Amid articles about Trump, taxes, political violence, and other top-of-the-priority-list political subjects, National Review Online also features Kyle Smith‘s musings about a certain form of rock and roll.
Progressive rock is the nonpolitical description that stuck to the pretentious, arty, classical-and-jazz-influenced bands, most of them English, who created the music fad of the early 1970s. With their mystical themes, their surreal and sci-fi album covers, their outlandish costumes (capes, fox heads), their obsession with faeries and aliens and loopy 20-minute synthesizer solos, bands such as Peter Gabriel–era Genesis, Yes, King Crimson, Jethro Tull, and Emerson, Lake & Palmer led rock down a bizarre sonic detour first mapped out by the Beach Boys on Pet Sounds and the Beatles on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Prog rock was the exclusive domain of a certain kind of nervous, experimentally minded, cautiously intellectual young white guy.
It was nerd rock. College rock. Dungeons & Dragons rock. Pimply-virgin rock. The “orgasmic peak” of a suite based on Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition would be the only kind its partisans would be likely to experience in the presence of anyone else.
Prog rock was, largely, terrible. But it was also kind of glorious. …
… Progressive rock was a rocket that crashed a few yards above the launch pad.
What say you, John Hood? Rick Henderson? Will you stand up in defense of 20-minute synthesizer solos and lyrical odes to elves and hobbits?
