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On April 15, 2014 By In Culture

Foundational prog albums – Close to the Edge

Close To The Edge

If you click and enlarge the picture you can see good ol’ Charlie Brown pulling out his well-worn vinyl copy of Close to the Edge.

Eddie [Offord] roused himself sufficiently to play back one of the album tracks called ‘Total Mass Retain’.

“What does ‘Total Mass Retain’ mean!” protested Bill [Bruford].

“What’s wrong with ‘Total Mass Retain’?” demanded Jon [Anderson]. “I had to think of something quickly.”

“Why not call it ‘Puke’?” asked Bill.[1]

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“In 40 years’ time, along with three or four other albums from that era, people will pick out Close to the Edge and say, ‘That’s what progressive rock was all about.’”[2]

Close to the Edge – Yes (released in 1972)

Few bands personify the worldview and ethos of progressive rock better than the band Yes. The band formed in 1968 around a nucleus of bassist Chris Squire, guitarist Peter Banks, vocalist Jon Anderson, and drummer Bill Bruford. Keyboardist Tony Kaye was added a bit later and the first version of the band was complete.

Yes began their career as a cover band performing tunes by The Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, and The 5th Dimension. Instead of performing the hits of these artists verbatim, Yes would add long instrumental sections of their own composition, extending the songs to epic lengths.

The first incarnation of Yes proved to be short-lived. After two largely unsuccessful albums, Banks was out of the band in 1970. He was replaced by Steve Howe. Kaye would leave the band a year later and was replaced by Rick Wakeman. The Yes of Anderson, Squire, Bruford, Howe, and Wakeman would comprise what many fans consider to be Yes’ greatest lineup.

Over the span of eighteen months (March 1971 to September 1972) Yes released three of the finest albums of the first wave of prog: The Yes Album, Fragile, and their masterpiece, Close to the Edge. Close to the Edge contained the perfect storm of three dynamic songs, performed by the right five musicians, recording under the oversight of the right producer and engineer (Eddy Offord), and everyone performing at the peak of their potential. The album also featured a brilliant album cover and gatefold sleeve by graphic designer Roger Dean.

As for the songs, Close to the Edge is an album full to overflowing with beauty and goodness. The songs also might be overflowing with lyrical truth. However, vocalist Jon Anderson’s lyrics are notoriously cryptic and quite difficult to interpret. Guitarist/keyboardist Kerry Livgren of the band Kansas summed up the ambivalence that many fans have with Yes’ music when he wrote, “Yes…should have been everything I liked, but for some reason they weren’t. They made use of esoteric and quasi-religious themes, but they sometimes went so far with their lyrics that it struck me as almost corny. But The Yes Album, Fragile, and Close to the Edge were musically excellent.”[3]

Dr. Brad Birzer has stated that he has heard Close to the Edge is about the Protestant Reformation. Although I have been unable to find any scholarly works or papers to verify Birzer’s assertion, he very well may be correct. Most of the scholarly commentary on the album’s title track point out that the lyrics are influenced by Hermann Hesse’s book Siddhartha. Regardless, we can certainly say that the album contains some images and concepts that may be biblical. I’ll point those out as we explore all three of the songs on this classic album.

Note: For the purposes of this review I used the 2013 Steven Wilson remix of Close to the Edge as a reference. Wilson spoke recently about his approach to remixing this iconic album here. If you can spring for the Wilson remix (especially the Blu-Ray version) it is well worth the money.

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On April 9, 2014 By In Culture

Building a Prog Foundation – Five Starter Albums

five_prog

We have arrived at the point in our show where, having set the stage with a brief history and addressed some “what and why” questions, we are ready to get down to brass tacks and give consideration to a variety of prog rock artists, albums, and songs. In forming this list I worked from the assumption that the average Kuyperian Commentary reader would have little to no familiarity with progressive rock. So my recommendations are geared toward the prog newbie and not so much toward a seasoned listener familiar with every nook and cranny of the genre.

If you are a seasoned consumer of progressive rock you will undoubtedly look at my list and find a quibble here or there. “I wouldn’t have recommended ______ by _______. I would recommended _______ by ______ instead.” Recommended lists are by no means definitive and I am assuming that. However, someone has to be the navigator on this prog journey and and I’m the one wearing the tour guide hat, coat, and dungarees. Nevertheless, prog fandom inspires vigorous debate like few other rock music genres. Proggers are a spirited lot, active on Internet message boards, able to write thousands of words about the glories of mid- 70s Italian prog, or argue to the death that everyone but them has completely overlooked obscure prog artists like Ozric Tentacles or Grobschnitt. Let’s just say that, if you’re looking for a series of recommendations from the skinny branches of the prog rock tree, prepare to be disappointed.

Finally, when compiling lists like these, I try never think in terms of a “best of” list. Therefore, this list (nor any other lists in this series) should not be misconstrued as being my picks for the “five best prog albums ever.” Leave the “best of” list discussions for athletic competitions and the Guinness Book of World Records. This is all about my opinions of what would suffice as suitable listening for a Kuyperian Commentary prog newbie. Your mileage and recommendations will surely vary.

This list is meant to address foundations. The following are five albums that I believe I could give any prog rock newbie and they would come away feeling as if they had a solid knowledge and understanding of what makes for good prog rock. If you look at the picture above you’ll see a spoiler snapshot giving away my choices for this list.

