Can't Prog Rock Get Any Respect Around Here?
Critic Lester Bangs once declared progressive rock "musical sterility at its pinnacle." David Weigel, author of The Show That Never Ends: The Rise And Fall Of Prog Rock, begs to differ.
"Here is musical sterility at its pinnacle. A band that has absolutely no soul, no feeling in the music," critic Lester Bangs declared in 1975. The target of his derision? The British progressive-rock group Emerson, Lake & Palmer. Bangs disdained the band's objective, as he saw it, "to play pre-set solos as fast as you possibly can, [at] breakneck speed, and do it for about five hours."
That critical contempt of prog rock By day, Weigel reports on politics for . But he used to write for , which encouraged staffers once a year to write about something off their usual beat for a feature called "The Fresca." That's where Weigel pitched stories about prog rock — the complex, polyrhythmic province of bands like , , Asia and Genesis.
