Take the Time
It’s time to sit down for a minute and think about your preferences in music. If most of the artists you listen to are the ones you’ve heard on popular radio, then this article is for you.
Although I love listening to some of the stuff on the radio, I happen to be a huge fan of progressive rock. And my hope is that I can convince a couple people that listening to some prog is actually worth a try. Because I’ve come to the conclusion that the main reasons progressive music isn’t more popular are all because of time.
Not to make this some misanthropic lecture about the insanity of modern society, but you don’t have to think about it too hard to agree that we tend to be obsessed with time. We get up at a specific hour, go to work at a specific hour, and microwave our dinners in three minutes so that we can eat them in time to go do something else at a specific hour. All this has been said before, many, many times. But how often is it considered as a having a negative effect on our appreciation of music? Time is closely related to three big issues that keep progressive rock relegated to a more or less “underground” status.
Musical Intricacy
I think a lot of music fans don’t want to spend the time required to really get into more complex music. I freely admit that the first few times I listened to progressive music I found it to be kind of boring, but as I spent more time on it and really paid attention to the nuances of the music, I began to realize that I was enjoying it far more than I expected I would.
Take, for example, Drowning Pool and Yes. The first time I heard Drowning Pool’s “Bodies,” I was rocking out like mad. It’s catchy and it’s infectious from the first whispered “Let the bodies hit the floor” to the last scream. The first time I heard Yes’ progressive epic “Close to the Edge,” a chaotic instrumental section near the beginning made me roll my eyes and turn the volume down a bit so I could focus on what I was doing. But as I listened to both songs more, I noticed that Drowning Pool was just playing a handful of chords over and over. Yes, on the other hand, was going nuts with unexpected picking patterns and cool keyboard arrangements. Drowning Pool was loud and angry the whole way through, but Yes offered a wide dynamic and emotional range. “Bodies” is a fun song, but what you hear the first time through is all you’ll ever hear. “Close to the Edge” has much more lasting appeal for me because as I kept listening to the song, I discovered new layers in the music that continue to give me chills when I hear them.
Twenty years from now, “Bodies” could very well be something that people look back on, snicker at, and derisively ascribe its popularity to idiotic trends of the decade, much like we now ridicule the fashions of the eighties. But “Close to the Edge” is already more than thirty-five years old and it’s still loved by fans and considered a classic by critics. Hopefully, that is a testament to the admirable creativity and enduring appeal that I consider to be characteristic of progressive music.
Composition Lengths
Another big problem that hinders prog’s popularity is the length of a typical prog song. Progressive acts tend to go a bit overboard with their compositions. By the time you’ve finished listening to a single song, the better part of an hour may be gone. Song length makes more sense as a prog turn-off than musical complexity does because most people have been conditioned into the 4-minute-song mentality. A lot of that can be attributed to the influence of radio.
The radio likes to crank out as many songs as possible in a short period of time, and they do it because it’s a shrewd business strategy. They need to keep people listening in order for any advertisers to be interested. If a radio station were to play Porcupine Tree’s “Anesthetize” or Dream Theater’s “A Change of Seasons,” people who don’t like those songs would have twenty minutes to spend on other radio stations, hearing other people’s advertisements. It’s actually a comfort for me, when I’m listening to the radio, to know that, if I don’t like a song, all I have to do is wait three minutes and a better one might come on. I don’t have to bother changing the station if the problem will solve itself momentarily. So that philosophy works for radio.
But unfortunately, plenty of people tend to apply that radio mentality to their own listening habits. They don’t have the patience for twenty-minute prog epics because they seem to think that their enjoyment of their music is directly proportional to the number of songs they can cram into their listening time. I happen to disagree. One twelve-minute song can be just as enjoyable as three four-minute songs. It should be about the quality of the music, not the brevity of it.
Sadly, though, people expect short songs and lose interest quickly when something goes much beyond the five-minute mark. Drowning Pool’s “Bodies” clocks in at a modest 3:24, but Yes’s “Close to the Edge” far surpasses that, ending at a staggering 18:42. “Bodies” follows your typical verse and chorus structure, but “Close to the Edge” offers several different movements which, to me, make it feel shorter. It’s kind of like four songs in one. Unfortunately, radio stations prefer to play four separate songs instead of one four-movement song. Not that I blame them.
Obscurity
But radio brings up another problem with progressive music. For the most part, prog is obscure, and it continues to be held in obscurity because it doesn’t benefit from the widespread exposure that radio offers. But how is obscurity a function of time?
Simple: the Internet. In the modern age, you don’t have to spend much time at all to expand your musical horizons. Internet resources such as Pandora, Last.fm, and even Yahoo Music can open your eyes and ears to a world of sonic euphoria you never even knew existed. With just a few mouse-clicks and a few minutes of streamed songs, you could discover something incredible.
Even Wikipedia helped me out a bit. They have a list of rock music genres. Once when I was perusing that list I saw “post-rock.” The name intrigued me, so I looked it up. The article describing the basic characteristics of post-rock further piqued my curiosity. And because of that, I’ve found great music from Sigur Ros, Explosions in the Sky, and Godspeed You! Black Emperor.
The point, I suppose, is that there’s a lot of good stuff out there, and you have no idea if you’ll enjoy it until you give it a listen. And I firmly believe that a lot of underground bands deserve more recognition than they receive from radio-dominated pop culture. All you need to do is give these artists a few minutes of your time. You may find that you enjoy some weird subgenre more than the popular music you’ve been listening to for so long.
I like 3 Doors Down and Evanescence and Breaking Benjamin. But I also like Yes and Ayreon and Gordian Knot. Great stuff can be found in any kind of music if you just give it a little time to manifest itself. And any kind of creative artistry deserves someone to appreciate it. So I’d challenge the reader to make an effort to explore just a bit more. Because if what I’ve discovered so far is any indication, we have no idea that what we we’re missing out on can really be this good.