"Every Home Is Wired": 2 -- The Progressive Rock Subculture and the Net

"Every Home Is Wired":
2 -- The Progressive Rock Subculture and the Net

Thus, Prog's cosmopolitans are well-situated to make use of the new influences on offer in the globalised cultural environment; their position is privileged, in any way, by the genre's central ethos of openness to new ingredients. The localists, on the other hand, are favoured by the subculture's inherent need to protect its existing achievements -- a certain tension between the two can therefore be expected in the Prog community, and will indeed emerge from a discussion of the Prog-related Internet newsgroups in section three. Conservative localism can also be seen as a natural response to the uncertainties of the fragmented global culture: "with the collapse of the high-modernist ideology of style ... the producers of culture have nowhere to turn but to the past: the imitation of dead styles, speech through all the masks and voices stored up in the imaginary museum of a now global culture" (Jameson 65). Cosmopolitans enter this museum, too, but do not slavishly reproduce its contents.¹⁶	Bit 21
Still, with the continuing revitalisation of Prog in the 1980s, fragmentation of the genre itself also carried on, driven particularly by the contrast between localist and cosmopolitan elements in the community. Predictably, amongst the more progressive of the sub-genres the interest in following established stylistic patterns is relatively limited: not only is there a lack of regard for the Prog 'forefathers', some of the newer bands indeed do not even regard themselves as Prog at all -- partly because of the stigma associated with Progressive Rock in the traditional music media, partly also out of a lack of knowledge of the Prog subculture as such. At the same time, however, the new bands have been appropriated into the subculture by their fans, who obviously do perceive links between this new music and Prog styles or attitudes -- fans and musicians, thus, are not necessarily both part of the same subculture.	Bit 22

Thus, Prog's cosmopolitans are well-situated to make use of the new influences on offer in the globalised cultural environment; their position is privileged, in any way, by the genre's central ethos of openness to new ingredients. The localists, on the other hand, are favoured by the subculture's inherent need to protect its existing achievements -- a certain tension between the two can therefore be expected in the Prog community, and will indeed emerge from a discussion of the Prog-related Internet newsgroups in section three. Conservative localism can also be seen as a natural response to the uncertainties of the fragmented global culture: "with the collapse of the high-modernist ideology of style ... the producers of culture have nowhere to turn but to the past: the imitation of dead styles, speech through all the masks and voices stored up in the imaginary museum of a now global culture" (Jameson 65). Cosmopolitans enter this museum, too, but do not slavishly reproduce its contents.¹⁶

Bit 21

Still, with the continuing revitalisation of Prog in the 1980s, fragmentation of the genre itself also carried on, driven particularly by the contrast between localist and cosmopolitan elements in the community. Predictably, amongst the more progressive of the sub-genres the interest in following established stylistic patterns is relatively limited: not only is there a lack of regard for the Prog 'forefathers', some of the newer bands indeed do not even regard themselves as Prog at all -- partly because of the stigma associated with Progressive Rock in the traditional music media, partly also out of a lack of knowledge of the Prog subculture as such. At the same time, however, the new bands have been appropriated into the subculture by their fans, who obviously do perceive links between this new music and Prog styles or attitudes -- fans and musicians, thus, are not necessarily both part of the same subculture.

Bit 22

Section 2 -- Go on to Bite:

1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20
21	22	23	24	25	26	27	28	29	30