Prog rock epiphany

Roger Taylor, he was the drummer for Queen, right? :) I suppose if there’s an astrophysicist in the band then there needs to be an art critic for a bit of balance. What else did they get up to in their spare time? “A history of the Church of England” by John Deacon? OK, I’ll stop now.

Mike Oldfield, not Gary.

The “Gary”for “Mike” comes from Tubeway Army?

I was too young to listen to this stuff at first, and only vaguely remember hearing “Tubular Bells” (the internet seems to say that it’s Mike, not Gary, but what do I or it know?). The thing I found when looking for it was, I thought at first, the X-files theme, but I guess it’s from the Exorcist. What it slightly reminded me of, though, was this, which definitely does not suck (and is from one of the best of all Soviet movies)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJj9y4t9UnU

(I guess a remake of this theme was a big hit in Europe a few years ago- faster, mostly. Bur Artemyev is a pretty great composer.)

Somebody isn’t smoking enough funny baccy if they don’t like absolutely everything Floyd.

The first prog musician would have to be Wagner: excess of everything, custom venues, devoted fans whose tastes are decidedly strange. But everyone bashing prog should stop and think: why can’t all forms of music be art? What’s wrong with aspiring to create something that isn’t three minutes long and about a girl or a car? I’ve never heard someone bash Cecil Taylor for what he does in favor of jazz that sounds like music. Somehow rock, if it isn’t made for enjoyment, is worthless. I doubt anyone would take the same attitude to Berg.

Prog rock was rarely rock but was something else. There were exceptions, but I think of rock as a primal expression rather than the meticulous and careful noodling (which I like!) of a lot of the prog folks. For me King Crimson was the best blend of mayhem and musicianship.

It’s a bit hard to recall now, but at that time the idea of Art as a unique and privileged kind of activity and the Artist as an inspired individual was in full flower.

Yes, rock was art already and prog was a way of reserving a space for an elite that you couldn’t join without years of dedication and a sense of focus approaching illness. I’m not sure that prog went away though: it continued crossbreeding with metal and a lot of those bands exhibit the same problems with sticking to a musical theme.

Sandanista must have been an attempt to outdo all those prog bands and their double albums.

I saw Tubular Bells for Two at the last Sydney Festival. It wasn’t pretentious at all, just great fun. And they play both sides of the album.

but I think of rock as a primal expression

I read stuff like this, I reach for my imaginary NAACP card. It has always struck me that there is something vaguely racist in the “rock primitivist” crowd, not only in that if rock ain’t based in Johnson, Sippie Wallace, and Muddy Waters it isn’t authentic, but that the black music rock must be based on has some kind of primal primitivist essence that demands an anti-intellectualism. Ellington begone, if it don’t have that swing, it don’t mean a thing.

I will not tell a twenty something what she can or cannot try. If the prog reach exceeded it’s grasp, well, that what’s kids do, God bless them. Romanticism has gotten a really bad rap recently, and if the alternative is Classicism, then the young should rebel and express themselves for the heck of it, offending and bewildering old fogies head-banging to their antique punk records.

The only time I ever drove someone from my room was with Brian Jones “Pipes of Pan at Joujouka.” Total garbage, he called it. I’m sure he would have agreed with Quiggin and Cohn on what music must be, what kids with instruments are commanded to play.

I read stuff like this, I reach for my imaginary NAACP card.

Indeed, imaginary!

not only in that if rock ain’t based in Johnson, Sippie Wallace, and Muddy Waters it isn’t authentic, but that the black music rock

If you want to examine the contents of my head you can ask for them: making them up is easier but less accurate.

“single most deplored genre of postwar pop music.”: thought that was disco.

speakin’o’history, from a while ago:
http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/troping_prog_as_toes/

I think we can all agree that the earlier one unlearns the ridiculous idea that “just because all the critics praise something, it must actually be good”, the better. I don’t remember when this happened for me, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was due to critical fawning over Bruce Springsteen, which was truly insane back in the day, or even now for that matter.

Equally uncontroversial is the fact that when prog rock fails, it can be, and in many famous cases is, because it has become kitsch (and thus well dismissed, as John does Tubular Bells here, as “pretentious”). I myself have mixed feelings about Oldfield, but I would like to stick up for Ommadawn side 1, which rocks. (He also plays on Robert Wyatt’s Rock Bottom, which is the greatest record ever made, so there’s that.)

