k-punk

IN MY ABSENCE

.... even Sir Lord Penman is back posting. Well, if that isn't motivation enough to take up the cudgels once again....

... just about every group ever seems to have been Progged . Not to sound like a killjoy or nothing, or like I'm missing the point of this joke, but is Prog really equivalent to 'Any Producer of a Concept Album'? Madness' The Rise and Fall, you what? Surely this kind of concept album - a bit like the Kinks' ones, or even The Small Faces' Ogden Nut Gone Flake - have more of a lineage in cockney music hall? Which provokes the thought, how does rock opera fit into this? Tommy, Quadrophenia, all that.... Also, I get that The Fall could have been Prog at certain points in their career .... but Live at the Witch Trials? Live at the Witch Trials is their least Prog, most snotty, amphetamine-garage elpee. Hex Enduction Hour, with the 18 minute (or whatever) 'Winter' and the ridiculously elongated 'And This Day', that'd be closer.... Wouldn't that be the influence of Can and VDG, partly?

Can hardly avoid commenting on the John Foxx inclusion, for 'The Garden', in Synthpop Prog, now can I? Not sure about this one: I've always thought it to be a noble but flawed attempt to return to a bucolic pastoral after the urbanoia of 'Metamatic' (actually, it's not even very 'synth' pop; synthesizers feature, but as part of an ensemble of 'real' instruments). But, no songs above four minutes... no absurd time-changes.... no overarching narrative concept....BUT as for ArtPunk Prog: Ultravox's ha! ha! ha! is a must.

Just what is the relationship between Art Pop/ Rock and Prog any how?

As for Prog Cinema: Lindsay Anderson ('O Lucky Man', 'Brittania Hospital') must be added to the list....

Now for that absence. Can only echo IP's comments on laziness (I think Roland Barthes wrote some paean to laziness, didn't he?) but which I can't celebrate in quite the same terms, since for me it is a direct consequence of work, its flipside. THEY'RE making me do something therefore IN MY OWN TIME I'll do absolutely NOTHING. 'Energy is eternal delight': lethargy is eternal misery.

Posted by mark at December 4, 2003 10:00 PM | TrackBack