Has Hell Frozen Over?

I got up a bit early this morning and thumbed through some magazines while drinking coffee. I first went through this week's Time but soon grew bored of people laying adulation upon Ann Coulter so I switched to Entertainment Weekly. If memory serves, Stevie accepted a free subscription from Best Buy. Anyway, I casually thumbed through it from back to front, as is my wont. It wasn't too bad of an issue. Instead of pages and pages devoted to Paris Hilton, I found some bits that interested me. For instance, there were reviews of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Kingdom of Heaven. Plus there was a brief interview with Pearcy. As I turned the pages, I began seeing pictures of and references to The Mars Volta. Then there's a side blurb entitled, "Pavement Was Prog?" Turning the page once more revealed the kicker: a picture of Rick Wakeman with his long blonde hair and his wizard outfit sitting in a wicker chair out in the garden of some country home. "What the fuck is going on here?" I asked myself. "There's progressive rock in a mainstream publication!" I flipped again to the beginning of the article and was taken by surprise as it was not trashing the genre. How blatantly odd. I began reading in earnest.

Towards the beginning of the piece, Lee Abrams, the senior VP/chief creative officer of XM Satellite Radio, which went, "Younger musicians are discovering the magic of Pink Floyd, Yes, and early Genesis records." I was flabbergasted. Who are these younger musicians? Well, the author mentions The Mars Volta, System of a Down, Coheed and Cambria, Lightning Bolt, and The Dillinger Escape Plan. There was also a timeline highlighting the major events in prog history such as the construction of Stonehenge and the invention of the Moog synthesizer. Not only that, but Marillion was even mentioned for the release of their first album, Script for a Jester's Tear!

There's a sidebar featuring the "Essential Classic-Prog Albums". They are:

Brain Salad Surgery by Emerson, Lake, and Palmer

Moving Pictures by Rush

Close to the Edge by Yes

The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway by Genesis

Yeti by Amon Düül II

The article generally focused on the newer bands mentioned above which is how is should be. But it was really nice to see Holger Czukay from Krautrock pioneers Can quoted. Honestly, I expected the article to trash 70s prog a lot more than it did. Still, most positive comments were filtered through a kitsch lense and the author submitted to stereotypes. There were also a few errors. Regarding the former, classic prog is constantly associated with unicorns and the works of Tolkien. While many a band took this route, to be sure, there are numerous that didn't go near those topics with a 10-foot pole. King Crimson, for instance. And all the RIO (Rock In Opposition) bands like Henry Cow plus Krautrock bands such as Can, Faust, and Neu! If anyone actually reads the article and is not a prog fan, please note that Genesis' The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway is NOT about "a street urchin's misadventures in the New York underworld". It is about a punk kid from New York with schizophrenia.

Perhaps the greatest triumph of the article is that it lends a sympathetic ear to one of the members of The Dillinger Escape Plan who opines, "Punk isn't just writing punk music, it's being against what's mainstream. And that's what King Crimson and all those bands were doing. They were writing the music that they want to write, and that's punk rock." It was quite refreshing to read that. People like Dave Marsh and Simon Frith have spent decades desparaging prog, complaining that, as a genre, it is divorced from the blues. Allan Moore and others have done a great job sticking it to them on this but the popular music press still loathes prog so this article was a breath of fresh air.

My last complaint is that Porcupine Tree wasn't mentioned. Bastards!