An overview of the genre

Progressive rock was one of the dominant genres for the so-called ‘serious’ market in Europe and the US between around 1968 and 1976. Commercial success was achieved despite a critical climate that was often disparaging and, by the end of the period stated, broadly negative. This was part of a systematic and ongoing critical process that Paul Stump aptly termed ‘the cultural exile of all such music’ (Stump 1998: 4). In many circles, it was felt that the genre embodied the worst excesses of pretension, expenditure and detachedness from values of ‘roots’ and social reality deemed important within popular music ideology. This critical approbation survives to the present day, despite several worthy academic attempts to reappraise the genre (see Stump 1998, Holm-Hudson 2002 and Macan 1997).

It is significant that progressive rock (as a musical style rather than as a concept) is one of the few forms that has not, in fact, progressed or greatly influenced other forms. Paradoxically, in a contemporary music scene full of so-called ‘underground’ scenes and forms, progressive rock is one genre that can truly claim to be ‘underground’ in terms of its lack of commercial promotion and subcultural appeal. As with other ‘marginal’ genres, the Internet has proven a boon for the survival of a form now largely ignored by the mainstream.

Progressive rock (‘prog’) was very much a product of the late-1960s’ Zeitgeist, wherein virtuosity, complexity and the ‘album as art form’ assumed greater significance within the newly named ‘rock’ field. Rock, as a term, was coined to differentiate the music and attitudes of both performer and audience from the ‘pop’ or ‘commercial’ form. This rock/pop binarism can be viewed as a false bifurcation on a number of levels (how can an act that sells millions of albums be considered ‘uncommercial’?). However, it did serve to reflect the growing fragmentation of the audience for popular music into what we might term ‘taste hierarchies’ often based upon class, gender, geographical or ethnic distinctions.

Drawing upon a wide range of musical antecedents, prog developed in a similar fashion to jazz, with which it shared many similar values and in some cases musical characteristics. In Europe, jazz had long existed as the bridge between the worlds of pop and classical music.