from elsewhere

Yeh, punk AND prog! Pervert I am. I have Crass' Feeding the 5000 and Yes' Close to the Edge in my collection! I had this book in my head for years about how punk and prog were not discontinuous, inimical. A friend reckons I waited too long - as Simon Reynolds' 'Rip it Up' covers the same ideas. It does to an extent, but his fear of prog ruins it. Prog is infinitely more problematic, dangerous, and alt than punk, I believe. A Steve Howe guitar solo is much more frightening than anything by Killing Joke! Look at Lydon's love of Van Der Graaf Generator and Kate Bush. If it's Prog's supposed rarefied rural silliness that damns it, well nothing is more firmly entrenched in that department than Kate, I'd say! Prog-Punk was an idea, if you will, I had during my degree - some 15 years ago now. But I sat on it during the Doctorate! I haven't got the will to get to it now! All that postrock stuff is just Prog - with its purveyors too frightened to come out and say so, for fear of looking like fucking Marillion! Marillion were/are a 6th form history project; whereas, say, Magazine, to an extent Radiohead, and for sure Godspeed, Killing Joke, and Battles, are working in the spirit of Prog - making strange, experimentating, pushing the envelope, etc. Prog is Modernism, is my argument. When I hear stuff by modern composers like Mark-Anthony Turnage, I just think - sounds like Yes in 1973. The instrumental passage of Gates of Delirium by Yes, from Relayer, does everything that Greil Marcus (in Lipstick Traces) says the end of Holiday in the Sun does.