On the other hand, I think that not only should we not identify prog rock with its excesses, it would also be a mistake to attribute these excesses, when they occurred, to the Romantic apotheosis of the Artist. If anything, that’s more characteristic of mainstream rock (been to Elvis’s grave recently, or Jim Morrison’s?) than of, say, Gentle Giant, who failed artistically not when they did what they were good at, but instead when they reached for rock stardom with blander and blander records (culminating in the notoriously awful ready-for-radio-airplay disaster Civilian – but I digress).

As with most things, the best prog rock will live forever – or it won’t, and our descendants (and some of our contemporaries, of course) won’t know what they’re missing.

The fact that art is now industrially produced makes it no less organic.
Corporations are an aspect of culture, no more free and independent than anything else.

What, no love for Magma?!? [/snark]

Though I was never a big fan of prog rock as a genre (and remember endlessly teasing friends of mine who were back in the ’70s), Floyd and King Crimson certainly hold up for me. I’ll also admit to a soft spot for Jethro Tull (though I won’t really defend it in terms of quality) and an appreciation (in very small doses) for Soft Machine and the solo acts that came out of it.

I just listened to (the quasi-prog) E.L.O.’s Out of the Blue for the first time in three decades and, while it’s crap, it’s very fun crap. I don’t plan to wait another three decades to listen to it again.

(Incidentally, the problem I always had with prog’s version of “rock as art,” was not the idea of art or even Art, but rather the very cramped vision of art-as-classical-music that most prog rock acts seemed to subscribe to.)

Ben Alpers, do us all a favor and defend you mother and her choice of career.
You of all people should know she deserves more respect than she’s given here.

etc. @33: I don’t think my mother or her discipline need any defense….though I’d add that she might be the last person to defend art history (at least as it tends to be practiced) as a field. I wasn’t aware, at any rate, that she’s been shown disrespect on CT. Maybe I’m not reading carefully enough!

Maybe I haven’t read enough. Is she that contemptuous of art, of Giotto and Sophocles? Maybe so. I’ll have to read more, or ask Tim Clark.

So Tin Pan Alley never existed, and Brahms wasn’t touring Europe to lead orchestras? Adorno critiques the cult of the maestro years before the Spice Girls are manufactured.
As for the excesses of the elite, Emerson, Lake and Palmer filled stadiums and were on the radio, hardly the sort of venue for something confined to a small number of people.

Bashing a supposed artist elite as being out of touch is easy. But art is important: it’s the appreciation of unities through the faculties of immediate understanding, and the pretentiousness (or complexity) is important: it’s more of a unity, more of a challenge to comprehend, and so a higher quality aesthetic experience. In that sense, insofar as this is essential to human flourishing, lack of access to art and its appreciation is a real form of deprivation.

Our inability to see the beauty in Stockhausen isn’t because of him: it’s because we live in a culture that has degraded one of the core human experiences.

Not progrock, but poprock: Get Well Soon is about to release his third album, and a brilliant video accompanies a new track (via Metafilter)-(caution, not safe for kids):

The song starts about 1:30.

This fellow is not only writing and singing, I think he is orchestrating and producing. This is from his first album:

I take it that this whole thread is a demo in error theory.

The fact that Rush’s songwriting was however briefly Randian is no more important than the fact tha Kansas or U2 are now and forever Born Again Christian. Dr Ralph Stanley is a lifetime follower of the Primitive Baptist Church. Hallelujah. Kansas still sucks. U2 are problematic. All a question of music, as literature is a question of language.

@John Quiggin

Thread assessment: Dear oh dear.

You’re quite right that the arts were long dominated by an elite that was often self-serving and which included within its ranks many stuffed shirts interested in nothing more than demonstrating social superiority. But the invocation of high art was and is no different psychologically from the invocation of the most holy, and ever since the dawn of humanity there have existed hierarchical and dogmatic organisations that have not only reserved the right to determine what exactly the most holy might be but also to inflict punishments of severity ranging from social ostracism to bodily dismemberment for voicing alternative views.

Over time, such groups, ranging from the Catholic Church to the Soviet Union and on to the High Art establishment, have a natural tendency to develop ever greater degrees of ideological or aesthetic cohesion, or perhaps rigidity, as schismatic disputes are worked out. Furthermore, even though these establishments might have grown absurd or obsolete and thus been overthrown, they had invariably up to the present day reconstituted themselves in short order, often in only slightly altered form. Nor are either pro- nor anti-establishment views something new under the sun.

But your rejection of the artistic establishment in the late-60s/early-70s did not occur in isolation. Rather, identical decisions were made almost simultaneously by millions across the world. And your dismissal of the artistic establishment notwithstanding, this time the change stuck so really you’re flogging a thoroughly deceased horse. Insofar as it existed at all, the artistic establishment of the 1970s was a mere fragment (and by far the stupider fragment) of its former self, an entity possessing none of the immense power it had held in earlier generations.

