I appreciate it has been a while but life ‘n’ stuff keeps getting in the way of the fun stuff like writing for progarchy and whatnot. Plus my laptop dumped all my saved settings so whereas before I had a single button click to get here I’ve had to try to find the dashboard by trial and error (aka google). Anyhoo, not a  lengthy piece first time up but a few words on my most prized possession, a gadget called a Brennan JB7. A shameless plug I know but I am very fond of it. I get in from work, press one button (one button solutions always work well for me) and it begins to shuffle through about 1500 albums, allowing me to hear stuff I haven’t heard for years or, as has happened tonight, stuff that I grew up with. In this case it is 2112 from All The World’s A Stage, the first ‘proper’ album I ever owned. Imagine a freckly teenage boy in grim, grimy industrial northern England in late 1977/early 1978. You have that image? Good, then I’ll begin. Spitting, snarly school friends had taken to sticking safety pins through parts of themselves and calling themselves punks. They listened to music in the common room that involved people shouting, swearing and clanging away on what sounded like pots and pans. I, on the other hand, ‘wished it might come to pass’, and it did. In the form of Rush. Rush, thanks to my friend Robert Hudson (who had an older brother) begat Yes, who begat Genesis who begat ELP et al. Blue Oyster Cult I discovered all by my self but that’s another story for another time.

And now all that accumulated loveliness from the past 35 years or so is now stored on a box about the size of a hardback book. And not a very thick one at that. Thus far this evening it has already thrown Strangefish, Manning, The Watch, Kaipa and Blue Oyster Cult out at me. It was when 2112 came on, however,  that I felt compelled to write something, to get back on the horse so to speak. I have a huge pile of new CDs from the likes of The Tangent, Thumpermonkey, Shineback, Be Bop Deluxe to name but a few to load onto the beast, so shall try to convert some of my evenings doing so into witty and erudite passages for the good folks at Progarchy. Now that I’ve discovered out how to log onto the site again, that is.

Until then I shall bid you all a fond evening.

We’re not getting any younger, none of us are… (Brad Birzer-Happy Birthday!)

I’m now rather depressingly at the stage where I find myself saying out loud,
“In my day things were better than they are now…” or “When I was a young lad we played outside every day, walked two miles to school in shorts in six feet of snow and tortured frogs for fun.
When it comes to Prog though it’s not the case, things are better now than they were, even with its relative obscurity and damn near financial bankruptcy.
What are you mad Eric? The Prog scene is better now than it was forty years ago?
Sure, some of the best loved and most successful albums of the Progressive rock genre belong to the seventies, sales were in the millions and concerts were gigantic spectacles and the artists were larger than life characters. But that was short lived and the years that followed were lean and as one clever Yorkshire man summed it up it was a time that the ‘Music died alone.’ It was tough, I remember it well and yet the one thing that saved me was the beginnings of the revolution we now use twenty four hours a day, seven days a week.

The Lamb dies down…
I was a late entry to University in ’89 and consequently I didn’t quite fit in. I was too old for the fresh-out-of-school-club, and too young for the mature student category. Combine that with the most unpopular and uncool taste in music and my first year a Uni was a lonely time.
It peaked one evening when I got lucky and walked a girl back to my room in the halls after a few drinks in the student bar. She told me with a shout over the noise of a rather poor student rock band, that she was a fan of Genesis. My spirits soared and I couldn’t believe my luck. She was gorgeous, truly sensational and so far out of my league that I didn’t stand a chance, but none of that mattered, she liked my favourite group. I was going to get married and planned out the rest of my life with her before I got back to my room.
Sadly it was rather short lived. Moments after she settled back into a beanbag on the floor I nervously slid out my vinyl copy of ‘The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway’ and turned round to face her as the tinkling piano of Tony Banks began to build in intensity.
“What’s this you’re playing?” she inquired.
I will never forget the baffled look on her face when I told her that she was listening to Genesis. It turns out she though Genesis was Phil Collins and Phil Collins was Genesis and wondered what it was I was playing, it wasn’t  ‘Another day in Paradise’ (for her or for me…) and when Peter sang “The lamb seems right out of place,” it seemed that there was never a truer word spoken.
She didn’t stay and made an determined effort to avoid me whenever she saw me around and about.
I got rather down about Prog, I mean, how could someone instantly lose their attraction for a person because of their musical taste? After that and for a short while I didn’t play much and dabbled with the Stone Roses and some of the early punk- grunge from Seattle.

Dialing back to my roots…

Going back to my point, it was the revolution in technology that brought me back from the wilderness and helped me to rediscover my love of Prog and it’s the same technology now that makes it a strong, independent force today, underpinning  a passionate fan-base, and it’s the technology that’s the future for the music, not any one band.

Before HTTP and web browsers there was Usenet, the newsgroups and bulletins through the College network. These were a lifeline to me at University in 1990. Basic text discussions with people in America about YES and Pink Floyd was suddenly a reality. And email too! I used to print off the discussions to read in my room in my own time. Stacks and stacks of stripy paper from the dot matrix filled with a love of Progressive Rock.
Naturally the first browsers followed and dial up with 14440 BPS which was stupidly expensive but it gave me home access to the newsgroups.
It’s no coincidence that Prog’s third wave began soon after in the mid-nineties and has gathered pace ever since. Andy Tillison with his first MP3 upload, Marillion and their cottage industry rebirth after EMI and of course digital mail order (1998 and an early web purchase of ‘Stardust we are’) with the rest of the world all ensured its survival and its future.

I might have recently said that Hyperbole on the social networks was the work of the horned beast and that it was the fault of the internet in general. It’s still true and I stand by that but I need to clarify that despite all that, I think we need it for Prog to avoid being lost in the wilderness again. Ironically I realise it makes me look like I’m caught between the devil and the deep blue sea.

Actually no I’m not, anything but.

Viva la revolution, long live Prog, and long live the internet!

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.