"Every Home Is Wired":
2 -- The Progressive Rock Subculture and the Net
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Naming the Genre
The first problem in approaching Progressive Rock is one of nomenclature: while the name 'Progressive Rock' itself today is the one generally accepted by the genre's fans, in the course of its history there have been a number of more or less misleading descriptions and definitions. The very word 'progressive', in fact, has caused many misunderstandings, since it raises expectations of continuous innovation which Progressive Rock on the whole is neither necessarily able nor aiming to fulfil: there are, at the heart of the genre, notions of 'progress' from traditional forms of making music, but neither is all music that 'progresses' in some way from the established idioms of rock music automatically part of Progressive Rock, nor is all Progressive Rock (and here especially the music of some recent bands which merely conforms to the conventions of the genre) necessarily literally 'progressive'.1 Bit 2
Similarly, Progressive Rock is not all 'rock', either: as an overview of its sub-genres will show, much of the genre depends on incorporating elements from classical to jazz to electronic music, sometimes leading to the abandoning of rock stylistics or instrumentation altogether. While some fans have therefore chosen to speak of 'Progressive Music' instead, the more generally accepted term has become 'Prog' -- this, then, is a name which is not only appealing in its handy brevity, but also avoids many of the distracting implications of both the original components 'progressive' and 'rock'.2 A further addition to the confusion is that before consistent labels became widely accepted, parts of the Prog genre were also referred to as 'classic rock' (today a term for most 1970s rock), 'art rock', or 'avant-garde' music (again, vague, misleading terms), and that these terms are sometimes still in circulation especially among older fans -- the most workable solution, then, is to follow the majority of fans today in their naming of the genre as 'Progressive Rock' (in the non-literal sense) or 'Prog'. Bit 3

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© 1998 Axel Bruns