Going back over the 20th Century, the high-art elite had suffered innumerable convulsions, from expressionism to jazz. On each occasion those in power had been dispossessed only for a new orthodoxy to swiftly reemerge. And believe me when I say that the power of these groups was out of any proportion to that which lingered in the 70s and 80s. The idea of having a career in the humanities in the 1950s while questioning the value of ballet or opera was unthinkable. It was possible to keep silent, but to be classed as a philistine was career suicide.

So why has hierarchy failed to re-emerge this time around. The answer actually has a single dominant component: it starts with a “P” and ends with an “ostmodernism.” It’s with exasperation that I note it hasn’t been mentioned a single time so far in this thread

Any headway made by postmodernism as a dogmatic (or anti-dogmatic) movement is debatable. On the other hand, it gave rise to an explosion of artistic creativity ranging from Sergio Leone’s westerns to the famous closing scene of the Sopranos. It was impossible to make sense of these creations in terms of any prevailing aesthetic. In fact no system of aesthetics could logically make sense of them. This is because, if it is to make sense, any cultural ideology requires the separation of the object (the artwork) and the rule (aesthetic). In a postmodern work, however, the object (e.g. one of Leone’s westerns) and the rule (lots of other westerns) cannot be disentangled.

It was this failure that shattered hegemonic high art. Postmodernism as a logic-corroding philosophical movement merely prevented the fragments from re-assembling as they’d always done in the past.

Though the merit and originality of many postmodernist works can’t be denied, by their very nature they demand that the observer remain consciously outside the work being observed. They are either statements about art itself or about our relationship to art. Taking the final scene from the Sopranos as an example, it’s without doubt brilliant but also modest. It’s a statement about cinematography as well as about things like “family” and “violence”. And when dramatic themes like family or violence are overlaid with statements about cinematography or our relationship to art then they can only be trivialised as a result, because to appreciate a postmodern work the observer must remain fully aware at all times that he or she is appreciating a postmodern work.

And it is a mistake to imagine that the downfall of artistic modernism somehow abolished elitism or snobbery. Snobbery is after all a force in human society that is universal in time an space.

Postmodernism has not acted equally against all manifestations of social or cultural elitism. Though it has demolished anything that might be called holy, its effects at the opposite extreme have been paradoxical because “postmodernism” doesn’t often appear in the same sentence as “Justin Bieber” or “Britney Spears”. In spite of the demise of high art, the cultural elite has therefore re-established itself in one important regard: we can no longer agree on what’s elevated or precious but that doesn’t stop us from agreeing on what’s the most debased or worthless.

What started out as a movement, in part political, attacking artificial and exclusive social, cultural, racial and sexual categories has dissolved into a formless tendency that paradoxically reinforces them. Rather than a vanishingly narrow apex at the top dictating to the mass of humanity, now the mass of humanity dictates to a vanishingly narrow apex at the bottom: Britney Spears, Katie Price, Justin Bieber, and so on. Instead of being demolished, the pyramid of social status has reformed once more only with the proportions reversed.

Hatred of the purest and most unrestrained type becomes in this context not just widely acceptable socially but, as far as many are concerned, actually laudible.

Nor has hierarchy been abolished, it’s just that now there are innumerable mini hierarchies many of which are just as ruthlessly self-serving as the unified establishment of the past. These are less self-aware and in many ways worse than what went before. You’ll hear well educated people these days condemning Britney Spears in the most poisonous terms with one breath and decrying elitism with the next. Genres such as science fiction that once were gaily unpretentious have now become choked with self-regard even as afficionados proclaim their anti-establishment credentials.

The urge to stratify hasn’t been tamed in the slightest, and if there’s anything more disgusting than a tiny group of the priviliged dictating tastes to the mass of humanity then it’s the mass of humanity uniting as a mob to dictate taste to a cultural underclass.

And of course in many of the places where it might have done the most good, e.g. religion, politics, culture apart from its artistic elements, postmodernism has either had no impact whatsoever or its impact has been rolled back over time.

John, I’ll stick to the 18th (to very early 19th). I’ve lent my Taylor to a friend, but Shiner’s version of the claim notices that in the mid-17th century there were no libraries, concerts, museums etc but that these institutions were all in place by 1800. He then goes in for a more detailed periodization of the art-craft split, ending with a final phase “from around 1800 to 1830, during which the term ‘art’ began to signify an autonomous spiritual domain, the artistic vocation was sanctified, and the concept of the aesthetic began to replace taste.” (p.75). So earlier than you, but overlapping.

