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Any American Prog Experts?
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IanB
IanB
6761 posts

Edited Dec 04, 2008, 13:38
Re: Prog, Marx and Elitism
Dec 04, 2008, 07:38
Moth wrote:
Dog 3000 wrote:
[ELP]... paraded their "good taste" around


Serious question: did they actually 'parade' it or preach about it or whatever? If people don't like them or find the music itself pompous, fine, but I'd like to know how much truth there is in this view of their attitude.

I know the music press etc always say or imply that they did. And obviously I can see that people might find the music pompous, but I've often wondered if there was a bit of inverted snobbery going on with their detractors?

I genuinely don't know, coz altho I (unashamedly) like a lot of their stuff, I wasn't really aware of them at the time.

love

Moth


That's a really good point and holds a mirror up to changes in post war class attitudes (sorry Dog 3000) and how people played at revolutionary socialism.

That was an era when people in the arts and at the student end of politics tried to appear more working class than they actually were and "high culture" was considered bourgeois and counter-revolutionary blah blah. Fact is that a lot of people who went to school in the 60s or 70s and had an organ in the school hall (which was certainly common in a lot of grammar schools built prior to WW1) had that fat churchy sound drummed into them from the age of 3. You can hear it in VdGG, in Yes, Genesis and ELP (and also in Magazine). Sometimes mixed in with some Jimmy Smith via Graham Bond but it is there for sure.

Tax exile status for rock stars (which was pretty common in the days of 90p in the £ high rate taxation) wouldn't have helped. Many successful Prog artists would have been tax exiles or would do a "year out" for tax avoidance and in the mid 70s being rich, bourgeois and consipicuously educated was critical death.

You could say that the upsurge in critical interest in Pub Rock acts in the pre-punk era (Feelgoods, Parker etc etc) was a swing away from high culture towards "street" authenticity. Joe Strummer's accent was born out of that political and social background and fed directly into Punk.

So it wasn't so much that ELP preached a gospel of extended hammond solos and classical knock-offs (!) it was more that they didn't run away from the classical/church music thing so were dismissed as being hopelessly (horror of horrors) middle class. Which meant that the sons and daughers of Mick Farren had a a field day at their expense. It was absolutely nothing to do with who the band were or how they were marketed.

Me, I like some of the Greg Lake slowies and bits of Tarkus but Keith Emerson is not my favourite keyboard player. As I said in another thread Kaye, Lake and Palmer or Crane, Lake and Palmer would be more up my alley.

Irony of ironies was that come the miners' strike and Wapping many of those oh-so-right-on student types who wore the badges, donned the donkey jackets and dropped their aitches in the 70s were comfortably ensconsed in various enclaves of the civil service and living a diluted version of the Thatcher dream off the back of their 2:2s in Political Science or whatever. Which begat Blair and the state we're in now.
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