How old are you?

[Yesspaz]

Originally posted by kirk
i'd say the difference
of the masters and today's prog is that none of the
masters set out to be prog.

Bravo! That is it.

I wrote a mini-essay a while back that touches these lines. Someone said that we are going having a bit of a prog revival soon - a new wave of prog. I countered that the prog revival already happened, and the prog people missed it. It was called Post Rock. They didn't set out to be prog, and so they weren't called prog. Think about it...

Ideology they are identical. In the 60s, a group of musicians were less than enthralled with the music scene and branched out to make music that was, as Jon Anderson put it on YesYears, "important." The exact same thing happened in the 90s. Musicians grew tired of punk, hard-core, and grunge. They started to experiment. Post Rock was born.

Just as prog has many subgenres, so does post. That's why artists as diverse as GYBE!, Fontanelle, Mogwai, Billy Mahonie, Stars of the Lid, Tortoise, Don Caballero, Sigur Ros, and Tarentel can all fall under the Post umbrella. Many of these artists play right along-side many well known Prog artists here on AM and fit right in. Many listeners (especially those not on the boards) probably assume that Sigur Ros is a prog band from Iceland, rather than a post band from Iceland. In other words, "what's the difference?" Both genres are based on expanding past rock's "normal" boundaries. There are differences, such as prog using classical and jazz as it's touchstone whereas post touches punk. Almost every time one reads a review of a post rock album, the reviewer references a prog band or prog in general. Basically, they are the same thing.

So I say the prog revival already happened, and it went right under most people's noses. It started in the 90s and continues today.

I like to think of it in these terms. We have two streams of prog today:

1. The prog bands who follow directly in the footsteps of the masters, such as The Flower Kings and Spock's Beard.
2. The prog bands who "progressed" out of the punk and core culture, yet still are aware of and versed in the masters, such as Tortoise and Fontanelle.

Yes, the two streams have much in common, but are not identical. I like to think of them as half-brothers: Same father (high musical ideals); different mothers (60s/classical/jazz vs. 90s/punk/core/70sProg).


(edited after Poda's comment below)