I wrote a piece in alternating bars of 9/8 and 7/8. Sounded normal to me, but I was informed it could not be danced to. I was surprised.
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Why did prog rock never have mass popularity?
- Thread starter MidnightRunner
- Start date
I wrote a piece in alternating bars of 9/8 and 7/8. Sounded normal to me, but I was informed it could not be danced to. I was surprised.
Oh, my gosh.
Prog was highly successful.
So many weird tropes here.
You can't dance to it? I can. Women don't like it? I do. You can't hum the melodies? Sure you can; it's a lot more melodic than much of today's music. You have to think about it? No you don't. Nobody "thinks" about music. You feel it or you don't. You hear it and it moves you, or it doesn't. You might have to think it through a little to play it, but if you can count to ten you can find just about any odd measure and count it as a player. It's not hard.
Prog was successful in its day. Someone up there talked about revisionist history and we sure do have a lot of that around here. It's on a par with believing that there was such a thing as "yacht" rock that people actually played while motoring around on big boats. No. That is not how it actually went down, and prog was pretty successful for a fairly short amount of time.
Why did it burn out so quickly? I'm guessing it was a victim of its own grandiosity, because there was a lot of rebellion against what seemed, to some, to be burgeoning levels of pretentiousness. Once it crossed into the mainstream there was money to be made on it, and you had manufactured bands aping prog who didn't have the creative juice to propel it forward. It spiraled into a quagmire of wannabees, and most of them were not very good.
But, at the same time, elements of prog were being airlifted into popular music. I don't think prog died as much as it dissipated into much of what came next. A lot of the new-wave and synth-pop bands owed an enormous debt to prog. People like David Bowie cut their eye-teeth on it. Brian Eno met David Byrne and produced massively popular records. Metal would not be metal without prog foundations.
Prog didn't ever die, it just kind of left its mark all over the place.
There will always be people who just want a 4/4 beat to dance to and there will always be people who want a more immersive musical experience. Sometimes those people are the same people. Just like the fallacy that every local band has to be a dance band, we have the fallacy that prog bands never filled stadiums. Y'all will keep rewriting history until people like me aren't around to remember it anymore. It's a very interesting thing to watch.
Prog was highly successful.
So many weird tropes here.
You can't dance to it? I can. Women don't like it? I do. You can't hum the melodies? Sure you can; it's a lot more melodic than much of today's music. You have to think about it? No you don't. Nobody "thinks" about music. You feel it or you don't. You hear it and it moves you, or it doesn't. You might have to think it through a little to play it, but if you can count to ten you can find just about any odd measure and count it as a player. It's not hard.
Prog was successful in its day. Someone up there talked about revisionist history and we sure do have a lot of that around here. It's on a par with believing that there was such a thing as "yacht" rock that people actually played while motoring around on big boats. No. That is not how it actually went down, and prog was pretty successful for a fairly short amount of time.
Why did it burn out so quickly? I'm guessing it was a victim of its own grandiosity, because there was a lot of rebellion against what seemed, to some, to be burgeoning levels of pretentiousness. Once it crossed into the mainstream there was money to be made on it, and you had manufactured bands aping prog who didn't have the creative juice to propel it forward. It spiraled into a quagmire of wannabees, and most of them were not very good.
But, at the same time, elements of prog were being airlifted into popular music. I don't think prog died as much as it dissipated into much of what came next. A lot of the new-wave and synth-pop bands owed an enormous debt to prog. People like David Bowie cut their eye-teeth on it. Brian Eno met David Byrne and produced massively popular records. Metal would not be metal without prog foundations.
Prog didn't ever die, it just kind of left its mark all over the place.
There will always be people who just want a 4/4 beat to dance to and there will always be people who want a more immersive musical experience. Sometimes those people are the same people. Just like the fallacy that every local band has to be a dance band, we have the fallacy that prog bands never filled stadiums. Y'all will keep rewriting history until people like me aren't around to remember it anymore. It's a very interesting thing to watch.
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I thought it was a really sly dig at the 1% being so isolated from the common reality that everyone else has to confront on a daily basis that they've effectively selected themselves out of it, and that you took them from the unthinking part of the equation for the same reason. Basically Eloi.
My bad, I guess.
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shh keep it down or the forces that conspired to ruin other subgenres will turn Prog Rock into Tiktok fodder too!
Prog rock never got hugely successful (and that's a good thing) because it's music for musicians, and most people are not musicians
Prog rock never got hugely successful (and that's a good thing) because it's music for musicians, and most people are not musicians
It's essential and critical to categorize things so we can make fun of things we don't like- and people can then make fun of the things we do like.
The only difference between this music and 4/4 music for dancing is that you have to have more familiarity with the odd time stuff so that you know where you're going if you're going to dance in a way that mirrors the rhythmic tempo changes. But if you can sway back and forth, you can move to anything. It really doesn't matter if the one is on your left foot or your right.
