Both the November and December issues of Prog magazine had interesting articles dealing with the lack of young people at progressive rock concerts. Polly Glass argued that this happens for a few reasons:
- Millennials think of prog as an old man’s genre.
- Prog doesn’t get support from big labels.
- Tickets are expensive.
Polly also noted that younger prog fans tend to like heavier bands such as Haken or Opeth. In the December issue, the great Jerry Ewing shared a recent experience he had at a live show. He said that on the same night, at the same venue, two different prog shows were going on at the same time in different rooms. Essentially, he blamed the promoters for booking two prog shows at the same time, with the younger crowd choosing to go to the heavier of the shows. He said the difference in age between the two groups was staggering.
Polly and Jerry make excellent points, and they have shed some light on a topic I believe deserves more attention. As a millennial myself (although I am radically different than probably 99% of people in my generation) I’d like to talk about some of my reasons for not going to as many live shows as I would like.
Continue reading “The Prog Gap – Millennials and the Dilemma of Live Music”
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.
Progarchy 