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Title: Rocking the Classics: English Progressive Rock and the Counterculture by Edward L. Macan ISBN: 0-19-509888-9 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: January, 1997 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.88 (8 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Quite informative
Comment: I find this book to be quite informative in the world of progressive rock. It's useful when you want to know how prog rock originated, the sociality of prog rock, why rock critics who have no life like Lester Bangs and Dave Marsh trashed the genre (simply because they live in a fantasyland that rock should forever be just like Little Richard). But I also found a few things I objected about. He acted like England was the only place for progressive rock. Yes, it originated in England, many of the most important prog rock originated there, but it's absolutely ludicrous to believe that the rest of the world did not contribute to prog rock, like the Italian scene, for example. There is a brief mention of non-British prog bands, but he didn't make much of an effort to bring in to focus their works, like Banco, PFM, Pulsar, Triumvirat, Eloy, etc. Also he made it sound like the minute you entered the 1980s, all the analog keyboards were replaced by digital, when in reality, it wasn't until the mid 1980s that the transformation from analog to digital was complete. He does tend to dismiss a lot of the major prog band's works from the 1980s, and often that holds true, try listening to Genesis' Invisible Touch. But he didn't say all bad stuff about the 1980s. The Post-Progressive section actually says favorable stuff about Edhels, Djam Karet, and Ozric Tentacles. He didn't even complete object to digital. He just objected when musicians use digital synthesizers just for solely synthetic sounds just to take the easy way out. There is a bunch of technical terms, as one has pointed out, that leaves many readers alienated, but there's plenty of stuff even the average reader can understand. Just don't buy this book expecting details in to how many prog bands are out there and how many albums they had. Buy this to know how prog originated, what was the social trends that brought the rise of progressive rock, and what brought it down, as well the technical side of progressive rock.
Rating: 4
Summary: Musician looks at Prog Rock
Comment: Edward Macan's book is an academic view of Prog rock. Macan seeks to establish the music's credentials, first by exploring the cultural roots of the genre (mostly from an American view) then assembling a cannon of standard Prog classics, then analyzing four important Prog works as if they were serious musical compositions. This approach works. Macan brings a musicians love and a teacher's experience to the discussion. Appreciating just was good Prog was, and why it was good is often not important as the overwhelming musical chops the most famous Prog musicians used - sometimes to the detriment of their music tends to obscure the compositions themselves. Viewed as an extension of the classical cannon, Prog becomes discernable as part of a high cultural continium that intersected with pop and folk styles for a brief span in the late Sixties before it died.
Prog is a middle-class form, hence its dismal by Marxist critics, but as the number of new prog bands and books like this appear, the appeal of the music, the appeal of form over function, of complexity, of ideas, is not dead. One aspect of Prog that Macan gets its the intense religiousity of the music, both in its roots, and in its message.
The best use of Edward Macan's book would be to read it simultaenously with Paul Stump's earthier English history of the genre.
Macan is uncomfortable with the written word; this book is too formal on occasion, leavening the insight with academic style, which is why I did not give it five stars.
Rating: 3
Summary: A good scholarly approach to the music itself, but...
Comment: ...when Macan gets around to the anti-prog groundswell of the late '70s/ thru the '80s, he goes into a lot of detail to explain what can be put a lot more simply. Or maybe narrowed down to one nationality--mine. The "art rock is an abomination" mindset came from the American belief that art is art and entertainment is entertainment--the one should not be confused with the other. Art is tedious and entertainment is fun, so when you fuse an art form with an entertainment form, you make tedious what was supposed to have been fun. Macan missed that point entirely, so there was no way he could have made the argument that a lot of us wish we had thought to make 25 years ago--we listened to progressive as an entertainment in the same way we also had Rolling Stones albums in our collection. And as such, I still do. I didn't read music back then and I still can't--as an "artsy-fartsy" snob, I'm a poor example. To me, the younger generation of progressive as represented by Spock's Beard, Dream Theater and Echolyn are just as valid as anything I still own by Gentle Giant, ELP and Yes. That's one point that Macan should have made as well (if it occurred to him at all)--that a lot of us of the original fan base of progressive had fun listening to it, as I'm sure the artists had fun playing it.
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Title: Progressive Rock Reconsidered by Kevin Holm-Hudson ISBN: 0815337159 Publisher: Routledge Pub. Date: October, 2001 List Price(USD): $26.95 |
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Title: The Music's All That Matters: A History of Progressive Rock by Paul Stump ISBN: 0704380366 Publisher: Quartet Books Ltd Pub. Date: March, 1998 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: The Progressive Rock Files by Jerry Lucky ISBN: 189652270X Publisher: Collector's Guide Pub Pub. Date: September, 2000 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Close to the Edge: The Story of Yes by Chris Welch ISBN: 0711995095 Publisher: Omnibus Press Pub. Date: 01 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Music of Yes: Structure and Vision in Progressive Rock (Feedback - The Series in Contemporary Music) by Bill Martin ISBN: 0812693337 Publisher: Open Court Publishing Company Pub. Date: November, 1996 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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