Guts in Progressive Rock

[Phanto]

where do you draw the line between for instance "adventurous prog metal" and other genres anyway? genres are dumb. especially "prog metal".

 

[Sauna]

Genres and subgenres are useful when discussing music just like the terminology in any other field, so I for one don't think they're dumb. However, I agree that being in some way bound by them in terms of the music you listen to or enjoy is.

And I do think Baroque has a point. I like black metal and pop, but the enjoyment I get from them is totally different, so I don't see the point in comparing the quality (whatever that means) of artists whose music is vastly different. And the point where two artists are different enough to be incomparable varies between listeners, I suppose.

 

[Kenneth R.]

Guess I'm at the far end of that spectrum. No two artists are incomparable.

 

[Postulate]

where do you draw the line between for instance "adventurous prog metal" and other genres anyway? genres are dumb. especially "prog metal".

I used to think genres were dumb, but the more music I listen to the more I realize that there are very real demarcations. When someone is influenced by or fits into a certain tradition, you just can't help but hear it all over. The difference, for example, between prog metal, neo prog, and modern retro-prog (whatever you want to call it) is usually just completely obvious to me after a few minutes of listening, for example. I would never mistake the stylings of an IQ for those of a Redemption or for those of a Magic Pie, for example - and these are genres that are very close to each other, and that most people would say are indistinguishable. If you're listening, anyway, they're clearly not.

Some bands straddle the line, but for all the protests bands give on being labelled by genres, I always wonder "then why do you play exactly within the confines of your genre if you don't want to be labelled as being part of that genre?" Genres are not bad or limiting - rather, without them, you lose the sense of historical development that bands go through. Dream Theater and Knight Area end up sounding on the surface very similar, such that they'd probably appeal to roughly the same people, but their historical influences are different, they come from different places, and it's written all over their music. If you just throw up your hands and say "genres are dumb," you'll miss that.

I also generally tend to think that the musicians people point out as being genre-defying and unique are actually far less so than people think, and that they usually say this because they haven't listened to enough music. It reminds me of a guy who once told me about the band Camel, and it became clear through the way he was describing them that he didn't know what progressive rock was - he thought that Camel was the only band that played anything remotely like their style of music, and so he thought they were some sort of stand-alone genius band. Clearly, no one who listened to Pink Floyd and Genesis would think anything similar. Genres are important because in music, history is important, far more important than the individual band or songwriter, although the bands and songwriters often hate to think that.

Inventiveness comes from working within your history to find new avenues for the music, and you can't do that without recognizing that history. That's what jazz is all about and when it's good, so is prog. Problem is a lot of the time prog just sort of sits still.

 

[Kenneth R.]

I sort of agree with the "using history in new ways" bit, but there's also something to be said for bands that don't fit in genres. They straddle the line(s) such that the categorizers (yes, you guys know yourselves) invent new sub-subgenres to describe them. I think they do this in the vein of thinking that spawned classification of species of living things. It's fine, but a lot of people put blinders on when they do it or are exposed to it. I tend to just ignore the whole thing entirely.

 

[Baroque]

I think the problem is just how you were expressing your opinion. You don't have to qualify anything like "this > that," obviously musical preferences vary wildly from person to person. I don't say the music I like is better than other music. I simply say "I like this music", "this is a band or song I like". When you start saying "this > that" you're generalizing in a mathematical sense that this music is strictly better than some other, and there is no way to mathematically define betterness in music.

I get what you're saying. I think if you instead said "I like this > that" rather than "this > that", there would have been no debate. Unless you really did mean "this > that" in which case, let's carry on.

 

[Kenneth R.]

Alright, fair enough. I thought it was just assumed that since this is the internet, everything anyone says is an opinion.

Don't make me break out the "==" and "IFF"

 

[Marwen]

Categorizing is useful up to a point. I couldn't care less about most of the sub-genre categorizing. It's useful for knowing a band's general tradition but not when it enforces the quest for similarity and conformity, be it in terms of what a band should stick to doing or what you should stick to listening to.

 

[Kenneth R.]

generally I agree with that man

 

[ABQShredHead]

Small-minded person checking in.

I should turn off the music and get back to my engineering.