"Every Home Is Wired":
2 -- The Progressive Rock Subculture and the Net
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Subcultural Traditionalists and Generic Progressives
The second generation of the Prog subculture soon found itself confronted with the dilemma of its predecessors: the question of continuing in generic styles laid down by the older bands or continuing to experiment and progress. Many of the neo-Prog bands -- whose major exponents are Marillion and IQ --, peopled as they were predominantly with fans of the older Prog bands, chose the former option (leading to criticism of them as simple 'clones' of the classical bands), but there also were some genuinely new developments which made use of advances in music technology in the beginning computer age or incorporated new influences into their music, such as the emerging sounds of minimalism, neo-classical, or world music. One of the core canon bands also returned to the scene: King Crimson reformed in 1981 with a new line-up and a new style based on intricate polyrhythms among two guitars, stick (a newly invented touchstyle guitar/bass hybrid), and electronic drums.15 Bit 17
With Prog bands thus ranging from meticulous copyists to innovative musical explorers, a certain Prog revival, if on a limited scale, took place during the 1980s. Using Shanks's concepts, Straw describes the extremes of this continuum as a musical 'community' and a musical 'scene', respectively: a 'community' with its "stable" population engages in the "ongoing exploration" of "musical idioms" while preserving "the musical heritage", and thus stabilises "historical continuities"; a 'scene', on the other hand, is a "cultural space in which a range of musical practices coexist, interacting with each other within a variety of processes of differentiation, and according to widely varying trajectories of change and cross-fertilisation", and working "to disrupt ... continuities, to cosmopolitanise and relativise them" ("Systems of Articulation" 373). It is quite clear that a subculture like that of Prog, whose practice as a genre is the continued exploration of musical possibilities, but which as a subcultural community has also automatically formed preservative structures of knowledge and information, must necessarily unite elements both of a 'scene' and of a 'community', and that its music will therefore range from conservative neo-Prog to progressive post-Prog. Bit 18

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© 1998 Axel Bruns