Hi,
Thanks for this Karyn ... thanks ... you have no idea ... thanks!
Guiding Light: Steven Wilson
This is interesting, but I think it is a really good thing, and it tells you that the guitarist and lead writer for Porcupine Tree is no slouch.
He shows up in the Klaus Schulze DVD "Das Rheingold" and talks to him, and it is pretty obvious that he knows the music really well, and he is around during the other documentary in the DVD that shows Klaus talking to a couple of technicians, and fixing a couple of the details in the music ... and Klaus following along with his fingers ... he's drumming to it!
All in all, when Steven went on to clean up the King Crimson stuff, it showed, that this guy "gets it" ... and made the simplistic and very bad recording equipment that grabbed the first albums by King Crimson, all of a sudden sound even better and much more important than they were at the time. ITCOTKC, still is one of the most important albums in "Progressive" music history, but the fact is that few people can deal with its social and political commentary all the way through the album when you will be crying when your friend is dead in the morning either by an IRA bomb or in VietNam ... and along with the really strong and vicious couple of pieces that the Edgar Broughton Band did, these are ... in my book ... the anthems that we are afraid to accept, understand ... and know what it all meant.
But today's style, is so meaningless, and these boards have a tendency to dilute "value", with people not giving a darn, and a side of that is good ... we might take things too seriously, but the other side is bad ... you lose the ability to focus on the deeper part of the work ... because it is all ... just fun! We were children of the War ... and seeing the carnage yet again, was not what we wanted ... and we fought against it ... but today, you would say that I'm just another generic hippie jerk!
History is losing its perspective in time due to commercialism. The advent of "progressive" music was almost all against this and the main reason why they did something different. And the difference was varied, when Robert Wyatt got tired of the rich coats and parading sex models in the shows, and broke into a very famous ABC in the middle of their "jazz" piece, and it became one of the signatures in all of Canterbury material. He was making fun of the snobbery in front of him, the "intelectual this and that ... with Allan Ginsburg and other writers ... and the joke was on him in the end! But look what the joke created?
But it tells you ... that these people were much more attuned to the "arts", which are usually known to the sentiment of the inner spirit ... which is not something that commercialism, or this board, or any other sentiment that most folks here are familiar with ... and many of them get offended ... because American Idol is not a standard for the arts ... is a standard for money for a network ... and you don't care about the difference!
The hard part is putting all this into a historical perspective, without you, or anyone else, thinking that this is an attack on your preferences, which it is not ... but maybe one day someone needs see something else out there ... like ... that light don't shine in American Idol!
If you see that massive Krautrock special from the BBC, you will find ... duhhh ... all parallel to this ... with Guru Guru making fun of the separation of the Germany's by saying that Chuck Berry is the new God, instead of Democracy or Communism ... but we don't get it ... do we? It was a magnificent example of the things that we believe in ... that we do not exactly use words for and illustrate.
It makes me cry ... I have spent 40 years standing up for so much of this music, and to finally see so much of it appreciated ... it was worth it ... to tell some radio folks ... who cares it's not rock'n'roll ... it's GREAT music ...
Yeah ... I feel happy ... I'm not unsatisfied ... and I did my best ... even if so many folks in the Coffee House, or ProgArchives ... have no idea ... but I was lucky ... I went from Portugal to Brazil and then to America ... dad was a political refugee of sorts in an invisible way ... and he became a well known writer ... to see people publish the film reviews he wrote of Fellini, Antonioni, Bergman, Bunuel, Ford, Hitchcok ... in their original form instead of the censored/cut articles that were published in the papers, because the government in Portugal was a fascist group ... is not something that anyone here can understand and appreciate ... what it is to have the freedom to really be free ... even of commercial strings and social constraints! You do not know what it is like to have known that the two oldest children had guns pulled to their heads to force the father to shut up and stop writing poetry about lit candles in the beach at night 10 years before Elton John ...
Progressive is ... freedom! Total! Don't ever forget it!