The principles of exclusion, constraint, and limitation are drivers of art as much as what ends up on the canvas, and more than anything explain how U2’s “The Three Sunrises” did not make the cut of their seminal 1984 album The Unforgettable Fire. That album, their fourth, changed the band’s trajectory by broadening their palette (thus ultimately guaranteeing their longevity). Subduing the band’s onward-Christian-soldier martial airs without dulling its passion, producers Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois — who the previous year had created, along with Roger Eno, one of the great ambient masterworks in Apollo — worked at applying creative filters to make a music that was moody, introspective, less deliberate but also more whole. The Unforgettable Fire feels more like an album with a sonic narrative than any of its predecessors. Still, no one, not even Eno, could contain U2’s spirit or strong self-identity, and the recording sessions yielded some work with one foot still grounded in the energetic brightness characterizing their previous catalog.
In 1985, U2 stopped the show at Live Aid with a stunning, impassioned performance of the song “Bad” from The Unforgettable Fire. In packaging the performance for release — and here it’s important to understand the impact that Live Aid had on popular music at the time, as it was simulcast on radio and TV worldwide — the band put it on the Wide Awake in America EP along with another live track (“A Sort of Homecoming”) and two studio outtakes from The Unforgettable Fire sessions. “Love Comes Tumbling” shares the twilit moodiness of the album it didn’t end up on, but “The Three Sunrises” is both farewell and greeting, a simple effusion of a youthful love song wrapped in a gleeful guitar riff, its title bearing a suggestion of trinity that so bound the group, especially in its early days, to a strong Christian following. More than this, or perhaps because of their beliefs and willingness to be moved by the Spirit, U2 was a post-punk band able to express joy like few other “serious” groups of the time, and in “The Three Sunrises” their ability to strike at the heart remained innocently undiminished.
*Above image is a detail of Larry Mullen, Jr., Adam Clayton, and Bono listening to Edge perform the riff to “The Three Sunrises,” from the documentary of the making of The Unforgettable Fire.
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Even with an acknowledgment that the guitar crossroads intersect and break and branch through 
Jimi Hendrix’s mystery is something not quite capture-able as an iconographic or intellectual thing. Even knowing some of the details of his background — from his emergence on the chitlin circuit to his being shepherded to London by Chas Chandler — doesn’t explain the lightning the man conjured. The scant year and a half that Hendrix and his Experience released their three albums (May ’67-October ’68) encompassed a sea change in rock music that saw a full embrace of 
The art gallery of rock and roll is a rich and welcoming place, with room upon room spinning off into many-directioned distances. There is no entrance fee or warnings to stand back, please, from the piece. And, like at all great museums, any pretense to surface comportment is, if meaningful at all, only a nod of respect to the spark of human creativity. A sign that we don’t stand in willful ignorance. Before the work, within the work, we are all children. It is in rock’s nature to empower its listeners to create, and within this space there is no genre, no boogie no punk no progressive no pop no indie no folk, just an honoring of the empty canvas and the unrestrained fire banked down in humanity. It’s what I love about rock, and it’s what made Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks happen.
There were only a handful of them, American rock bands in the late 1960s who sunk the kind of roots that North American progressive rock could grow from. Spirit was one of them, and by the time they released their fourth album in 1970, they’d covered enough territory that they managed to have both a pop single, in the garage rock monster “I Got Line On You,” and a back catalogue of albums critically respected for their sophistication in arrangement and playing. Although recently dwarfed by the attention given to their instrumental “Taurus,” which Led Zeppelin may have heard and used, probably unwittingly, for “Stairway to Heaven,” Spirit’s albums up through Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus are rich canvases that, some have observed, may seem too eclectic, don’t always sum the band’s talents as they could. So that when you look for a definable Spirit sound, it eludes definition. I can see this, but at the same time Spirit’s appetite for musical movement was its guide, a definable point not being the point at all.
Like Rush, the 
Outside the fact both groups employed players of a violin/viola in their lineups at one time or another, and possessed songwriters of legend, you’d be hard pressed to find common ground for 
Bob Dylan is the rare artist who, at 75, retains the power, energy, and restlessness that distinguished his early work. As both a recording and performing artist, his electricity is unabated, and he continues to make vibrant contributions to the post-folk culture he virtually created. That he has achieved this is astounding; for those of us who have followed his career and know something of its roots and evolution, it is not surprising. He constantly recasts his song catalogue, the depth of which by 1965 (let alone 2016) was unrivaled in the rock/folk/singer-songwriter genre he invented, to match his current sound, and commands a fluidity of vision in his writing that sees beyond the trees and perhaps the forest as well. Witness “High Water,” a tribute to Charley Patton (whose “High Water Everywhere” is a stone cold delta blues barking, howling, classic), from 2001’s Love and Theft. This is a blues about love and the water that rises, that has picked up some oldtime, some drone, shaking and breaking and name-checking muscle cars and evolutionary philosophers. The thing is that it works because when Dylan sings “the cuckoo is a pretty bird” that’s a kind of referenced code that he’s hollering back to Patton. He’s writing a blank check to freely associate (find and listen to a version of “The Cuckoo” and you’ll get what I mean), to make the rhyme work and throw meaning to the wind and to the listener. Harder than it sounds because it’s about the sound, what music is, what makes its power inexplicable. To make that warble on the 5th day of July, and trace your absurd and beautiful melody: it takes courage and a resolution that comes at a price only Dylan, and maybe Patton, knows.
Three months after 
Say what you will about pop radio, you nostalgists and prognosticators of musical doom. I will laugh and scoff with you, because there is, as there always has been, portents of conformity in the monochrome sameness of the popular. But your arguments against are blind to the tail-chasing beast: it’s as often in pop as not that the true revolutions happen, where the work is done, before in creeps mimicry and gold diggery. In the case of Hozier, the revolution is subversion by honoring the blues and soul music his native Ireland so loves. In 2014 into 2015 he produced a bona fide pop radio hit in “Take Me To Church,” which got played on all the I Heart Radio stations in the U.S. In true pop radio fashion it was catchy, easy on the ears, anthem-y. But unusual too — it wasn’t hard to hear beneath the compressed radio waves a rock band sweating it out behind a gifted singer, songwriter, and guitarist. It almost seemed like it was a mistake, because how long has it been since you heard an actual band pumping out the rock on a pop station? The song was from Hozier’s full length, self-titled debut, which, while not a perfect record, isn’t far from it. With lyrics that investigate sexuality, religion, and drugs without robbing any of them of their dark poetry, the album maintains a soulful bounce that only occasionally loses its chug. Them-period Van Morrison would be proud. “To Be Alone,” which Hozier put together, or so I understand because the internet on this point mostly fails me, as a tribute to Junior Kimbrough (who gets a writing credit), does not bear the stamp of Kimbrough’s rough electric blues — although perhaps captures the feel — suggesting instead Peter Green during his brief time as the leader of Fleetwood Mac, it’s lead riff echoing the B riff of Green’s”Oh Well.” The production, too, has that dank, rainy reverb that Green loved, and deals in the dark depths of green manalishis and black magic women. Knowing nothing of the man but his music, I can say that he’s gotten at least that bit right, and while it would be a stretch to say his is the future of pop music, that he found his way into pop’s armored compound is a righteous thing.
Progarchy 