Someone recently asked Greil Marcus why "sixties and seventies rock crits hate prog so much?"
"Why do people hate prog rock? Because it epitomized the worst of its time, that post-60s desert of stale ideas, idiotic new trends and catchphrases, where bad tv commercials were the great art form of the epoch. It was pretentious, claiming the world while gazing at its own navel. It was pleased with itself. It had no conviction and no doubt. It was able to vanish as if it had never been, because it hadn’t.
Of course there was Can."
Just throwing this to the wolves....
I will say though that I have never ever seen a musician more pleased with himself than Robbie Robertson in The Last Waltz
That blog page is an amazing window into the Boomer subconscious. I particularly liked this quote:
ReplyDelete"I’ve heard it told that a favorite pastime of George Harrison’s was to take any given situation, ranging from personal to global, and find an applicable Bob Dylan lyric to summarize said situation."
I now understand how Vladimir Putin so effortlessly outwits the USA.
Like most prog criticism - and frankly, much of Marcus's other writing, although not the best examples - the actual qualities of the music enter nowhere into it. It's almost entirely external - how a music relates to The Situation, where one can be effortlessly switched for the other. I really, genuinely believe, for instance, that Marcus believes that the reason the Band is Great is because they harken back to an iconographic American way of life, and that the Pistols were Great because they harken back to the long European tradition of existential protest (Diggers, Ranters, Robespierre and Debord). There's no way to attach that kind of weight to most prog (he seems to make an exception for Krautrock, which strikes me as a recent development; I doubt he's heard Canterbury stuff, Hawkwind, or Henry Cow-type Rock In Opposition, nor would he be drawn to them anyway), ergo the only context you can place it in is the Bad Old Seventies of decaying hippydom and post-Woodstock commercialization.
ReplyDeleteThis is why Marcus's best writing is when he allows himself to be carried away by the music itself, to be dislocated by it - his writing on Van Morrison in particular - and the worst is when he can effortlessly plot out his references and points of interest to the last footnote, with no ambiguity left
DeleteSide note - notice how he restates the question so that 'rock critics' is swapped out for 'people'. Some habits die hard
Marcus wrote that as if the cultural context hasn't changed, 55 years after IN THE COURT OF CRIMSON KING came out. To use Tyler's phrase, The Situation is much different. When I started listening to prog, it felt refreshing because it didn't come with the suffocating degree of piety around Dylan or punk.
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