@JQ

He was ahead of the wave all right, and of course he was held in contempt at the time although he himself always insisted on his serious artistic intentions. 2001: A Space Odyssey is likewise postmodernist when it both invokes and lampoons Nietzsche by playing “Also Sprach Zarathustra” over footage of the evolved ape braining all comers with his newly invented bone weapon.

To be honest I’ve little knowledge of how either of these was linked historically with the postmodernist philosophical movement; I could cobble together some stuff from wikipedia but as I’ve no special expertise there wouldn’t be much point. However I can say that conceptually speaking both fall under the postmodernist umbrella as neither can be understood without standing apart from the film itself and considering its consciously constructed links to other works. Leone’s focus, as described here, is very narrowly postmodernist. So I suppose the answer is the latter — a manifestation of postmodernity.

I’ve nothing against a thoroughgoing, broad and considered postmodernism once placed in some sort of context. But it should be remembered that it’s voraciousness extends far beyond high art to aesthetics generally (including for example the communist dominated folk that competed with high art), beyond aesthetics to ideology and beyond ideology to logic without qualification.

There are two dominant (anti-)ideologies today: conservatism (what politics can’t do) and postmodernism (what anything else can’t). There are valid critiques of either position that don’t rely on outdated or narrowminded ideas. What’s lacking is the confidence to tackle the useful but ultimately limited morass that is postmodernism.

‘Incidentally, the problem I always had with prog’s version of “rock as art,” was not the idea of art or even Art, but rather the very cramped vision of art-as-classical-music that most prog rock acts seemed to subscribe to.’

Surely this quote cuts to the nub of the matter? There is an implied contrast here between the pretentious seriousness of ‘prog’ versus the ‘hey let’s dance’ attitude of punk. But of course that’s nonsense. Punks hated prog (partly because they were both competing for the same commercial territory: white boys playing guitars). But if there was a revolution in ’77 it was a palace revolution. The one thing punk absolutely took over from prog (as Jon Savage pointed out) was that music could and should be ‘progressive’: that it should move forward to the future, not attempt to recreate the sounds of the past. Also: many (not all) punks were just as keen on the idea as pop music as Art as the most chin stroking of the progs. You don’t write songs about Marxism or alienation or environmental collapse if you think it’s all just dance music. And in any case there was a huge amount of musical crossover, from Steve Hillage supporting Sham 69 and producing Simple Minds, to Paul Weller playing on a Peter Gabriel record, to Lydon’s love of Van Der Graaf Generator, etc. etc. And if you broaden ‘prog’ to include bands like Can and Henry Cow, the contrast is lessened even further.

The real revolutionary force was disco, which really did oppose the idea of music as Art.

@47, 49:

There’s two senses of postmodernism here: (a) There’s a cultural trend, influenced by (among other things) the invention of mass media technologies such as printing, photography, recorded music, radio and television; capitalism as the dominant political/economic system; and advertising; (b) an academic literature that, among other things, responds to (a).

So, yes, it seems implausible that the academic literature could be the sole cause of the cultural trend; but they are possibly caught in a mutual feedback loop where one influences the other.

Hidari, you would do well to read Taylor’s chapter on Marxism and art. He’s got the number of the “we are standing up for universal values against commodification” crowd. Whatever they (with Adorno in first place) are standing up for is not universal.

Incidentally, I never said that the values of Art were universal. I said that when you abolish the values of Art you don’t get liberation: you get the values of the Commodity. What has changed is that we used to be the victims of cultural elitists who were cultural elitists. Now we are the victims of cultural elitists who are the CEOs of large American corporations.

@62

Even the “Once upon a time…” title (reused with “Once Upon a Time in America”) is an implicit reference, and Leone tried to cram in every cliche he could into his films.

His stuff can’t be classified solely in terms of postmodernism, though little can. OTOH his films and their appeal to successors like Scorsese simply can’t be explained in terms of a finite aesthetic consisting solely of rules rather than other artworks. This was the failure of modernism — or any -ism, because a collection of mutually-referential cultural works can’t be defined in terms of descriptive rules, only vague generative ones. This leaves him classified as postmodernist by default.

The parallel to Prog Rock in interest and in weakness is Jazz Fusion.
For an understanding of the blues in relation to “Art” talk to any expert on Bartok. Or talk to Charles Rosen. Talk to Rosen about about Art Tatum; Horowitz could play Tatum’s solos from memory.

I’m not sure the last thing about Horowitz qualifies as even apocryphal – it’s just BS. Horowitz was impressed by Tatum’s technique and ability to improvise, but that’s it. So what?

