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Originally Posted by Rob Instigator
what's more gaga and tongue in cheek than prog?
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I think far too many people assume that prog must be tongue in cheek because of the sheer ridiculousness of it. Sadly, I think there are few who take themselves more seriously than prog rock dudes. They are closer to to tongue-in-asshole.
Prog became tongue in cheek, after a fashion, due to people taking the "ironic cool" approach (think Hella fans in Rush shirts and comedy rockers like Dave Ghrohl and Tenacious D using prog-metal as a backdrop for stupid theme nysic videos and over-the-top dumbassery). But there are some kids out there who evidently missed the joke and started to rub their little pube goatees and sincerely draw connections between YES and the math rock that they desperately wanted to be identified with.
I know you guys know some of these folks. The forced intellectuals who evaluate YES and Rodan by the same criteria. That's bullshit of course. Slint and Rodan were clearly born out of hardcore, plain and simple. Slint has nothing to do with concept albums or maximalism. It's guttural, violent, piercing punk rock, only it's informed by the forward thinking work of Sonic Youth and Fugazi in the late 80s.
Slint is just like Sonic Youth really, and there's nothing prog about it. It's just smarter, more contemplative and musically challenging variations on punk. In a way it's far more stripped down. Even the work of GY!BE and Don Caballero are more punk than prog. The connection to wailing synths and long winded classical guitar ejaculations was never there. GY!BE just play punk rock really slowly and inevitably build to a climax that touches on black metal at times... Which does have a connection to prog, which is why most black metal is fucking terrible.
I really have nothing against YES or Peter Gabriel era genesis, but prog rock as a whole is an objectively absurd, and really really dumb thing that British band geeks threw together after discovering acid and having sex way too late in life, leaving them with the self importance of a trained classical artist, and the naïveté of... Well... The rest of us before we lost our virginities at the normative and totally appropriate age of 14 (+/- 2 years for the outliers).
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Wow, I'm sorry. Why the hell am I still talking about prog in the hip hop cafe? Jesus. That was not at all my intention when I started typing, but I managed to bring back some really awful memories of friends I met at Don Cab or Russian Circles shows, luring me into their basement lairs and playing Yes albums for my stupefied drunken ass, to show me the "mathiest track ever" ... The memory of their scorn as my laughter at what I took to be a drunken joke slowed to an apologetic grimace as I realized that I was pissing my pants while they were bearing their goateed souls to me. Unfortunately this kind of thing happened happened on multiple, increasingly awkward occasions, and I was eventually written off as a mean and judgmental person by people who had NO FICKING SENSE OF HUMOR TO SPEAK OF.
I wasn't laughing at them for their taste in music... But I sure as hell was laughing at the seriousness with which they drew argued that Unwound and Tera Melos were mere descendants of Jethro Fucking Tull. Assholes.