You know there’s one thing that really gets my goat…
Before I carry on I should point out that there are many things actually, including false opening statements like the one above. I’m now in my mid-forties and true to form my dormant grumpy gene has kicked in, and having an online social network presence is not the ideal place for someone with a growing affiliation to Victor Meldrew. (Sorry people of the US, pick another great pompous moaner from TV, Fraiser Crane perhaps?) Reading people’s comments and sweeping generalisations on a daily basis pushes all the buttons to get me to DEFCON 1, it’s not good.
And it’s not your fault or mine; we are all a product of the social revolution with all its benefits and woes.
Okay back to my point, the one thing that annoys me on a daily basis, oh bollocks, here I go again. It’s not one thing. Actually…this is my point. Exaggeration used to create a strong impression. The dreaded HYPERBOLE.
Actually Hyperbole isn’t all bad, I should say this now. In literary terms it has great uses and allows us to understand the character or story in a short, effective passage. “He’s got tons of money.” or “I have a million things to do.” These types of hyperbole work. However it’s when we look online, visiting blogs and forums and reading people’s updates and reviews that Hyperbole becomes the engorged tool of the devil. It all turns a little triumphalist. I know. I have seen it a million times….
“Mila Kunis is the sexiest woman alive,” apparently.
Well she is pretty and probably a contender. But come on! How would anyone know that? Has the person who made this crap piece of lazy journalism walked the length of the earth like some obsessed Forrest Gump type checking on all the women alive before deciding it is in fact Kunis? Yes indeed he might have, it’s highly likely he’s done some research late at night on the computer when his wife is asleep in bed, but that still doesn’t qualify the statement. Yes it’s a judgement call based on a tiny sample of the voting public, but for crying out loud, it’s just not true.
Progressive Rock fans are no exception, especially those that write about it online.
In fact in music genre terms they are perhaps the World’s worst for hyperbole. (see what I did there…)
Maybe it’s something connected to the epic quality of the music that brings out the overblown statement, or just the fact that as fan’s we know that the world isn’t really listening and they should be, so we bolster the music with exaggeration and unrealistic amplification? As fans go, they stand out for committing this particular writing sin more so than many other music categories.
With Pop music the opposite of hyperbole seems to happen (What is the opposite? Hypobole?)
Rather than resort to overstatement, we are bombarded with sky high superlatives instead, against the backdrop of choral theme music and a man with a ridiculously deep shouty voice. See the X-Factor/American Idol for evidence of this.
“Have you heard the new single by Jessie J? It’s a masterpiece!”
Somewhere, someone online may be saying this yet if this is so, it’s not close to the grand scale of trumpet blowing that follows each new Prog release. Does this mean that Progressive rock is better than everything else and the only true source of music perfection, or are we occasionally in danger of disappearing up our own epic-length arseholes?
So far this year we have seen a dozen of entries in the “album of the year contenders” category and, probably the same again in ‘masterpieces’ and classics. I can’t walk through some of the popular discussion groups without tripping over these pedestals.
Is it really true that the new ‘Haken’ album is a masterpiece or the latest ‘Magenta’ release? Both are certain to be excellent and well worth a look, for sure. But masterpieces they are not, nowhere near. By ranking them as this we do a disservice to the very music we love because we elevate it far too much and look subjective and a little obsessive, like musical equivalents of anoraks to the uninterested music world.
“Who cares, we’re fans and we can review our albums just how we want, why should we be worried?” Well we should, because the next band to break through and make Progressive rock massive again is probably out there but they are weighed down by huge amounts of hyperbolic bling from their core fans.
Putting that aside, let’s take a look at example of the new Haken again as a potential masterpiece and see if the cap fits. If the term masterpiece can be applied to any music of the last fifty years then lets classify ‘Close to the Edge’ by Yes and ‘Dark side of the moon’ from Pink Floyd as such and add Haken’s “The Mountain” into that club. Suddenly I see everything that winds me up about the internet. Short sightedness and a need to make everything better than everything else, ever. How can we take a review seriously that boasts about a new album, barely two weeks warm, summing it up as a true masterpiece? Ten out of ten. The danger is once we use the term we then have to find new ways of describing something even greater. Like the race for the next size of storage capacity or super-fast processor, we need a ‘mega-masterpiece’ or a ‘giga-piece’.
Ultimately it’s fair to say that none of the above are masterpieces, not even Yes or Pink Floyd. It’s hard to see any of these albums influencing and inspiring people a hundred years from now in the same way that Bach, Mozart, Debussy or Stravinsky have done for centuries and still do. Hell, even my spell check knows who these people are. These are the truest representations of the word and need no hyperbole to remind us how magnificent they were. If you ever doubt the validity of this, have a chat with those musicians whose work we elevate to such lofty heights, in fact I did and this is the result.
As for the over statements on the internet, I couldn’t change it in a million years. No word of a lie.
Progarchy 
Oh dear. Guilty as charged.
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I definitely plead Guilty as Charged for using the phrase “potential album of the year”.
The best prog albums are the ones that take time to fully appreciate; often the ones that make a strong first impression don’t last. They pushed all the right buttons to start with, but go back a couple of years later and you realise they weren’t really doing anything groundbreaking.
It can be very sobering as a reviewer to go back and listen to something you wrote a gushing five-star review for, and realise it wasn’t really that special after all.
Music is a funny thing, and your emotional reactions to it can be very subjective, very personal, and sometimes influenced by factors other than the music itself. Even more so if you actually know the artist.