The main problem with prog rock was that it was humorless, just like much of this discussion. (And of course I don’t mean that the problem is that the music wasn’t ‘funny’, but that humor – or perspective – was conspicuously and unnaturally absent from it, even on those rare occasions when it tried to be ‘funny’ (except for Zappa)). There is a sense of the word ‘pretentious’ which is not entirely pejorative: a striving – successful or not – for something better or higher. Quite a bit of prog rock is worse than that because it really just apes 19th century ‘romantic’ bombast, which was of questionable value to begin with. However you feel about the concept of ‘art’, the good stuff isn’t vulgar in this literalistic way (in this case more notes/more physically virtuosic = better music). I’d also say that the good stuff doesn’t take itself as seriously as does both most 19th century musical ‘art’ and prog.

If I may also just assert something in response to the discussion above of PoMo: postmodernism is not a counterpose to conservatism. PoMo *is* conservative, and deeply and fundamentally so. It’s just the latest form of romanticism, and just as feckless and nihilistic. By no means am I saying that all pomo *art* is bad, but at base pomo is about politics, and it’s ugly ugly ugly – not to mention anti-progressive.

In the fetish character of music essay Adorno takes on more then just popular music. He begins by denouncing classical music for adhering to a few well known pieces with the cult of the maestro, a pre-disk DJ whose ability to select and modify existing pieces is his mark of “artistry”. Adorno is concerned that the space for apprehending unities which art has has been smothered by a commercialized art, which is precisely a class marker.

Think about a Stradivarius. Most people cannot tell what is so good about a Strad. Yet they feel it is something special and important when one appears in an orchestra. Taste, and with it any sort of critical faculty, vanishes when this is the way art is received.

So far I’ve said nothing new. But what is worth noting is the response. Adorno wouldn’t write “On Jazz” about Coltrane. He was writing about big band music, which thankfully has vanished. The response to the condition of philistinism was to try to make art again.

This is why I think Chris is wrong. If making art means producing an elite (which is not exclusive necessarily: see Sparta), and to not resist commodification is to surrender, then we are left with destroying the entire activity as human, and going back to folk music, produced with no idea that anything is happening. Postmodernism is exactly what Adorno takes on, in the figure of the tune detective. The distortion Chris talks about is exactly the production of an aesthetic.

There’s nothing wrong with music produced for reasons other then art. But there is something wrong with saying it can serve the same function as art music, because that amounts to saying art is superflous.

At the big U of Chicago comics conference this summer, Art Spiegelman said that when technology or commerce shifts a craft either dies or becomes Art. This is not cause for celebration, but it may be inevitable — part of the life cycle of artforms.

It was a kick to watch R. Crumb and Lynda Barry and Gary Panter on the edge of their seats watching for the academic machine to, in Crumb’s words, “cut their dick[s] off.”

The Bastard Offspring of Art and Commerce murder their parents and go off on a Sunday Outing.

67 are you accusing me of lying?
Look it up, jackass.

I stand corrected on Horowitz playing Tatum’s solos, so I apologize for calling you a jackass. That would be me.
He was a fan, as others were of Tatum’s art.

As for post-modern, art or anything else, the only thing we’re post is modernism. And, pace Panofsky, it’s proof of the marginality of comics that their ‘serious’ authors hover around academia with concerned looks on their faces. Plenty of college professors would kill to meet Coppola (father or daughter) or Scorsese, Fincher or Nolan, let alone Godard et al. David Simon doesn’t lose any sleep over the opinions of anyone at the University of Chicago.

“Poetry is art. Music is art. Phidias was a sculptor and Sophocles was a playwright. Both made art. Philosophers wrote about all the above.”

This seems rather anachronistic.

Well, I have a comment on it anyway. The story I’ve heard is that Horowitz met Tatum, who improvised something, which Horowitz was able to play back by ear (presumably not with the same touch etc. but with the right notes), but was still impressed that Tatum had improvised it, since he had no knowledge of improvisation. The story is definitely out there, so it at the least “qualifies as even apocryphal.”

On the original topic, I wasn’t quite a teenager when Tubular Bells came out, but I didn’t think it was pretentious, I thought it was really funny.

Looking up the release date on Wikipedia, I see that the voice introducing each instrument was Viv Stanshall of the Bonzo Dog Doo-dah Band, which makes me think Oldfield intended it to be funny.

Viv Stanshall indeed. And as to seriousness of Tubular Bells, to some (OK, a limited extent but it is there) extent it’s really just an arrangement of extant folk tunes. Not just the hornpipe at the end: the double speed guitar bit on side one is the spiritual “Joshua something something the walls of Jericho”.

