Re: The Who Mailing List Digest V8 #16

[Lucas Bleicher <bleicher@who.net>]

Jeff House wrote:

> Clearly I do not understand the Progressive label.  I always thought that
> pretension was the single most important characteristic.

In fact, no.
L. Bird's post explained everything perfect, but, anyway, I'll post a
definition
of prog rock that doesn't cause many strange classifications:
Progressive Rock is a rock sub-genre developed in the sixties and made
famous in
the seventies that have the following characteristics:
Use of elements of musical styles not commonly associated with rock
music, like
classical music, jazz music, folkloric music, etc.
A greater complexity on the compositions (when compared to the average
of rock),
using variations of rhythm, tonalities and moods on the same song.
The main difference between psychodelic and progressive music (some
people get
confused by the two labels) being the fact that the first had one rule:
sound
experimentation, while the other had another one: compositional
experimentation.
Psychodelic bands were always experimenting with frequency alterations,
pan effects,
electrically-generated sounds, while progressive bands tended to
experiment with
richer forms of composing.