Reconfiguring Genre, Style, and Idiolect: Investigating Progressive rock’s Meta-Genre and Affordances

ABSTRACT

This article argues that we should adapt our understanding of genre, style, and idiolect to encompass the personal and collective idiolects associated with particular bands. Focusing on progressive rock as an example, it is proposed that the collective idiolect of a band may not only transcend style, as suggested by Allan F. Moore, but also genre: that progressive rock may be usefully regarded as an assemblage of collective idiolects. Moreover, it is argued that greater attention should be paid to the classificatory activities of progressive rock fans whose “lay discourses” forge connections between the different bands.

KEYWORDS:

• genre
• style
• idiolect
• progressive rock

Acknowledgments

An early version of the arguments made in this article was presented at the 4th Biennial International Conference of the Progect Network for the Study of Progressive Rock: Progressive Rock and Metal: Towards a Contemporary Understanding, hosted online by Lori Burns at University of Ottawa, Canada, on May 20, 2021. My thanks to the conference participants for their feedback.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. There is relatively little research that examines progressive rock fans in their geographic cultural contexts or that talks in qualitative depth. Quantitative analysis of online forums has been undertaken by Timothy J. Dowd et al. (“Talk”) and Timothy J. Dowd et al. (“Retrospective”), and qualitative analysis of online album reviews has been discussed by Jarl A. Ahlkvist. Paul Goodge’s doctoral research incorporated in-depth qualitative interviews with progressive rock fans from seven countries, providing the first concerted attempt to understand fans in their own terms (see also Anderton and Goodge); however, geographical differences were not a central concern.

2. Rieder lists five attributes of genre, but I have discussed them under three broader headings here.

3. The website version of GEPR included a “Prog Sub-Genres” pagewritten by Mike McLatchley in 2000 that included 25 sub-genre names, including “Dutch Euro-Rock,” “Gentle Giant influenced,” “Oldfield Progressive,” and “Zappa Music,” alongside more familiar terms today such as “Neo-Progressive,” “Canterbury,” and “Kraut Rock” (McLatchley, “Sub-genres”). In 2003, McLatchley created a second version of the guide which now encompassed well over sixty different classificatory names, plus further delineations based on the country in which the music was produced. It was organized across five main categories: “rock,” “jazz/jazz rock/fusion,” “folk/folk rock,” “electronic,” and “unclassified,” plus an “Appendix” that encompassed ten “heavy metal” subgenres—a set of genres that were absent from the earlier edition of the guide (McLatchley, “Guide”).

4. David Simonelli argues that fans and critics alike assumed “that if a record made the popular charts, it pandered to the mass taste and was thus virtually worthless” (106). In this sense, the separation of progressive from pop music was ideological, and singled out the progressive fans as having “discerning ears” (105). Anderton and Atton make a similar point with regard to music critics who defined progressive rock as music for listening, as do Borthwick and Moy who note that in live performance the audience was mostly seated and sedate in terms of physical movement, creating a “hushed awe” (66) that encouraged “prog audiences to perceive themselves to be elevated, both emotionally and aesthetically, by the experience” (67).

5. Notably, both of these genres gained prominence through media or industry support. For instance, the term Krautrock derives from reviews and interviews by Chris Welch and others in the Melody Maker newspaper in the early 1970s, and several German groups were played regularly by the DJ John Peel on B.B.C. Radio, including live sessions by Can. A number of Italian bands were signed in the mid-1970s to Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s Manticore record label, and also played at the 1973 Reading Festival, which was dominated by progressive rock. However, numerous bands in Europe and around the world were recording and performing music that we now categorize as progressive rock; yet their distribution deals remained largely localized (especially for the many bands releasing records in the countries of the Soviet Union), so the full extent of progressive musical productions only started to come to light when record collectors, specialist mail order companies, and archival record labels began to move beyond the better-known canons. A good introductory overview of European progressive rock of the 1970s can be found in Scented Gardens of the Mind (Asbjørnsen), though there are also significant numbers of albums released in other parts of the world. For example, Julian Cope’s Japrocksampler offers a wide-ranging discussion of postwar Japanese music that includes many progressive rock bands.

6. Moore refers to the specific soundworld of the title track of Close to the Edge, yet elsewhere in the same article discusses the “communal soundworld of first generation prog” (“Shreds” 4, 16). I would argue that this grouping together of “first generation prog” needs to be unpicked further, given the varied music of the era: it is not a singular communal soundworld but a plural variety of soundworlds that have been assembled under the broader meta-genre classification of progressive rock. For this reason, I have adopted the more specific term of “collective idiolect” to refer to the soundworlds of particular bands as heard on specific albums.

7. Yes singer Jon Anderson provided backing vocals on two songs of Glass Hammer’s album Culture of Ascent (2007), while in 2012 Glass Hammer’s lead vocalist Jon Davison (who was with the band from 2009 to 2014) was recruited by Chris Squire to become the new lead singer of Yes. Davison has since recorded three studio albums with Yes: Heaven and Earth (2014), The Quest (2021), and Mirror to the Sky (2023).

8. Holdsworth’s personal idiolect has been an inspiration for many guitarists and keyboard players, particularly in relation to his lead solo stylings, while the American guitarist Tim Miller draws more broadly on his idiolect, with records that also show strong similarities to Holdsworth’s compositional approach.

9. Marillion did include a sound-alike section of the “Apocalypse in 9/8” part of Genesis’ “Supper’s Ready” in their early song “Grendel” (released on the band’s first EP release in 1982), but other than this the band’s music did not directly copy from Genesis, and the band sought to lose the comparisons almost as soon as they were made. Indeed, the band dropped “Grendel” from their live set in late 1983 following the release of their debut album Script for a Jester’s Tear (see Anderton, “Clutching”).

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Chris Anderton

Chris Anderton is Associate Professor of Cultural Economy at Solent University, Southampton, UK. He has published five books: Understanding the Music Industries (Sage 2013), Music Festivals in the UK. Beyond the Carnivalesque (Routledge 2019), Music Management, Marketing and PR (Sage 2022), Researching Live Music (Routledge 2022), and Media Narratives in Popular Music (Bloomsbury 2022). He has published several articles and book chapters about progressive rock, edited a special edition on progressive rock for Rock Music Studies (issue 7:1, 2020), and is co-editor, with Lori Burns, of The Routledge Handbook of Progressive Rock, Metal, and the Literary Imagination (in press).