The Intro and the Outro got there first.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DUEAG5eO6c

Maybe Oldfield got into the prog bin because he could Play Instruments and he could thus be spared the company of less-skilled racket-makers.

And, no, etc. wasn’t me, however much I may sympathize.

Maybe I should delete “tries to.” And then I guess I should conjugate “appeal,” too. Nothing necessarily wrong with 20-minute excursions into Indian scriptures, if the music is good.

Substance McGravitas beat me to it! Click on his link to the Bonzo’s ‘The Intro and the Outro’. It’s very funny, as is a lot of their work. My last comment on the main topic is that a lot of prog doesn’t seem as ridiculous now as it did when it was happening. In that sense prog was ‘ahead of its time’ – it fits into an earnest, humorless time like ours better than it did into the 60s and 70s (a time when there might be Bonzos….).

@ godoggo:

The story I’ve heard is that Horowitz met Tatum, who improvised something, which Horowitz was able to play back by ear (presumably not with the same touch etc. but with the right notes), but was still impressed that Tatum had improvised it, since he had no knowledge of improvisation. The story is definitely out there, so it at the least “qualifies as even apocryphal.”

You are right, it qualifies as apocryphal! Sorry about that.

However, I would be amazed – AMAZED – if Horowitz could have played back a Tatum solo of any length by ear. That is so vanishingly unlikely. It wouldn’t have been easy – even for Vladimir – to just play the notes, since, as we all know, Tatum had a fierce technique. Could Tatum have played back by-ear something virtuosic that Horowitz played? Now THAT is much more likely. Horowitz didn’t improvise, so it’s very unlikely that he had developed the skill to play by ear to that high a level. The ear is a gift, but the ability to play by ear is a skill. Tatum was in fact, as it were, all ears.

The version of the story I heard – don’t ask me where, because I can’t remember – is that Horowitz was impressed with Tatum’s technique; when he heard Art improvise something he asked him for the score, and Tatum said there wasn’t one – that he had improvised it.

@90 Avoid looking up lyrics.

You never got your Jon Anderson decoder ring, did you?

Oh, sorry, I must try to be civil…

@godoggo

What do perfect pitch and and an extraordinary memory necessarily have to do with being a great piano virtuoso? Really?

jonnybutter: they just seem to be fairly common attributes, it seems to me. Why? Perfect pitch comes from studying music at a very early age, which is generally considered necessary to be a great classical virtuoso. Memory would be useful for learning the repertoire in all its detail (i.e. not just banging out the notes). It really isn’t just a matter of Michael Phelps-like pure athleticism.

Perfect pitch comes from studying music at a very early age

OK, now you’re toying with me.

No. If you’re interested in what PP actually is, you can use Teh Google. It’s a rare thing, kind of like synesthesia. Perfect pitch doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with musical greatness – most wonderful/genius musicians don’t have it. Likewise with unusual powers of memory. People who don’t read – music or words – tend to have more developed memories, right? So it’s Tatum rather than Horowitz who probably had the highly developed memory.

It’s easier than it’s ever been to learn about anything, including music. There seems to be something, however, in the Anglo-American makeup that resists (like plague) to learn about, but nonetheless can’t resist lecturing about, music. It’s really weird.

Well I googled Perfect Pitch Early Childhood and got, from the first result, “It is sometimes said that, in its highest form, perfect pitch ability occurs in as few as one in 10,000 persons in the general population, almost always among people who have had musical training by the age of five. ” Also I understand it’s comparatively common among people who learn tonal languages at an early age. In other words, it’s an acquired trait, which can only be required during early brain development. Again, my points were a) it’s generally thought that it’s necessary to study music at an early age to become a first-rate classical virtuoso and b) perfect pitch is an effect of such early musical education. Plus I’ve just run into a number of anecdotes of top virtuosi having perfect pitch over the years. That’s why I wouldn’t be surprised to find it in Horowitz. But, again, as I said, I don’t know for sure. And, again, I said, “But yeah, I agree that the reverse would be easier to believe,” by which I meant, yeah, it’s likely that Tatum would have an easier time copping from Horowitz than the reverse.

No idea why you’re assuming I don’t know anything about music. I’ll just take your word for it that you do. But the reflexive condescension is… well, I guess it’s an Internet thing.

https://crookedtimber.org/2006/10/09/sometimes-behaves-so-strangely/

There’s a lovely bit of criticism from Matthew Ingram that reversed the usual logic and portrays punks as Reactionary / Thatcherite / Reaganite against the beardy communal lefty Prog types.

