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.
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting that Julie Burchill, scorner of 'rock's rich tapestry', and Marcus, who practically wove that particular cloth, both found resonance in punk in general and the Pistols in particular. I think there's a gap in how something like historicizing is treated in the US vs Europe - in the latter, the mooted and never quite realized countercultural ideal is a total rupture from the millenia-long continuum, while in the former, more or less a state built on cultural amnesia, cultivating historical consciousness is taken as an act against the status quo. There are plenty of exceptions to those broad categorizations, but in general I think those are the tendencies
DeleteIn a contrarian American's hands, even something intended to 'break rock in half' (in Marcus's own words) can be taken as part of a tradition, much to the irritation of those involved
DeleteThe carve out for Can - I assume that is "damning with faint praise"? Like, this is all it has to show for itself, as a genre, and it's not much.
DeleteIf actual liking, it's a recent development: Can are noticeably absent from his list of the greatest records ever at the back of Stranded. But then I think the only European group mentioned is The Savage Rose.
Of course, Can vehemently distanced themselves from prog, said their thing was all about rhythm and repetition and reduction, as opposed to a competition to play as many notes as possible. Caressing the listener not impressing the listener, is how Karoli put it when I interviewed them.
Famous fans like Cope and Mark E. Smith and Wobble would agree that Can - and Krautrock in general - is anti-prog.
I think the area certainly has some overlap with prog - largely instrumental, long tracks, post-psychedelic whimsy, keyboards-ism, panglobal influences, studio sorcery, the invitation to spatial mind's eye projection - but the repetition thing and the primal thing thing push it somewhere else. The influence from the Velvet Underground outweighs the influence from post-Barrett Floyd. And there is certainly enough German actual prog and Euro-rock with which Krautrock contrasts strongly to define it sufficiently as something else.
The thing about determining whether something is or is not prog (or even 'anti-prog') is that two of the groups most associated with the genre - ELP and Yes - were arguably kind of outliers within the rest of it. ELP's 'rocking the classics', maximalist approach and Yes's fractal, start-and-stop but through-composed approach was not really taken up by many other groups, even the famous ones like Crimson or Genesis - they stuck to a song based approach (even if they were linking them together) or a more improvised, jazz-like one. (You could call Emerson a flamboyant classical pianist or organist with 10,000 watts, but you couldn't really call Fripp a classical guitarist in the same way)
DeleteIn that sense, I think Krautrock is definitely a close relative of prog, even if it had its own influences. One thing I think you have to remember about Can in particular is that three-quarters of its membership was coming from non-rock/R&B backgrounds in modern classical and avant-jazz - when they talk about 'rhythm and repetition and reductionism' they were speaking relative to their old foundations in those areas. In that respect, they were the opposite of someone like Emerson amplifying Romanticism, but in rock terms, it was still 'progressive' - they just adapted their training in a much different way (you could say the same thing about John Cale - someone in love with drones and minimalism, but who still approaches them from a Western art music perspective even when working in pop)
Side note - minimalism, in the Glass/Reich/Riley sense, usually gets mentioned in rock circles in relation to punk and maybe dance music, but it arguably bears as much relation to San Francisco psych - there's the Lesh/Reich connection and Ned Lagin, but many of the other notable participants were at least aware of what the San Francisco Tape Center was doing.
DeleteThere's a whole chapter of Sarah Hill's San Francisco and The Long 60s that goes into it, and someone actually did their dissertation on the broader connection between SF psych and what we might consider relevant only to NYC circles of the era (and beyond)
https://escholarship.mcgill.ca/concern/theses/qj72p981b?locale=en
isn't it all a bit more prosaic, really? that rock (and here I mean more so rock n roll) critics are ultimately failed prog rockers and don't want to see bohemian eclecticist noodling reflected back at themselves? It is especially patent in the case of Marcus making parallels where there aren't any. If any of them thought mclaren or lydon had a hoot about debord...
ReplyDeleteApropos of this, I was listening to an old Weatherall interview with Charlie Bones (ex-NTS) and he rightly noted that people like him were young teenagers, and punk of course seemed like a year zero for them, and this itself was the liberating effect more than the music itself. In fact if people of his generation were older, had gone through the 60s garage phase — in short were more cynical, the doors wouldn't have been blown open.
A lot of punk actually sounds quite polished (the inevitable long march of recording technology) than the monks, The Sonics, The Savages etc.