Let’s consider briefly each album in chronological order and then, over the next five posts, we will attempt a deeper, track-by-track dive into my “foundational five albums of progressive rock.”

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On April 4, 2014 By In Culture

Why enjoy this music? – What is in progressive rock for the mature believer

I grew up in a home where my parents took both my brother and me to church almost every Sunday. The memories I have are of a conservative Bible Church full of good people who loved the Lord and sought to glorify God in word and in deed. My teenage years directly coincided with the explosive growth of contemporary Christian music (CCM). All of the cool kids in our youth group owned cassettes by artists such as Petra, Michael W. Smith, Amy Grant, and Whiteheart. A smaller subset of ultra-cool youth group kids owned cassettes by Steve Taylor and Stryper.

Then there were the square peg/round hole kids like myself who, although they enjoyed and owned some contemporary Christian music, also really enjoyed so-called “secular music” by artists such as Genesis, Rush, Van Halen, and Journey. This was a problem. My church youth group promoted the ministries of people like Bob Larson and Al Menconi (remember them?) who proclaimed that “secular rock & roll” was “the devil’s diversion” and that what was needed was a 30 day “Christian music diet” in order to flush out the bad stuff.[1] Much of this gained little traction with me, even when it was accompanied by a late-night showing of A Thief in the Night at a youth group all-nighter. For the most part I continued to enjoy Judas Priest and Bryan Adams right alongside Rich Mullins and DeGarmo and Key

Fast-forward to 2014. Many Christians freely interact with all sorts of “non-Christian movies,” especially in critiquing a movie’s story and worldview. Students attending Christian academies (especially classical Christian academies) participate in “great books” or Omnibus programs where they are expected to read The Koran, On the Origin of Species, or Mein Kampf alongside City of God, Institutes of the Christian Religion, and Mere Christianity. In the areas of movies and literature Christians are learning more and more to understand the culture and how to bring the Christian worldview to bear in the arena of ideas. We have learned (rightly, I believe) that sifting through a thing thoughtfully in order to keep the wheat and reject the tares pleases God much more than a wholesale, retreatist rejection of the whole shooting match. Realizing that unbelievers are able to tell a story that correctly reflects God’s truth, beauty, and goodness is to realize that God pours out his common grace on believers and unbelievers alike, even if unbelievers remain strangers to God’s redeeming grace.

And yet I fear that, in the area of music, too many thoughtful Christians are stuck in a reactionary Christian ghetto with no desire to strike out and explore other musical aspects of God’s world. A wise partaking of and engagement in rock music–especially progressive rock music–is what I am after in this series of posts. If Christians are mature enough to interact thoughtfully and honestly with Immanuel Kant, Edgar Allen Poe, and The Communist Manifesto then they should be able to interact thoughtfully and honestly with Pink Floyd, Marillion, and the song “BU2B” by the band Rush.

One reading of pop music history claims that punk rock came along in the late 1970s and almost overnight rendered progressive rock obsolete “dinosaur music.” Punk rockers may or may not have “hated” prog rock, but I believe we can say beyond a reasonable doubt that punk rock gloried in the overthrow of tradition, adhered to the ethos of ugly anarchy, and believed in the supremacy of revolution. How else can one explain explain a song that exclaimed, “I am an anti-christ/I am an anarchist/Don’t know what I want but I know how to get it/I wanna destroy the passer by.” If the punkers rejected the proggers because the latter loved truth, beauty, and goodness while the former did not, then so be it.

But I expect better things of Christians, especially Christians that regularly partake in great books, big ideas, and meta-narratives. J. S. Bach’s B Minor Mass is beauty nonpareil, but Yes’s piece “Awaken” is also quite glorious in its way. Handel’s Messiah is a soul-stirring (albeit slightly over-performed) masterwork, but the song “The Underfall Yard” by Big Big Train also excels by celebrating creation–with an undercurrent of Ecclesiastes “all is vapor” melancholy–in ways that are deeply rousing, incarnational, and dare I say it, Christian.

So why partake of progressive rock? Because it is there, because it frequently tells amazing stories with a distinctly Christian worldview (sometimes even intentionally), and because Christians can and should affirm truth, beauty, and goodness wherever they find it.

It is time for mature, thoughtful Christians to expand their music horizons beyond J. S. Bach, Handel’s Messiah, great hymns of the faith played on the pan flute, and the Gaither Homecoming videos.  My hope is that the rest of this series will help you expand those horizons by exploring the glorious mess that is progressive rock music.

1. Never mind that, in retrospect, much of the “Christian music” meant to flush out the bad stuff was, in the words of C. S. Lewis, “fifth-rate poems set to sixth-rate music.”

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Derek Hale has lived all of his life in Wichita, Kansas and isn’t a bit ashamed about that fact. He and his wife Nicole have only six children–four daughters and two young sons of thunder. Derek is a ruling elder, chief musician, and performs pastoral duties at Trinity Covenant Church (CREC). Derek manages a firmware lab for NetApp and enjoys reading, computers, exercising, craft beer, and playing and listening to music. But not all at the same time. He blogs occasionally at youdidntblogthat.tumblr.com.<>сколько стоит реклама в гугл адвордс

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