I’d be very interested to read that – certainly punk’s always struck me as simply a movement of reaction against whatever happened to be around in terms of dominant culture, so you got pro-Nazi punks in eastern Europe, racist punks and anti-racist punks in different bits of England, deliberately violent and offensive and badly performed punk music against a background of heavily produced big budget prog rock, etc.

>Tim Worstall

Viv Stanshall indeed<

Remember Viv wrote the lyric to Steve Winwood's "Arc of a Diver".

… or Ethan Iverson’s (whose music I happen to dislike, but two or three of his essays went a ways towards curing me of the inclination to say “I know a lot” about the stuff).

Ack. I was going to say, also, what does humor in music look like? What would be different about prog rock if it were present? And does it always have to be present–if a certain song or album has no humor, is it automatically lacking something?

@108 –I suppose you are mostly right. The opening 1:45 of “Every Little Thing” sounds progressive to me. But “progressive rock” has gained a wide definition in this thread, so I may be confused even more than is usual. For example, I do not think of the album “Dark Side of the Moon” as progressive rock, I would put it with “Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake” or The Pretty Things’ “Parachute”. I never thought of “Tubular Bells” as progressive, more like minimalism or raga rock, made into a concert-hall sit-down by Stanshallian sprechgesang.

I was prevaricating on whether to cut back into the thread or not and that “other side of the coin” argument was my entree. Ah well.

Of course the entire idea of ranking music is strange, as if pieces could be given a numerical rating. Pop music fans are looking for something quite different from artistry. It’s understandable that a pop tune lacks artistic merit when neither the producers nor consumers are looking for it. Conversely, if Shostakovich never wrote any catchy numbers it’s probably because he wasn’t trying.

There’s an exception to modern mores about what consenting adults get up to on their own time: incredibly, a piece of music can drop not just to value zero but actually lower, and it’s peculiar to music AFAIK. Someone who dislikes a piece of music can seldom merely ignore it. The general rule is that they’ll be overcome with a powerful desire for its destruction.

At the Paris premiere of Rite of Spring in 1913, riots broke out between bohemian and conservative factions in the audience and the unfortunate orchestra members were forced to play under a rain of furniture. Inside 30 years sizable elements of those factions drifted to either Action Française or to the Communist Party where they continued the fight, this time with guns. Stravinsky was hardly to blame for that, but it illustrates how at that time the arts were central to the brewing conflicts that were about to engulf Europe.

Although conflict has hardly ended, the arts are of little relevance to it today. Regardless of personal preferences for ‘high’ or ‘low’ and however they’re defined, this must be a failure — the only questions are by whom and of what sort. Not everything would need to be relevant; what’s incredible is that so very little actually is.

I think that’s how a lot of people see it, rock has to be ‘dangerous’ in a certain way, and ELP or Yes are inherently rock musicians who could have rocked out if only they weren’t too restrained/capitulating… but this is a really bad way to evaluate, or try to appreciate music.

Restraint is maybe not the word: the big bands of prog had people who could do extraordinary things with their instruments, and for ELP/Yes it was form of muscle-flexing. It’s not that they’ve restrained themselves, but they’re off the path. This for instance starts off with a lot of heft and then at 2:10 something happens that is just wrong wrong wrong (but also hilarious). And it doesn’t seem as if it’s service to what’s going on before it: it’s a different way to jerk off than just sounding big and tough.

ajay, you don’t think Snoop’s look is largely all about taking the piss?

@118, okay, I understood that before, what I’m wondering is, what does a little humor added in one place matter to the rest of the music? You say ‘the entire approach doesn’t allow it’ as if, were they only to include some self-deprecation here and there, the whole thing would be improved. Would this change our perception of the other songs, too, and change how they feel? And in any case, wouldn’t this criticism apply to a lot of rock music–Nine Inch Nails, a lot of metal…?

I don’t see what’s wrong with what they’re doing at 2:10.

Then I think you’re missing some of what’s funny in, say, Stonehenge by Spinal Tap.

It’s a shift to a completely different tone and feel, like they started imitating harpsichord music, and wouldn’t the track be really boring and forgettable without that part? Does rock always have to be hefty? Doesn’t that just get monotonous?

I would say:
No,
No, it can also be screechy (or some other take-charge-of-the-room variation)
Not to me.

That sounds like an appeal to masculinity.

It’s an appeal to a kind of power, which needn’t be masculine – obviously there are women who like and make such music – but which is often lunkheaded. I don’t want to shrink from an acknowledgement that a lot of what I like is dumb; sadly it’s what I always return to.

