"Every Home Is Wired":
2 -- The Progressive Rock Subculture and the Net
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Defining Progressive Rock: the Musicians Involved
The problems fans have experienced in naming the genre are only symptoms of deeper difficulties in defining Progressive Rock and describing its main characteristics to non-fans. One approach is that of a historical view, in which the early, seminal bands of the late 1960s are seen as setting the stylistic ground rules for the genre: for Prog, these bands centrally include Pink Floyd, King Crimson, Yes, Genesis, Emerson, Lake and Palmer (ELP), and Jethro Tull, as Macan writes (3). He points out that "concerning the bands from the 1960s and 1970s ... for the most part a consensus has emerged ... which bands from this period made the most important contributions to progressive rock as an idiom" (10).3 Bit 4
These six bands form the core of a Progressive Rock canon, then. Over time, as line-ups changed, bands developed, broke up, and reformed, further bands and musicians were added to this canon (if in less central positions), largely based on their personnel connections to the main canonical groups -- a band like U.K., for example, formed by two thirds of King Crimson's mid-70s line-up, is almost automatically part of the Progressive Rock genre. Even an artist like Kate Bush, discovered and initially supported by Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour, is seen as having relatively close ties to Prog. For more central figures of the genre, the case is even clearer: most anything released by King Crimson's guitarist of thirty years, Robert Fripp, will be regarded as Prog, for example. Bit 5

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© 1998 Axel Bruns