Sic Semper Tyrannis

On Marx, Prog Rock and Music Criticism

I’ve read a little bit of Karl Marx in my life, and the vast majority of it kind of went over my head. But I do remember one of his ideas that got stuck in my head. It relates to value or worth. Here’s the question: how do you determine the value of a particular object? For instance, how do you determine what an ounce of silver is worth? Well, economically speaking, our market-based economy says that an object is worth whatever anybody will pay for it. On the other hand, Marx says that an object or product is worth the sum total of work or effort that went into its creation. I like his way of thinking on this. It’s not messy and nebulous. For, in the first answer, value is an idea. The consumer pretty much brings the concept of value to the object. I don’t like that. I don’t like to rely on people. We’re all fickle and unreliable. We’re messy and muddle-headed at times. With Marx, the value is a little more inherent in the object. Value is material. It is fixed. It is not affixed.

So, I got to thinking about why I fell so hard for prog-rock back in high school, and why prog-rock is so uncool today. (I was reading a review of Springsteen’s newly remastered Born to Run just today that credited Yes and Jethro Tull with “ruining rock n’ roll.” Pretty harsh.) And I think Marx has helped me in my attempt to articulate my love. Of course, I didn’t realize most of the following at the time. But that’s the way we are. We love first and ask questions later.

Let me first lay out the basics of how prog sounds for the uninitiated. In a word-difficult. You frequently have fast notes all over the place and you frequently have “unnatural” odd meters, rather than “four on the floor” caveman drum beats. You usually have a bunch of instrumental breaks and/or instrumental solo sections. When you first hear prog music, your first thought is usually something along the lines of “gee, those guys must have practiced a lot.” Prog-rock also has a tendency toward the dramatic or epic scale. This basically means long songs that frequently segue into each other. All in all, it’s very musician-friendly music. As a budding instrumentalist myself, I loved hearing what was possible.

Now, what does all of this have to do with Marx and materialism? One of the reasons I loved (and still love) such obvious displays of technical prowess was the clarity of it, like the clarity of Marx’s materialism. A lot of times when people, particularly critics, discuss the merits and liabilities of music, it’s full of fuzzy language. Kind of like when we say a product is worth what people will pay for it. They cite a line or two of lyrics as if they held some kind of universal significance. Or they try to place an artist on some sort of continuum of relevance. To me, popular musical criticism has come to be veiled statements of good old American preference. It’s opinion dressed up as doctrine. Sheep in wolves’ clothing.

But at rock bottom, I could appreciate prog-rock for the musicianship of its creators. Now, “musicianship” is a word that sounds just as ambiguous, but let’s look a little closer. It’s much more easily measured by fellow musicians than the rest of the aesthetic concerns. Someone with basic musical training can hear the difference between musicians who have the “chops” and those who don’t. And that’s what I liked. It actually simplified the aesthetic process for me into a matter of concretes. For you see, either you can play more than three chords or you can’t. Either you can play odd meters or you can’t. And my policy back in the day was, if a musical artist wasn’t doing anything that I couldn’t do, they weren’t worth listening to. I’ve never gotten much enjoyment out of learning other people’s songs and all of this is a big reason why.

To put all of this simply, the presence or lack of good musical technique is probably the aesthetic element subject to the least amount of interpretation. I don’t need a critic to tell me if someone can play their instrument better than I can. I can hear it for myself.

So, how did the progsters of the late seventies “ruin rock n’ roll?” Basically, what separated Yes from all the other rock of the time was their injection of a classically trained musicality into popular rock forms. Obviously, prog was a short-lived experiment for the masses because it’s rarely heard in the new music of today, (with the possible exception of Tool.) It’s not as if all rock music came to resemble it. Unbridled instrumental technique and grand artistic vision did not become de rigeur. No, history is written by the winners, and prog rock lost. Prog rock didn’t ruin rock n’ roll. It was just one of the many interesting diversions in its history. To say prog-rock ruined rock n’ roll is like saying T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound ruined poetry. The truth is, they just wrote for a different audience in ways that they thought were right.

Now, whether or not critics should speak for the tastes of the “common man,” remains debatable. I honestly think that prog rock confounded its contemporary music writers for several reasons. 1)Deadlines-music of grand ambition does not lend itself well to the life of a time-obsessed journalist. It was probably a lot easier to vilify the likes of Yes and Jethro Tull than to engage their music with the attention, patience, and time that it demanded. 2)Instrumentalism-writers are word people. That is what their income, nay; their whole economy is based on. This is probably why music criticism today worships the lyric. Well, like I’ve said elsewhere, prog-rock certainly did not worship the lyric. At best prog artists strove to set lyrics with appropriate musical content. At worst, they subjugated lyrics to a place of least importance. 3)A lot of prog rock was pretty cerebral, which made it not necessarily relevant to someone who just wanted music to dance to or to ignore or to remind them of their childhood or their first love or to make them feel all warm inside. And so, by extension, any critic who spent time weighing the merits of such music was also in danger of irrelevance. Thus was born the distancing statement, such as “Jethro Tull ruined rock n’ roll.”

And I’m spent.

posted by Mike @ 3:33 PM