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Re: What the hell is Progressive?



>Me:  "After all this Prog talk has got me wondering.  Where do you see The 
>Who gettting Progressive?  Rael, Relax, Tommy?"
>
>keets: "The Ox."
>
>Clearly I do not understand the Progressive label.  I always thought that 
>pretension was the single most important characteristic.  Is "The Ox" 
>progressive because of it is hard and jammy with lots of tempo and melodic 
>changes?  It is definitely not pretentious.

"Progressive" is based on the word "progress," which means to go forward or 
to develop, and that really doesn't have anything to do with pretentious.  
That label is something that's become attached to progressive rock because 
fans didn't like how it was developing.  It was getting away from the raw 
punk sound (or the pop sound, if you come from that side) and adding more 
polished refinements like jazz, blues and classical techniques into the mix.

Seems like the term "progressive" was applied to jazz before it was to rock, 
and as far as I know, it doesn't have any pretentious connotation there.  In 
jazz, I thought it had to do with the development of whatever song the band 
was improvising on.  Everybody jump in and correct me if I'm wrong there, as 
I'm not a progressive jazz fan, either.  Anyhow, that's the definition I'm 
working on when I say The Who is progressive.  They improvise; they 
experiment and they don't see any barriers as to what techniques they can 
use to do it.  (Maybe fusion would be a term that would fit here, too.)

So this tendency showed up right away, right there on The Who's first album. 
  I don't have "The Ox" right here to play it, so I'll have to go on memory. 
  Moon starts off with a beat that sounds like "Wipe-out," so I'm expecting 
a surf-type song.  Instead they proceed to deconstruct the whole genre.  JAE 
begins it with that outrageous string bending, which is revolutionary for 
bass and absolutely hilarious.  Then Pete starts in, and he pretty much does 
to the song what they did to the instruments in concert.  (BTW, Pete sets 
the standard here for every guitar solo he's ever done since.)  This is more 
than just The Who fooling around.  Not only did they choose punk style songs 
over pop for the album, but they've actually made a statement by trashing a 
pop genre song.  It's experimental; it's improvisational, and it makes a 
radical statement.  Therefore I'd consider it a major indication that 
they're going to be progressive, rather than just a run-of-the-mill punk 
rock band.  (As the surfer dude, I wonder what Moon thought of that whole 
thing?)

;)
keets
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