Progressive Rock in the Great Cannon of Music

Amongst the general public, artists come and go in quick succession and few have much in the way of decades-long popularity the way The Beatles or The Rolling Stones have. Amongst music junkies, however, there's a collection of recordings that always get praise year after year after year, continually being placed on best albums of all time lists and gaining notoriety. Sometimes there's overlap between the two, as Abbey Road, Blonde on Blonde, Led Zeppelin IV, Master of Puppets, and Nevermind are always there. On the other hand, there's some real oddities that many people have never heard of, like Marquee Moon and just about every classic Jazz album except for about 4. In addition, there's the ones that despite public knowledge of them today, took decades to achive any sort of acceptance, including The Velvet Underground and Nico and Pink Moon.

There's just a minuscule fraction of those albums that are Progressive Rock. While Prog is not music for the masses, and appropriately just a few Pink Floyd Albums, Aqualung, and possibly a Yes album are two are on the popular list. But what about those critics? Surprisingly, the alleged "champions of the non-mainstream" seem to hate the genre if it benefits them.

Taking a look at Rolling Stone Magazine's 500 greatest albums of all time, a whooping 4 albums of progressive rock under the traditional definition made the cut*, three of them by Pink Floyd, and the other being Aqualung (the neo-prog Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness by Smashing Pumpkins was on the list also, if you consider that equivalent). Now, Rolling Stone don't have an ounce of respect in the community of real music fans. Why would they hate Prog? Most of the people who bother to read it won't enjoy the genre, so why point them there when they can have pop? Similarly, internet communities with lots of teeny boppers from generations Y and Z have little to no prog on similar lists.

All is not lost however. Going to another source, the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, collected by Robert Dimery, is a collection of reviews from various music journalists. A very respectable 32 Prog albums from the classic era made their collection†. Considering they had 50 years to cover and many genres (there's some really mediocre country in that book just to make it look like they care), almost 1 in 30 albums isn't too bad. Music sites with lots of really deep fans also have good turnout for Prog. Rateyourmusic.com has 2 in their top 10 albums, almost unheard of elsewhere.

If anything, all this hubub just confirms that Prog isn't for most people, but for the lucky few it really endears itself and sticks like glue. The only question left is whether sacrificing the other genres to hear as much prog as possible is worth it, but that's for another time.

*(Using a very broad definition of Progressive rock, you can get that number up to 8 with a hand from Kraftwerk, Frank Zappa, and Captain Beefheart.)
†(The large definition makes that 41)