Progressive Rock Reconsidered
With the revolution of ’77, you’d think prog rockers would’ve been the first lined up against the wall, but megastars like Led Zeppelin made a fatter target. In fact, prog was as hated by reigning rock royalty like Zeppelin as by rock’s new proletariat, and by the time of “Anarchy in the U.K.” it was already widely considered too pathetic to waste spit on. By the dawn of the 80s, people who would still cautiously defend “Stairway to Heaven” would deny ever having owned a million-seller like Yes’s Tales From Topographic Oceans. In the 20 years since, even as Tony Bennett, easy listening, and jazz fusion have come back cool, prog’s fortunes have improved not one bit, a state of affairs that every die-hard fan is painfully aware of.
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The latest in a long line of attempts to get prog accepted into the canon–or at least gain a hearing for it–is Progressive Rock Reconsidered, a collection of academic articles edited by musicologist Kevin Holm-Hudson, an assistant professor of music theory at the University of Kentucky. The book, which declares its boosterish slant in the introduction, does an adequate job on musicological analysis but somehow manages to avoid the sociological questions that are more relevant in understanding prog’s place (or lack thereof) in rock history.
Sheinbaum’s logic is faulty in other ways. First of all, rock groups incorporating “classical” elements in their music are not always despised. The late-60s experimental rock band the United States of America, most of whose members were formally trained in music, have been acclaimed by everyone from composer Elliot Schwartz to obscure-psych specialist Richie Unterberger. (Progressive Rock Reconsidered tries to claim them as proto-prog, in a welcome profile by Holm-Hudson himself.) But while the United States of America studied modern composition and were influenced by Morton Feldman, John Cage, and 20th-century electronic music, the big-name prog bands tended to prefer the work of 19th-century romantic composers and middlebrow household names like Mussorgsky and Brahms. Prog musicians usually came from a rock background–Yes covered the Beatles on early records–and generally gave the impression of being strivers: not so much members of the cultured elite as middle-class types who had outgrown “common” blues-based rock, vastly improved their chops, and read a few books. (How well they digested their referents is another can of worms.)
Most of prog rock’s greatest achievements had less to do with the low-level structure of the music than with feel. King Crimson in their prime could incinerate the competition with their mix of free improvisation, Bartok, and heavy metal; the bass and drum playing in Yes’s “Roundabout” comprised one of the most revolutionary sounds ever to grace a Top 40 single; Genesis in their heyday recorded some lovely pastoral records that can be considered “pretentious” only by association; and Gentle Giant (who, oddly, don’t even rate a mention in this book) were superb but relatively humble musicians who composed authentic medieval four-part harmony for rock instruments and generally pulled it off. This suggestion might be anathema to the book’s contributors, but a fresh look at these records from a traditional rock perspective might be the best idea of all.
