Progressive pop

Progressive pop is a form of pop music which attempts to break with standard pop music formulas. Originally used to refer to early progressive rock music, some stylistic features of progressive pop include changes in key and rhythm, experiments with larger forms, and unexpected, disruptive, or ironic treatments of past conventions. Performers commonly produce their own material while opposing the influence of managers, agents, or record companies.

Since 1967, progressive pop has stood in contrast to mass/chart pop. Following the economic boom of the mid 1960s, record labels began investing in artists, allowing performers limited control over their own content and marketing. Groups who combined rock and roll with various other music styles such as Indian ragas, oriental melodies ultimately influenced the creation of progressive rock (or prog). After the 1970s, the prog genre began selling poorly, opening a vacuum for a new, milder brand of progressive pop. During the 1980s, the New Pop movement attempted to bridge the divide between "progressive" pop and "mass/chart" pop. By the 2000s, progressive pop gave rise to a host of popular, uncommonly large bands who share a disdain for clearly defined hierarchies.

Definition

For more details on this topic, see Progressive music and Pop music § Characteristics.

The term "progressive" refers to the wide range of attempts to break with standard pop music formulas through extended instrumentation, personalized lyrics, and individual improvisation.[1] The premise involved popular music that was created for the intention of listening, not dancing, and opposed the influence of managers, agents, or record companies.[3] Progressive music was also mainly produced by the performing artists themselves.[4] In 1970, a journalist at UK publication Melody Maker described progressive pop as music that is "meant for a wide audience but which is intended to have more permanent value than the six weeks in the charts and the 'forget it' music of older pop forms."[5] By the late 1970s, "progressive pop" was roughly interchangeable with "rock music".[6]
The Beatles – "Penny Lane" (1967)
Paul Willis names "Penny Lane" progressive pop for the Beatles' unorthodox use of instrumentation.[7]
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Some stylistic features of progressive pop include changes in key and rhythm or experiments with larger forms.[8][nb 1] In terms of tonal structure, progressive pop is similar to rock and roll in overthrowing harmony as its basic organizing structure. However, unlike rock and roll, progressive pop inverts received conventions, playing with them ironically, disrupting them, or producing shadows of them in new and unexpected forms.[7] Electronic techniques such as echo, feedback, stereo, loudness, and distortion may be used to give the music the impression of space and lateral extension.[7] In the 1970s, a new generation of progressive pop musicians drew from the Beatles' work.[10]

History

1960s: Origins

The Beatles working in the studio with their producer George Martin, circa 1965
The Beach Boys, 1964

During the mid 1960s, pop music made repeated forays into new sounds, styles, and techniques that inspired public discourse among its listeners. The word "progressive" was frequently used, and it was thought that every song and single was to be a "progression" from the last.[11] In this era, "progressive pop" was used as an earlier term for progressive rock,[12] a genre influenced by the "progressive" pop groups from the 1960s who combined rock and roll with various other music styles such as Indian ragas, oriental melodies, and Gregorian chants, like the Beatles and the Yardbirds.[13] The Beatles' Paul McCartney intimated in 1967: "we [the band] got a bit bored with 12 bars all the time, so we tried to get into something else. Then came [Bob] Dylan, the Who, and the Beach Boys. ... We're all trying to do vaguely the same kind of thing."[14] Before the progressive pop of the late 1960s, performers were typically unable to decide on the artistic content of their music.[15] The Beach Boys' leader Brian Wilson is credited for setting a precedent that allowed bands and artists to enter a recording studio and act as their own producers.[16]
The Beach Boys – "Wouldn't It Be Nice" (1966)
"Wouldn't It Be Nice" features a harmonically surprising key change right before its opening verse, which composer John Adams says was "nothing unusual" in the realms of classical or jazz, but felt "fresh" and "novel" for a standard rock song.[17]
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Author Bill Martin credits the Beatles and the Beach Boys as the most significant contributors to the development of progressive rock, transforming rock from dance music into music that was made for listening to.[18][nb 2] Upon release, the Beach Boys' 1966 album Pet Sounds was hailed by British newspapers as "the most progressive pop album ever".[20] Cleveland's Troy Smith believes that the album "established the group as forefathers of progressive pop, right from the beginning chords of 'Wouldn't It Be Nice', a Wall of Sound style single".[21] Melody Maker ran a survey which interviewed many pop musicians on whether they believed that the album was truly revolutionary or progressive. The author concluded that "the record's impact on artists and the men behind the artists has been considerable."[22][nb 3]

