Well

Before I get the hang of the visual aspect of this blog (which I shall certainly take care of in the near future, making it beautiful), I thought I'd take a moment to write about PROGRESSIVE ROCK.

I was actually thinking of naming it Bruno's ProgBlog, to express my love for this wonderfully pompous, self-indulgent style of music. I only changed my mind because I realized I would be writing about other music and entirely different subjects.
Anyway, what is it that makes prog so blatantly superior to most (if not all) music ever written before and after? It's not such trifles as outstanding musicianship and heartbreakingly pure emotion both of which can easily be found in many of the lesser forms of music. What's that? "Emotion is for girly faggots" you say? "I'd rather have my badass macho music" you say? Of course, prog also has it's fair share of manly kickassery (although it is often somewhat "diluted" in the longer songs and therefore less obvious)  but again, that's not what it's all about. Could it all be about the complexity of the compositions, perhaps? That's certainly one of the style's major virtues, but then again: bebop opened up a whole new world of theoretical complexity before prog came to be, and for ages before that we had a fuckton of classical composers writing not-exactly-very-simple-music. What makes this music so very special is the mentality. It is the mentality of those holy pioneers that made them willing to play something more than just plain ol' rock 'n' roll, to take the best of each genre out there and competently combine it into something new, beautiful and scary. In fact I don't think that prog "rock", as they call it is a genre at all. Firstly, what the hell does this have to do with rock 'n' roll music? Then think about this: what are the similarities in sound between, say, The Mars Volta and Genesis? None at all. Yet they all share a forward thinking (some might even say progressive) mentality. And there you have it folks, the truth about prog rock.

(I realize that I may have posted way too many links, but they were all completely necessary for this discussion. Think of them as those 10-20-30 sec. samples you find on some sites, rather than going through each of them individually.)