of punk-rock is the other side of the same coin to me. For me the lines are far more blurred than they are supposed to be and narratives like punk vs prog or punk vs metal not only they do not tell the truth but also they fail to interpret the relative unity of rock music in the late 60's early 70's. Boundaries were still, imo, quite irrelevant at the times, and I think that in the future rock music of that era will be - or has to be -evaluated as a whole, as a highly significant and varied cultural phenomenon.

  17. #67
    Quote Originally Posted by Bucka001 View Post
    Yeah, you can't sound more "white" (whatever that's supposed to mean) than The Ramones. But something tells me the two authors I referenced before wouldn't be down with describing that band as such.
    Quote Originally Posted by Zappathustra View Post
    Btw the Ramones is one of the greatest rock'n'roll bands ever, imho. And this opinion is coming from someone who appreciated their music long after being initiated to the delights of progressive rock music. Denigrating the significance of punk-rock is the other side of the same coin to me.
    I agree and am fervent about some punk stuff myself (the DK's in the mid 80s was one of the best concerts I've ever seen). I like (but don't love) the Ramones, they're okay in my book (wife *loves* them). I'd written earlier in the thread about the R's sounding very "white" (again, whatever that's supposed to mean...) but that wasn't a knock on them. Rather, I don't think the hip white-guy "journalist" would describe them that way, although he has no problem deriding prog by bringing up skin color. Just a case of hipster journalism where you have two equally"white"-sounding types of music (???) but because history has (for the time being) decided that punk is 'cool,' one wouldn't describe the Ramones that way. Prog is not 'cool' so, yeah, say it sounds "white." All ridiculous and tres stupide, obv.

  18. #68
    ^^ I think "white" is used here to reinforce the concept of "elitist", which is the quickest and safest way to dismiss everything that is above one's understanding.

  19. #69
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    Quote Originally Posted by JKL2000 View Post
    I'd like to see The Atlantic run something about how bad rap is.
    Nah, they would have to have some cojones to try that one. Other than prog, what other musical genre can you diss with absolutely no chance of backlash? Rap, Jazz and Classical? no, we already covered those. Punk? no. World music? no. Zamfir the master of the pan flute? no. The marches of John Philip Sousa? Nope.

    New age? Yep! that'll be the Atlantic's next article. The gory and witty details of why they hate Yanni and John Tesh.

  20. #70
    Quote Originally Posted by JKL2000 View Post
    I'd like to see The Atlantic run something about how bad rap is.
    Why? Rap is its own genre.

    Progressive rock is a subgenre of rock music. Therefore, it can be held to the standards of rock music, and therefore much of the criticism leveled against it is totally legitimate. You don't have to agree with it or like it, but it's legitimate.

    Rap is a different story altogether. Just the fact that you said this reveals a disturbing racist angle.
    Last edited by Facelift; 08-07-2017 at 04:21 PM.

  21. #71
    Quote Originally Posted by Zappathustra View Post
    ^^ I think "white" is used here to reinforce the concept of "elitist", which is the quickest and safest way to dismiss everything that is above one's understanding.
    Maybe, fair point. But I took it more to mean that "white" is lacking in hipness or "soul." Squaresville. The Simpsons lampooned this perfectly years ago when Homer was watching a black comedian on TV who did the typical* "Black people drive like this (all relaxed and cool, one hand on the wheel, the other stretched out across the top of the passenger seat) but white people drive like *this* (all scrunched up, both hands on the wheel, totally nerdy); audience laughs including Homer (exaggeratedly). Cool versus uncool. Ramones vs. prog.

    *There was a lot of that humor back then from black comedians, but I thought it was pretty funny myself. But I have a different reaction when it's done by white idiotic journalists. Maybe that's me ;-)

  22. #72
    Highly Evolved Orangutan JKL2000's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Trane View Post
    What's wrong with whitest of white music anyways??

    Should we be ashamed?
    Quote Originally Posted by Scrotum Scissor View Post
    The purported "shame" lies in the assumed implications; progressive rock claims optimal creative freedoms yet somehow (allegedly) presets the most narrow concept of human context. By demonstrating/revealing/exposing its (apparent) exclusiveness in that department, its worth as art is somehow also unconditionally compromised.
    Does the writer have a problem with literature or visual art that's too white?

  23. #73
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    SJW is an abbreviation for Social Justice Warrior. I had to look it up.

  24. #74
    Jazzbo manqué Mister Triscuits's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Baribrotzer View Post
    SJW is an abbreviation for Social Justice Warrior.
    Not this guy?

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  25. #75
    Quote Originally Posted by Facelift View Post
    Why? Rap is its own genre.

    Progressive rock is a subgenre of rock music. Therefore, it can be held to the standards of rock music, and therefore much of the criticism leveled against it is totally legitimate. You don't have to agree with it or like it, but it's legitimate.

    Rap is a different story altogether. Just the fact that you said this reveals a disturbing racist angle.
    Rap is rock and roll according to the revisionists at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Prog is not rock and roll if you follow the New York elitist critics attempts at ignoring the genre altogether. Sure, Genesis and Yes are in the Hall, but not for what they did in the 70s (had Yes and Genesis hung up their guitars in 1978 or 79, they wouldn't even be considered). However, you have an influx of rap artists being selected due to this homogenization and revisionism.
    "And your little sister's immaculate virginity wings away on the bony shoulders of a young horse named George who stole surreptitiously into her geography revision."

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