I never understood.

Maybe that makes it a little better.

You see, music has all these rules attached to them, or at least rules if you want to make your crap sound good. I failed Music Theory in school, so I’m pretty sure I’m off to a great start.

I can’t speak for an entire genre, because usually when I do that people call me a pretentious asshole, and while I plead the fifth, I can safely talk about what Progressive as a prefix means to me.

Much like when someone talks about an ideology being “progressive”, it usually challenges the traditional structure that came before it. In music, it’s a lot more literal. Like, over 90% of music even today is written in either 4/4, ¾, or 6/8. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, much like how they are a sandbox or a structure. I just believe fucking with that traditional structure, let’s say… adding a fucking SHARK TANK to the sand box, makes the experience more memorable.

Everyone’s seen a sandbox. You’ll remember the one with a shark tank.

4/4 is just the simplest form of division. We have our (1) measure and humans can super easily and naturally divide it in half. Do that again to obtain four beats in a measure. Simple division.

Human emotion is not the simplest, however. We’re dumb fleshy balls of angst and feels. A simple cut in half won’t do. My ABSOLUTE FAVOURITE example is 5/8. Mission Impossible’s Theme. Tense. Dramatic.

You can look to movie scores and you’ll notice that composers really like to fuck with meters. There’s a lot of human emotion going down in films, yo!

Anyway, the question was, “What is Progressive Rock and what can it do?” and my answer is more or less straightforward (albeit lengthy). The traditional sense of music, be it the instrumentation, the composition, the structure, whatever, is most memorable when fucked with.

Music should fuck people.

Why limit your band to just a guitar, bass, singer, and drumkit? You’ll be like nearly every other band. Now, if you add a fucking cellist, now there’s something worth noting. That’s specifically adding Progressive to the Rock though. Progressive could probably be affixed onto pretty much everything at this point. There was a interesting group that was fronted by a Lindsey something or other that played electronic music behind her violin playing that caught my eye.

Anyway…

I think the term Progressive just means fuck with tradition. I had classes on tradition, but I failed them thoroughly.

I never understood.

Maybe that makes it a little better.