Monday (not) Metal

From the Atlantic, and via Kathy Shaidle, this is too delicious not to re-blog:

Do you like prog rock, the extravagantly conceptual and wildly technical post-psychedelic subgenre that ruled the world for about 30 seconds in the early 1970s before being torn to pieces by the starving street dogs of punk rock? Do you like the proggers, with their terrible pampered proficiency, their priestly robes, and their air—once they get behind their instruments—of an inverted, almost abscessed Englishness? 

And..

Money rained down upon the proggers. Bands went on tour with orchestras in tow; Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s Greg Lake stood onstage on his own private patch of Persian rug. But prog’s doom was built in. It had to die. As a breed, the proggers were hook-averse, earworm-allergic; they disdained the tune, which is the infinitely precious sound of the universe rhyming with one’s own brain. What’s more, they showed no reverence before the sacred mystery of repetition, before its power as what the music critic Ben Ratliff called “the expansion of an idea.” Instead, like mad professors, they threw everything in there: the ideas, the complexity, the guitars with two necks, the groove-bedeviling tempo shifts.

For me Genesis means that nice, poppy Invisible Touch album, and Peter Gabriel, well, Sledgehammer. During the first season of That Metal Show, I wondered what the hell Rush's Geddy Lee was doing there. Not metal, guys, not even hard rock.

Rush is nerd rock. Which is fine. You can see them at mom's kitchen table, locks of hair hanging over the game board, Dungeon Master's guide open, dice at the ready, an empty pizza box and coke cans strewn about. 2112 plays in the background. I say this from experience, people.

For the record we like Rush's first album, 'Yeah! Ohhhhh-yeah! insert cool riff.

Also for the record we can recognize precisely one ELP song. This one:

We saw it once on MTV the summer of 1986. That synth riff could be metal. Why not?