In the opinion of author Simon Grilo, the Beatles' progressive pop would be exemplified in the double A-sided single "Strawberry Fields Forever" / "Penny Lane" (1967).[25] Influenced by Pet Sounds, the Beatles demonstrated "paradoxical lyrical content matched by music that was at once 'young' and 'old', rock and Tin Pan Alley, LSD and cocoa, progressive and nostalgic" — all features that were shared on their following 1967 album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.[25] Musicologist Allan Moore writes: "At that time, Sgt. Pepper seemed to mark rock music's coming of age ... Now, of course, with jaded memories, we think of it as ushering in an era of pomposity, with varying degrees of seriousness ... The question after 1967 was whether 'progressive' pop/rock was to be trusted, because it was dealing with issues 'deeper' than simply interpersonal relationships. In the long run, the answer turned out to be 'no' (at least, that is, until a later generation of bands discovered the delight of pastiching the Beatles)."[26]

1960s–70s

See also: Art rock

Towards the end of the 1960s, progressive pop music was received with doubt[27] and disinterest.[28] The Who's Pete Townshend reflected in 1974 that many people were doing ambitious works that were "instantly getting labelled as pretentious, and at the same time garbage was being pushed into the charts ... Anybody that was any good ... was more or less becoming insignificant again. ... There was a lot of psychedelic bullshit going on."[29] Writer Nik Cohn in his 1969 piece Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom: The Golden Age of Rock believed that the pop music industry had been split "roughly eighty percent ugly and twenty percent idealist", with the eighty percent being "mainline pop" and the twenty percent being "progressive pop [developed to] an esoteric feel". He predicted: "In ten years, its practitioners will probably be called by another name entirely, electric music or something, and they'll relate to pop the way that art movies relate to Hollywood."[30] In its 1970 revision, Cohn amended: "I had guessed that progressive pop would shrink to a minority cult and it hasn't. Well, in England, I wasn't entirely wrong ... But, in America, I fluffed completely — the Woodstock nation has kept growing and, for all his seriousness and pretensions to poetry, someone like James Taylor has achieved the same mass appeal as earlier stars."[31]
Supertramp – "The Logical Song" (1979)
Supertramp's "The Logical Song" was one specific example of progressive pop named in Night Moves.[10][nb 4]
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Progressive rock (also known as art rock) was ushered in the 1970s, directly following the combination of classical grandiosity and pop experimentalism from the 1960s.[13] Authors Don and Jeff Breithaupt wrote that bands like Queen and Electric Light Orchestra "found their place in prog-rock firmament with a sort of progressive pop that allowed them full access to the charts".[33] The authors elaborated: "From 1976 onward, orthodox progressive rock waned; that is, the sprawling moody electronic suites that had fueled FM rock radio during the early seventies disappeared, or sold poorly ... Into the void created by prog rock's misfortunes sailed a host of new, milder 'serious' bands, whose humor (Queen), pop smarts (Supertramp), and style (Roxy Music, mach two) would ensure their survival into the eighties. Stylistic descendants of the Beatles, they met the melodic requirements of AM radio while still producing thoughtful, original work. This new, leaner breed of pomp rock deserves a name–let's call it progressive pop."[10]

Author Edward Macan views British symphonic pop as a splinter of the progressive rock genre that relied on straightforward songwriting, rich vocal arrangements and quasi-orchestral fullness, citing Supertramp, ELO, 10cc, the Alan Parsons Project, and Al Stewart as examples.[34]

1970s–2000s

See also: New Pop

In 1985, Simon Reynolds noted that the New Pop movement "involved a conscious and brave attempt to bridge the separation between 'progressive' pop and mass/chart pop – a divide which has existed since 1967, and is also, broadly, one between boys and girls, middle-class and working-class."[2] In a review of Brian Wilson's debut solo album (1988), Deborah Wilker called its closing eight-part piece "Rio Grande" "the kind of immensely fulfilling progressive pop with which art-rock bands such as Yes and Genesis formerly toyed, but rarely brought to satisfying completion."[35]

In 2008, The New York Times' John Wray discussed "the return of the one-man band", observing, "the past few years in progressive pop ... have given rise to a series of popular and acclaimed collectives — uncommonly large bands with a disdain for clearly defined hierarchies", noting examples such as Arcade Fire, Broken Social Scene, and Animal Collective.[36]