Isn’t rock ‘about’ (if it’s ‘about’ anything) not always coloring inside the lines?

Yes and no. Rock has to be loud and aggressive somehow. A distorted guitar playing a giant E chord represents rock in one swipe. It’s pretty easy to see why people want to leave it behind as eventually it’s just too stupid and easy. Bob Mould from Hüsker Dü had that feeling when he left the band – the volume is a kind of reliable sentimentality that always works on a certain crowd. It’s pretty easy to make a “rock is conservative” argument if you focus on a lot of the biggest bands out there.

(TMBG were fun live, but I find them wearing to listen to because it seems like one quirk after another. They’re funny and smart guys though, and right to say that clothing doesn’t have much to do with anything. That’s about a show. Kiss before their hitmaking phase were a fairly dull outfit and didn’t live up to their own cartoon.)

I’d say the Deep Purple solo is funny but it doesn’t interrupt the flow of the song in the way that the Yes thing does and so warrants exactly 3/4 less eye-rolling (though I like the Yes song more). The Highway Star is about a big dangerous car so fast and hot you want to fuck it, so it seems reasonable to suggest that concessions to powdered-wiggery are inappropriate.

117:

It’s understandable that a pop tune lacks artistic merit when neither the producers nor consumers are looking for it.

I can’t quite manage to assign a meaning to this statement. It does makes me sad for all those poor benighted empty souls feeding at the trough of pop music, though.

Conversely, if Shostakovich never wrote any catchy numbers it’s probably because he wasn’t trying.

I’m not so sure, because I doubt that there is such a strict ordering of skills as all that. It was hardly unheard-of for composers to be reduced to taking folk tunes and making them into music. (As the prof for my college music class put it; a class where a very limited scope of activities was the whole of music, and all the rest invisible.)

@123 You say ‘the entire approach doesn’t allow it’ as if, were they only to include some self-deprecation here and there, the whole thing would be improved. Would this change our perception of the other songs, too, and change how they feel? And in any case, wouldn’t this criticism apply to a lot of rock music—Nine Inch Nails, a lot of metal…?

The music itself would be different. It would feel/smell different. I don’t think you can ‘add it here and there’. It’s attitudinal and inseparable from the music itself. In fact, it’s only something you take away – it’s a naturally occurring substance – not something you add.

I find this discussion interesting because I think in this moment of our culture we have a fundamental problem with humor itself (or maybe ‘recently had’ – lots of tragedy, and therefore lots of humor, ahead probably). The exemplars of this problem are Matt and Trey, who can of course be *hysterically* funny – who have, at times, made me laugh so hard I DOTTED MY DRAWERS – but who also don’t seem to see a distinguishing line between humor and not-humor, which, IMHO, is why they always chicken out on their satire in the end, no matter how strong they start: no matter how daring and funny something begins (e.g. Team America), there always ends up being a quite maudlin element, usually at the end. Isn’t that strange? I think so.

We also have the entertainment concept of the ‘dramedy’, which is just a pathetic thing. Dramedy is a self-refuting term. You can have a drama with a comic sense, and you can have a comedy with a dramatic or serious level of meaning – or you can have a piece that doesn’t understand what either one is, and doesn’t understand what itself is, and that is the ‘dramady’.

I’m going to have to make this a blog post of my own somewhere…

Everyone should poke fun at rock or deviate from the path somehow: rock can be silly and deserves it. If you’re a musician that deviation is all but impossible to avoid: you learn to play and stretch out and suddenly you make a concept album or something. It doesn’t necessarily mean you’re making a rock song if you do that; it’s not helpful to have everything not-rock included in the set of rock if the right person does it. It also doesn’t mean you’re doing something bad if you inject some new elements into it, but there’s forcing it in with a hammer and there’s making it fit. I’d say the Yes song is the hammer approach, as unsubtle as Spike Jones but only funny inadvertently.

TMBG are a pop band making pop songs for the most part, although the John who plays guitar does like to make it sound a little dirty now and then.

If you ask a person “Does it rock?” when you ask them about a given song there’ll be variation but I think people have a general expectation of volume and energy.

117 implied “Shostakovich could have written catchy numbers if he wanted”.

My reply 127 implied “Maybe not, greatness in High Art doesn’t necessarily include skill in writing catchy numbers.”

In answer to this question in 128, which seems to be intended to be a response:

So you’re saying that all Shostakovich really wanted was some chart-topping success?

…I say, “No”. (And “huh?”)

Unrelated to that: yeah, Dark Side of the Moon is pretty decent, actually.

Actually, Shostakovich did write some catchy numbers, and was far from indiferent to popular success.