Ya, that's kinda what made it an "underground station". No selling five 30-second spots in between a couple two and a half-minute songs, with five seconds of jock talk - time and temp - over the outro and the intro. So they weren't phenomenally profitable. But on the underground station, the jock actually had time to say something meaningful about the music. They were there for the music, not for the money, IMO.
It's easy to narrow down
"the thing I like should be more popular and is under appreciated."
I like to say that there is a universal truth, that people like to boogie/dance and as soon as a style of music doesn't let them dance anymore they move elsewhere. People danced to Big Bands and when they couldn't dance to stuff like BeBop they moved to Rock and Roll, as soon as Rock had long keyboard and drum solos people went to disco. On any given Friday or Saturday night there is a full club with people dancing.
I saw John perform his music (he was right in front of me) for a Merce Cunningham show I saw in the early '80s. Some fantastically wild "music" that evening.
With some noted exceptions, it may primarily be a US'ican problem as to dancing to odd time signature music. I have written lots of such music that audiences did, in fact (US'icans, even), dance to.
Here's an aside, with no intention of hijacking this topic...
OK. I'll confess. While I recognize that, for purposes of discussion, categories are often used to define a certain type of music based on generalities for that music. The same can be said for architectural styles, art, or almost anything. However, a category of music has never been something that I identify with. I like a huge oddball bunch of stuff: Beatles, Bowie, Bach, Beethoven, Sex Pistols, Gogol Bordello, Rush, Yes, The Rolling Stones, T-Rex, The New York Dolls, Rachmaninoff, The Dead Boys, The Beach Boys, The Beastie Boys, Cat Stevens, The Roches, Jonathan and Darlene Edwards, Frank Sinatra, Mose Allison, The Mothers of Invention, John Denver, Bread, James Taylor, Dwight Yokum, X, The Knitters, Dolly Parton, The Doors, Cream, Jethro Tull, Elton John, Sam Phillips, T-Bone Burnett, CCR, RUN DMC....so, so many. I'm sure if I listened to almost any style of music I can find something to really enjoy about it. I don't know what that says about me, whether I have no taste, or indiscriminate taste. But it frustrates me when there's so much good music out there that some people (looking at one of my "bandmates" who can ONLY relate and include one genre of music on our setlist) can only listen to, or play, or perform ONE genre of music.
OK. I'll confess. While I recognize that, for purposes of discussion, categories are often used to define a certain type of music based on generalities for that music. The same can be said for architectural styles, art, or almost anything. However, a category of music has never been something that I identify with. I like a huge oddball bunch of stuff: Beatles, Bowie, Bach, Beethoven, Sex Pistols, Gogol Bordello, Rush, Yes, The Rolling Stones, T-Rex, The New York Dolls, Rachmaninoff, The Dead Boys, The Beach Boys, The Beastie Boys, Cat Stevens, The Roches, Jonathan and Darlene Edwards, Frank Sinatra, Mose Allison, The Mothers of Invention, John Denver, Bread, James Taylor, Dwight Yokum, X, The Knitters, Dolly Parton, The Doors, Cream, Jethro Tull, Elton John, Sam Phillips, T-Bone Burnett, CCR, RUN DMC....so, so many. I'm sure if I listened to almost any style of music I can find something to really enjoy about it. I don't know what that says about me, whether I have no taste, or indiscriminate taste. But it frustrates me when there's so much good music out there that some people (looking at one of my "bandmates" who can ONLY relate and include one genre of music on our setlist) can only listen to, or play, or perform ONE genre of music.
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I can't fathom it, myself. I get really bored, as a general rule, listening to any particular style of music for more than a few songs. I need variety, I guess.
I listen to music based on my mood. So some sense of genre is important to me as a listener. But with my own physical collection it is not easy to put pieces into categories. Many pieces wind up in more than one group. Prog Rock as a category is actually limiting, but it does represent a mindset that goes way beyond just Prog Rock, to Jazz, Fusion, even classical and etc. Prog influenced Jazz and Jazz influenced Prog. Cross pollination is everywhere. Just look at Miles Davies from Bebop to Kind of Blue to Bitches Brew. That is a huge range!
Having a wide variety of taste and now the streaming services I have a ton to listen to without having to listen to "cookie cutter pop".
Prop Rock, like the other genre are still here and popular high up on the mountain even if not at the very top. There is so much music out there that no one specific type can be the very top very long anymore.
It's a great time as a listener, but you do need some minimal guide.
So, here is how I look at it. Different music is intended for different audiences. For example; genres like classical and jazz are generally intended to appease musically intelligent people; whereas genres like hip-hop and classic rock are intended to appease the public. The simpler the song, the easier it is to understand, and thus like. So most of the time a pop tune with a catchy melody will be liked by a wider audience than a complex jazz fusion tune that implements a variety of musical concepts.
Prog rock is generally a more harmonically and rhythmically complex genre that is made for the sake of making fulfilling music rather than worrying about how it will sell. Many people love it, but its greater level of complexity makes it a bit tougher to understand, and thus will not appeal to the widest possible audience.
