What is Prog?

There is a lot of misconceptions about prog rock.

I keep hearing things like “It’s all songs about elves and wizards, I want to hear songs about real things”. I’ve even heard that coming from someone who used to be in a band named after a magic sword! It gets labelled as music that punk allegedly saved us from, parroted by generations of music journalists who were too young to have been around in the 1970s. I was amused when The Guardian’s Alexis Petridis reviewed a Genesis reissue, and was amazed to find it was full of tunes! He was about six years old at the time of punk.

The the stigma is such that bands such as Marillion or Porcupine Tree have on occasions loudly denied any connection with the genre, and that’s used by loud, obnoxious factions within at least one fanbase to bash anyone that dares to like such ‘uncool’ music.

As Electric Hedgehog wisely said, genre definitions should be shared tools, not weapons of conflict. ,

So what exactly is ‘prog’ nowadays? If you look at artists that have featured in Classic Rock Presents Prog over the past few months, ‘Prog’ covers artists as diverse as Radiohead, Kate Bush, Opeth and The Mars Volta. All of whom sound absolutely nothing like each other whatsoever. Prog is something that’s not easy to define, but you often know it when you hear it. Sometimes there are the obvious markers like lengthy songs, Mellotrons, 7/8 time signatures, and that overdriven guitar sound favoured by many guitarists in the genre. But none of those are anything like universal, and indeed some of them are so clichéd that many bands try to avoid them. What present-day bands do have in common are musical ambitions that extend beyond the three minute pop songs, a greater level of musical dexterity and complexity than is common in indie bands, and far more light and shade than you see in most metal. The majority of today’s prog bands take at least some musical influences from non-chart music from the period between 1968 and 1975, or thereabouts, which in turn took influences from jazz, folk and especially classical music alongside those from earlier rock and pop.

Some bands, like for example IQ stick pretty closely to a template established in the first half of the 1970s by bands like Van der Graaf Generator and especially Genesis, but succeed by doing it well enough to transcend being a mere pastiche. Other bands, such as The Pineapple Thief take a more streamlined modern sound with a very song-orientated approach. Sweden’s Opeth started out as a straight death metal band before incorporating influences from 70s British bands such as Camel into their sound. And I can’t not mention Mostly Autumn, whose influences range from Pink Floyd to classic rock bands like Fleetwood Mac and Deep Purple. All these bands, to my ears, fall within the broad genre of prog, whether they choose to accept the label or not.

Yes, like any other genre, Sturgeon’s Law applies. There’s quite a bit of what I’ve described as ‘Euro landfill prog’ out there, directionless jams produced by people who are clearly competent musicians but don’t seem to know anything much about composition or putting any emotional depth into their music. And I won’t deny there are unimaginative retreads of earlier, better bands in much the same was as many landfill indie bands make unimaginative pastiches of The Kinks or The Jam.

But surely no genre deserves to be judged by it’s most mediocre contributors, but by those that represent the best the genre has to offer.