The moderator of a Facebook page dedicated to music journalism asked its members what their general view of Progressive Rock happened to be. As with most who wrote for a time about hip sounds from young rockers, my relationship was ...problematic.
Never a great fan of prog rock, although I count Zappa's
instrumental albums and most of the King Crimson releases among the greatest
works released under the increasingly vague classification of "rock."
Theirs is music that's stayed fresh in my mind; the likes of Grand Wazoo or
Larks' Tongue in Aspic still make me want to write long essays on music that
was recorded nearly half a century ago.
The fact that the music has withstood decades of changing
trends, fashions, and fads comes from the singular obsessions of Zappa and
Robert Fripp in how they ran their respective bands, the Mothers of Invention
and King Crimson. Though their sounds were singular, unto themselves, distinct
from each other in many ways, Zappa and Fripp were unafraid through the several
decades of their existence to change styles, adapt new ploys, experiment,
extend, and suddenly change course in musical directions as it suited their
individual interests. Granted, there are signature tricks and sounds that one
identifies with either band, but it's a safe bet that one can easily note the
wild evolution of both through their long histories.
It's the artists who continue to challenge themselves with new concepts that intrigue me and keep my interest, especially the ones who have a definite idea of what they want to assemble with the new sonic territory they've decided to invade, plunder, exploit, and make new. Not every eclectic spirit in rock is able to do this.For the genre in general, it started out as—and remained essentially—a one-idea concept: tricky time signatures, long instrumental passages, classical quotes, awful, awful, awful pontification of philosophical and spiritual matters in the worst kind of poetic form imaginable. Musically, it was exciting stuff, riveting, challenging (I lifted the tone arm to skip vocal parts and get straight to the extended trick-tempo jams ahead), but after a very few years, too much of it started to sound alike, sameish—a retreading of ideas already successfully explored previously. The bands in general created their own brand of genre clichés and repeated them.
For me, the tipping point was Tales from Topographic Oceans,
the three-disc release from Yes that achieved the distinction of being even
slower moving than the most lugubrious tracks from Pink Floyd. The lyrics were
impossibly insufferable, grandiose, incoherent, and glutted with toothless
bromides that at best suggested that the listener was on the verge of
experiencing a miracle. The only miracle here was that the album did have a
last side, a last track, a last note, from which one could again rejoin the
land where one is allowed to think clearly about a world that actually exists.
I have many exceptions to my general rule of not being a fan
of prog rock in general, but in general I walk the other way.
