Prog Related?

For those of you who have never gone for a visit to http://www.progarchives.com/ , it’s a fantastic site with over 20,000 prog albums from over 4,000 bands catalogued. They’ve got a lot more reviews and info than I could ever accumulate here and a forum. But one thing about the site I don’t like is a category, called “Prog Related”. This is an umbrella category designed to hold all sorts of artists that are not prog, but have some progressive influence in their music. Today, I seek to work through an issue I have with this category.

The problem is for way too many of those entries they don’t strike me as having an ounce of prog to them. A smaller number have enough to be at least “Crossover prog”, which is the opposite, progressive music that has influences from mainstream pop in addition to all the jazz and classical. Have a look at their top 5 albums in prog related:

· Queen II- Queen
· Argus- Wishbone Ash
· A Night at The Opera- Queen
· Led Zeppelin IV (a.k.a. Zoso) - Led Zeppelin
· Seventh Son of a Seventh Son- Iron Maiden

Now I like Queen, but what in their music is progressive exactly? From their own site, prog is defined as “a mostly British attempt to elevate rock music to new levels of artistic credibility."[1] Queen does come from Britain, but the problem is Queen doesn’t really elevate rock music to new levels of artistic credibility. They aimed and succeeded at the singles market, and while their songs did vary in genre, very rarely would something progressive make its way in. It’s not that Queen never did anything prog, it’s just that it wasn’t frequent enough to be even considered anywhere in the same ballpark. I like Queen, but because their songs and albums are fun, not progressive.

Led Zeppelin’s and Iron Maiden’s inclusion confuses me even more. These bands are blues/ hard rock and metal, respectively, and those genres are almost contradictory to prog. The focus here is getting famous, taking drugs, having sex. Prog music explicitly stays away from these themes in the music to concentrate on the art value. I own over half of Zeppelin’s albums and have heard most of the rest, and there’s not a thing on any of them that even sounds progressive, let alone is progressive. I’m not as familiar with Iron Maiden, but knowing the 80s heavy metal scene as I do, you can’t be both progressive and metal.

This leads me to my qualm with all these “Progressive Metal” bands like Dream Theatre and similar acts. Prog Metal does have some use, some bands that are not 80’s Hair Metal-type Metal do use unusual chord structures and playing patterns in the music, but the term is way to generalized. The problem is they sound much too similar to pop music, normal metal music, or just standard prog all too often. Whenever I hear a Yamaha grand piano or grunge guitar in “Prog Rock”, I find the music too commercial. It is for these reasons that I concentrate on classic rather than modern prog.

So can music straddle the line between prog and other music? Yes. In my first article, I mentioned Prog can also be called “Art Rock”. This is not entirely true if you want to be a purist. Art rock artists make their music for the sake of making an artistic statement, Progressive rock artists want to elevate rock music by trying something new. For an analogy, Realist painters in the mid 1800’s are art in the same way art music works: Gustav Courbet and John Singer Sergeant wanted to make painting more exact, technical, and anti-Romanticist. They made heavy commentary on the state of the world of painting. Impressionists from the same period are “Progressive”, Claude Monet and Edgar Degas wanted to try new experiments with light and color in their painting.

Obviously, it’s easy to do both at the same time, which is why for many people, myself included, Art rock and Prog rock are interchangeable terms. But when I get very technical, I’ll differentiate. Pink Floyd’s music works as both art and prog rock, as their stuff is both making a statement with the way they do things, and inventive. Jethro Tull, King Crimson, and many more work the same way. “Emerson, Lake, and Palmer” however have a statement to act absolutely ridiculous. Many prog fans pan them for being too much of a joke, such as myself. They did not make a great statement, they just had some fun. ELP are prog, but not art rock. Let’s talk about the last of Prog Related’s Top 5, Argus. This is a hard rock album form 1972. They didn’t really do anything new or close to new, despite deep lyrics and technical playing. They are Art rock, but not prog.

Taking a look at some of the other artists from the top 20 Prog- Related albums we can discard some non-prog like entries Blue Öyster Cult, Metallica, and Muse, and clump the others into an “Art, not Prog” category, like Black Sabbath and David Bowie. From here on, Count Felix’s prog blog declares all art rock albums that are not progressive are fair game on this blog, but I’m not going to waste time on the famous stuff like Sabbath or Bowie. There’s plenty of literature on the internet about them as is.

[1] http://www.progarchives.com/Progressive-rock.asp “A definition of Progressive Rock Music”