This is a real pet hate of mine. Bands who clearly have progressive rock as a significant element in their musical palette of influences, but try to deny they have anything to do with “prog”.
Of course, it’s up to them how they choose to market themselves, but it does artists no favours to get precious about what genre labels fans or reviewers use to describe their music. As one well-known magazine editor once said “If you don’t want to be labelled Prog, stop making music that sounds Prog”. If a sizeable proportion of a band’s audience are big fans of a specific genre, exactly what does aggressively denying being a part of that genre achieve? It’s only going to alienate a proportion of the fanbase. At worst, it gives fans who don’t care for that genre a licence to behave badly towards fellow-fans, and even to actively try to drive people away on the grounds their presence somehow “taints” the artist. I’ve seen that happen.
In this day and age any band with a diverse mixture of influences ought to be able to keep feet in multiple camps rather than restrict themselves to one self-imposed ghetto. To take a non-random example, there is no reason why sharing a bill with a prog band should prevent you playing something like a blues festival.
Denial of any connection with “prog” was something quite common from bands who formed in the mid-90s when there was still a stigma associated with the genre. Even Marillion tried to pretend they weren’t prog around that time. But in 2012, if you’re making technically complex and grown-up music, anyone who’s still in thrall to the punk-era style music journalism almost certainly isn’t part of your potential audience anyway. So you have little or nothing to lose by not pandering to them. This penny has dropped for many of those artists. Steve Wilson for example has now fully embraced the Prog. But there are still a few who have yet to get the memo.
Surely if people are arguing over whether your music is “prog” or not, then it means you’re actually doing something right? It probably means you’re doing something interesting enough to attract the attention of those who like their music more sophisticated and challenging than typical three-chord chart fodder, but neither are you making formulaic prog-by-numbers.
Why does this also remind me of writers nominally labeled as SF who go berserk if you call them same? Or writers of what could not be called anything but fantasy who go ballistic if you … eh, you get the idea.
Indeed.
“Talking squids in space” is the exact equivalent of “ten minute bass solos and concept albums about Hobbits”, an inability to see beyond laughably inaccurate stereotypical clichés.
See also some “mainstream” literary critics who use “Science fiction” as an insult to mean “ludicrous or implausible plotting or characterisation”, which displays a complete ignorance of what science fiction is.
Thankfully, most of this kind of labeling re: SF, it seems, has become confined to the domain of the likes of pug-nosed columnists in The Daily Mail (or, on this side of the pond, the National Review).
That said, while there’s a lot less compulsive use of the word “SF” as an epithet, there’s still not a lot of close review of SF by “mainstream” literary critics. They only engage with it in retrospect, after it’s been safely absorbed and digested. To wit: Philip K. Dick, who couldn’t get two inches of column space when he was alive and now gets regular encomiums to his genius.
was there a particular band you were thinking of Tim, or do you not want to name and shame?
It’s beyond me really, I exist only on the fringes, I’ve only just discovered that I can’t download any King Crimson legally (I want to pay for it!), but I am familiar with the idea from being in the world of goth.
I’ve very deliberately avoided naming any names in this post.
Is Robert Fripp being such a luddite that King Crimson are CD-only? Not even available in audiophile geek formats like FLAC?
Fantastic post, I couldn’t agree more. The self-appointed Rolling Stone, et al, critical elite turned the label into a epithet long, long ago and the lingering effects of that can be charted in a variety of ways, including the RRHOF’s continuing neglect of bands like Rush, Yes, Jethro Tull, Hawkwind, etc. This continuing neglect further strengthens any arguments that this critical elite and their house organ, RS, are much more interested in throwing an industry party rather than objectively recognizing substantive artistic achievement.
That attitude is slowly dying, though. Anyone nowadays who dismisses “prog” out of hand probably hasn’t heard much of the actual music, and is simply repeating second-hand received opinion.
Um, ‘epithet’ just means ‘adjective’ you guys.
T’wasn’t me!.
Definition of EPITHET
1
a : a characterizing word or phrase accompanying or occurring in place of the name of a person or thing b : a disparaging or abusive word or phrase
c : the part of a taxonomic name identifying a subordinate unit within a genus
From Merriam-Webster.