List of artists

Notes

  1. ↑ The Songwriting Sourebook (2003) states that key changes are more common to "arty" genres like progressive rock than they are to Top 40 pop songs, slow reggae tunes, dance music, R&B, punk, 12-bar blues, and 1950s rock and roll.[9]
  2. ↑ Music created with the intention of listening, not dancing, was also the aim of progressive pop.[19]
  3. ↑ Guitarist Andy Gill from the post-punk band Gang of Four argued: "Clearly, The Beatles learnt 90% of what they did in the mid-to-late ‘60s from this album. ... so many rock bands took it as a green light to get clever — to start playing with the time signatures, to go prog. You know, 'Let’s put a french horn in there!' Before you know it, you’ve got Queen."[23] The Beach Boys continued to be associated with progressive pop for their 1971 album Surf's Up, for which Rolling Stone called a "wed[ding of] their choral harmonies" to the genre.[24]
  4. ↑ Others were "Love Is the Drug" (Roxy Music, 1976), "Bohemian Rhapsody" (Queen, 1976), "Dream Weaver" (Gary Wright, 1976), "The Things We Do for Love" (10cc, 1976), "Year of the Cat" (Al Stewart, 1977), "Solsbury Hill" (Peter Gabriel, 1977), "I Wouldn't Want to Be Like You" (Alan Parsons Project, 1977), "Telephone Line" (Electric Light Orchestra, 1977), and "The Man with the Child in His Eyes" (Kate Bush, 1979).[32]

References

  1. 1 2 Haworth & Smith 1975, p. 126.
  2. 1 2 Reynolds 2006, p. 398.
  3. ↑ Shepherd, Virden & Vulliamy 1977, pp. 187–188.
  4. ↑ Shepherd, Virden & Vulliamy 1977, pp. 186–188.
  5. ↑ Jacobshagen, Leniger & Henn 2007, p. 141.
  6. ↑ Shepherd, Virden & Vulliamy 1977, p. 201.
  7. 1 2 3 Willis 2014, p. 220.
  8. ↑ Palmberg & Baaz 2001, p. 49.
  9. ↑ Roberts & Rooksby 2003, p. 137.
  10. 1 2 3 Breithaupt & Breithaupt 2000, p. 68.
  11. ↑ Hewitt & Hellier 2015, p. 162.
  12. ↑ Moore 2004, p. 22.
  13. 1 2 3 4 Prown & Newquist 1997, p. 78.
  14. ↑ Philo 2014, p. 119.
  15. ↑ Willis 2014, p. 217.
  16. ↑ Edmondson 2013, p. 890.
  17. ↑ Adams 2011.
  18. ↑ Martin 1998, pp. 39–40.
  19. ↑ Shepherd, Virden & Vulliamy 1977, pp. 187–188, 201.
  20. ↑ Leaf 1985, pp. 76, 87–88.
  21. ↑ Smith, Troy L. (May 24, 2016). "50 greatest album-opening songs". cleveland.com.
  22. ↑ "Pet Sounds, the Most Progressive Pop Album ever OR as sickly as Peanut Butter". Melody Maker. July 30, 1966.
  23. ↑ Brennan, Colin; Corcoran, Nina (June 18, 2016). "The Genius of Pet Sounds: Artists Reveal Their Favorite Aspects of The Beach Boys' Classic". Consequence of Sound.
  24. ↑ Gaines 1986, p. 242.
  25. 1 2 Philo 2014, pp. 119–121.
  26. ↑ Moore 1997, p. 70.
  27. ↑ Heylin 2012, p. 40.
  28. ↑ Lenig 2010, p. 34.
  29. ↑ Heylin 2012, pp. 40–41.
  30. ↑ Cohn 1970, p. 242.
  31. ↑ Cohn 1970, p. 244.
  32. ↑ Breithaupt & Breithaupt 2000, p. 67.
  33. ↑ Breithaupt & Breithaupt 2014, p. 136.
  34. ↑ Macan 1997, p. 187.
  35. ↑ Wilker, Deborah (July 29, 1988). "Brian Wilson's Album A Comeback Triumph". The Sun Sentinel.
  36. ↑ Wray, John (May 18, 2008). "The Return of the One-Man Band". The New York Times.
  37. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 Breithaupt & Breithaupt 2000, p. 70.
  38. 1 2 Strauss, Nwil (September 5, 1996). "The Pop Life". The New York Times.
  39. 1 2 3 4 Breithaupt & Breithaupt 2000, pp. 68–69.
  40. 1 2 Smith, Troy L. (August 1, 2016). "Rock & Roll Hall of Fame: 7 so-called snubs that shouldn't be inducted". Cleveland.
  41. ↑ Breithaupt & Breithaupt 2000, p. 69.
  42. ↑ Breithaupt & Breithaupt 2000, p. 71.
  43. ↑ MOJO Staff (May 7, 2015). "Todd Rundgren: "I Could Have Been A Casualty Like Syd Barrett"". MOJO.
  44. ↑ Newton, Steve (April 29, 2016). "Todd Rundgren's setlist bodes well for pop-rock freaks in Vancouver". The Georgia Straight.
  45. ↑ Burdick, John (July 23, 2015). "The Best Guitarist in the World at Bearsville". Almanac Weekly.
  46. ↑ Leone, Dominique (April 3, 2002). "Coat of Many Cupboards". Pitchfork.

Bibliography

Further reading

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