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I definitely agree with your point about it taking time to fully appreciate something. I’ve noticed some things I really loved initially (e.g., much of ELP) hasn’t stood the test of time with me. Even though I still like much of ELP, I’m far from crazy about them the way I was when I first discovered them. On the other hand, there are albums that made lukewarm first impressions that grew on me over time (many Rush albums fall into this category for me), and still others that just never, ever get old with me (such as Yes’s Going For The One).
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Eric, so glad to have you as a Progarchist. Thanks. And, as to hyperbole, I do think Americans (and myself as much as anyone) are a bit more susceptible to it. Probably a huge amount of my career has been built on hyperbole. But, it’s also really nice to have something in which to believe and something into which I can express my loves.
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I’m more or less with Brad on this – I’d rather use hyperbole to express my loves in which I believe and am passionate about. It’s certainly preferable to the jaded hipster mode of being ‘too cool for school’ which infects the critics, music and otherwise.
As to your penultimate paragraph, I don’t doubt that the composers you mentioned created masterpieces, but I’m wary of using remembrance a century or two hence as a standard for judging. Mozart, Beethoven, and other classical greats worked in an environment where far less music was produced and in which it was recorded only on paper. It was far easier for them to stand out. In contrast, albums such as ‘Close to the Edge’ and ‘Dark Side of The Moon’ were first released to the public in a time when recorded music had become a normal feature of daily life in developed nations, particularly in the West. A band and their works thus had to really offer something unique to stand out from the crowd. ‘Close to the Edge’, ‘Dark Side of the Moon’, and a number of prog albums have certainly done just that. The memory of these great works may eventually get lost in time due to the thousands and thousands of songs and albums released each year, but that in no way diminishes what great works of art they truly are, and I am only too happy to describe them that way, charges of hyperbole notwithstanding.
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Good post Eric, but I think you overlook one thing :
Prog has had such a bad press in general over the years that in this beautiful period of almost never ending quality releases, there is an almost euphoric feel to proceedings.
From the days of having to search out good NEW releases, or else listening to the old and trusted albums, we are presented with an abundance of wonderful (hyperbole ?) music on a regular basis. Just this last ten days I have had the pleasure of listening to Sanguine Hum, Days Between Stations, Vienna Circle and Haken ….. add all the other bands and we have a veritable overflowing chalice.
I agree with your point in some ways, but then in other ways I just want to wallow in the glorious music that we are surrounded by.
Oh, and yes – I am guilty as charged 🙂
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Thanks guys, You all add worthy points to this topic, I’m with you all as well.
Leaving the issue of the classics aside, the point is boiled down to the internet and to some extent 24 hour news. Everything has to be so overblown because despite our busy social lives there is the strong feeling that no one actually listens to each other.
Someone on Twitter yesterday remarked about the lousy service he got from British Airways and paid to promote it. Something of a first and his method worked because he shouted louder for a while. Once everyone catches on, it leaves us with an even higher bar to overcome.
A little like the need to promote everything we love about Prog as loudly as possible even when, realistically it’s not actually better than the greater albums that have gone before.
I just think that when we give out 10/10 or 100% we lose something, objectivity. And there is nowhere else to go after after 10, unless you’re Nigel Tufnel…
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Eric,
First welcome aboard the Progarchy train. This post has piqued my interest !
I’ve only started writing reviews in the last year and have always been acutely aware of the use of hyperbole and superlative. Although I am passionate in most of what I do in my life, my nature and the way I’ve been educated (nurture?) have led me to be very wary of over-statement. I think this is evident in my writing style, which I know is very basic!
I love to read enthusiasm in reviews but I find so many too effusive/gushing in their praise for my liking. Slightly off the point, but one that I think can compound this issue, is that some (many?) music (and other art form) reviewers, particularly skilled in the art of writing, use the opportunity not to deliver a basic description of their subject matter but to effectively show-off their skills to be clever and witty. And they have many admirers as a result!
Having said this art forms are notoriously difficult subjects to write about without the use of emotion, rhetoric etc. As they say ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’.
In my view perspective in art forms is impossible because of the way it connects to our emotions and it is all the better for it.
Ian
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Guilty as charged…at least to some extent. Good post Eric! I don’t write many reviews. Actually my first proper music blog pieces have been published here. Yes, I chose carefully where to start out! 😀 And I don’t think I really ahve used hyperbole in those few I’ve published so far, buuut on my Facebook timeline the hyperbole is as prevalent as anywhere else in the utter mayhem that is FB. And thinking of it now I guess I use hyperbole to wake up the unaware to the fact that there is a wonderful world of music that the major part of music consumers (awful word that one isn’t it…pfff…consumers… :D) doesn’t have a clue about that it exists! Not sure I’m succeeding though but my love for the music that means so much to me urges me to continue to inspire people around to dare leaving theri comfort zones.
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Excellent article Eric – potentially article of the year!
Sorry, couldn’t help it……:-)
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It may be a bit of hyperbole to describe Close to the Edge and Darkside of the Moon as masterpieces, but only a little. I don’t know if they’ll last for hundreds of years, but I don’t think we need to go that far. Both have been clearly influential in their own time. Darkside of the Moon spent 861 (non-consecutive) weeks on the Billboard Top 200 for a total of 16 (non-consecutive) years! Yes music has survived every attempt to kill it, from critics to the band’s own hands! If it can survive multiple rotations at every position and the Union release, I think it’s pretty much indestructible. I think both will endure per omina secula seculorum.
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