Progressive Music

Let’s talk prog! Progressive music, as defined by Wikipedia, is “music that attempts to expand existing stylistic boundaries associated with specific genres of music.” It pushes the envelope of art and culture, often in strange and unpredictable ways that challenge the boundaries of music. There are a number of different styles that fall under the prog umbrella, and I’m going to discuss all of them in this month’s article. 

Progressive Rock

Progressive Rock started in the 60s as many psychedelic rock bands like The Doors, The Beatles, and the Beach Boys began to incorporate more experimentation and technicality into their music, with the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds and the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in particular setting the groundwork for a lot of albums that followed them. King Crimson’s 1969 debut, In The Court of The Crimson King, was one of the first albums to be truly described as prog, blending elements of psychedelic rock, jazz fusion, and art rock to create an epic, well-textured series of lengthy anthems. Soon after, albums like Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here, Genesis’ Selling England by the Pound, King Crimson’s Larks’ Tongues in Aspic and Red, Led Zeppelin’s Led Zeppelin IV, and Yes’ Close to the Edge began to make waves throughout the music sphere, leading to the creation of bands everywhere. Bands like Los Jaivas, La Máquina de Hacer Pájaros, and Serú Girán spread prog beyond North America and the UK, inspiring many groups throughout Europe and South America. While prog rock had largely died down by the 80s and 90s, with Rush and Porcupine Tree creating a significant number of albums in a short period of time, it experienced a massive revival in the 2000s with Muse, The Mars Volta, Coheed and Cambria, and the aforementioned Porcupine Tree dropping blistering masterpieces, skyrocketing the genre’s popularity back into the mainstream. TMV’s Frances The Mute, Muse’s Origin of Symmetry, Porcupine Tree’s Fear of a Blank Planet, Opeth’s Damnation, and more led to the creation of a new, off-the-wall, metal-infused brand of prog that set them apart from their 70s counterparts. The Mars Volta incorporated elements of Latin rock and post-hardcore, as heard in vocalist Cedric Bixler-Zavala’s previous band, At The Drive-In. At the same time, Muse employed sci-fi aesthetics to craft stories of totalitarianism, mass surveillance, AI, futurism, and space travel. As of late, prog seems to have dipped in popularity, but bands like black midi, Glass Beach, and even Car Seat Headrest continue to create new and interesting twists on the genre.

Progressive Metal

Prog Metal essentially started with the creation of bands like Metallica and Megadeth, whose songs often stretched beyond 6-7 minutes (I’m sorry, I had to). Metallica’s Master of Puppets, Megadeth’s Rust In Peace, Iron Maiden’s Powerslave and Seventh Son of a Seventh Son, and Slayer’s Hell Awaits fused metal’s raw aggression with prog’s technicality, ushering in a new era of prog music, aptly coined progressive metal in music publications. Bands like Dream Theater, TOOL, and Opeth reached new heights within the greater metal sphere. As the 90s and early 2000s progressed, death metal bands like Death, Suffocation, Nile, Cryptopsy, Opeth, and Voivod began to experiment further by incorporating prog elements and lengthening their songs, creating a genre that’s known today as technical death metal or progressive death metal. Sweden’s Meshuggah spawned djent, a prog subgenre that employs down-tuned and heavily distorted guitars, strange meters, syncopation, and palm muting. Progressive metalcore and mathcore, two technical and rhythmically complex subgenres of metalcore that emerged in the 90s and 2000s, feature virtuosic instrumentation, chaotic polyrhythms, and insane meters, with three of the most notable contributors being Converge, Botch, and the Dillinger Escape Plan. More recent bands within prog metal and its subgenres include Gojira, Between the Buried and Me, Architects, Mastodon, Periphery, Trivium, and Porcupine Tree.

Progressive Soul

Prog Soul, aka prog R&B, can be traced back to the Motown sound of the early ‘60s, when prog rock was on the rise and black artists began to experiment with more adventurous songwriting techniques and elements of a multitude of different styles, including funk, jazz, Middle Eastern music, psychedelic rock, and then-newly popularized electronic music. Unlike the traditional R&B that preceded it, early prog soul focused on social issues among African Americans rather than romantic ballads, with some early pioneers being Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Issac Hayes, and Curtis Mayfield. Earth, Wind & Fire, Parliament-Funkadelic, and the Isley Brothers began to incorporate elements of disco and funk as the mid-to-late 70s rolled around. Like many of these other genres, progressive soul was on a decline by the 90s, but artists like Sade, Seal, Bilal, D’Angelo, the Roots, and Erykah Badu kept it alive and relevant, with D’Angelo winning Grammys for his 2000 album Voodoo and its lead single “Untitled (How Does It Feel),” and Erykah Badu gaining a triple platinum certification for her 1997 debut Baduizm. Recently, artists like Janelle Monae, Frank Ocean, and the aforementioned Bilal have found great success with widely artistic and sonically diverse spins on the genre, incorporating elements of dream pop, ambient, indie rock, trap, jazz, doo-wop, and more. 

Progressive Pop

Progressive Pop originated in the mid 60s with the rise of acts like The Beatles and The Beach Boys. The latter’s 1966 album Pet Sounds, while not largely defined as prog pop, helped to bring its characteristics into mainstream music, with grandiose production and stretched song structures. In the 70s, bands like 10cc and ELO spawned numerous hits and set a precedent for future acts. Although it had died down by the 90s, artists like Animal Collective, Arcade Fire, Frank Ocean, and, more recently, Magdalena Bay, revived it by the 2010s and 2020s, finding new ways to fuse genres. 

This isn’t a complete list, and there are other genres with prog elements that exist, like ambient house, Third Stream, and progressive hip hop, but these four are the most notable. To this day, prog continues to defy the laws of music and completely disregard typical structures and stereotypes of its respective influences through innovative and otherworldly production, instrumentation, and songwriting. Thank you for reading this month’s edition of The Beat, and Happy Thanksgiving!