In Defense of Art-Rock or The Downside of Success
So, I haven’t read (and probably won’t) The Show That Never Ends (The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock), but I know that book exists partly because of the common derision art-rock suffers. Even this book, which ultimately (I’ve read in the blurb) defends progressive rock, has a Spinal Tap-esque cover with a tiger-Pegasus playing a double neck guitar, an image which clearly invites mockery.
For better or worse, economics play a major role in popular music. From about 1966 to 1976, the popular music scene saw near-perfect conditions, particularly with the coming-of-age of the largest generation the world has ever seen. It was also a largely prosperous generation, and with youth culture being expressed through music more than any other art form, the market for rock and pop exploded. The window of opportunity this opened for every aspect of the music business led to the excesses we still associate with rock acts. Even for those who didn’t trash their hotel rooms, to name just one of the excesses, there were few checks on what artists could do musically as long as the record sold. And the records sold like never before. It was frankly hard not to make money.
Those excesses affected songwriting as well. The Beatles (with George Martin) pushed the envelope in the recording studio, using the studio itself as an instrument, and they in turn influenced others. Brian Wilson radically altered the way in which the Beach Boys functioned in his legendarily excessive Pet Sounds recording sessions. Groups like Queen pushed the capabilities of multi-track recording, producers like Phil Spector could afford to bring in massive numbers of studio musicians for a three-minute pop song, and performers like Keith Emerson experimented with early (temperamental) synthesizers and, when they ran out of new synth sounds, brought full orchestras into the recording session (and then took the orchestra on the road for the tour).
The common thread was spending more time and money in the studio, a place that had been used to merely capture what was essentially a live performance only a few years before. Successful acts were given free-reign to take as long as they needed to record an album. What once took a few days in the studio expanded into weeks and months, not just because there was so much more to do in the studio to record the music, but also because the writing itself was more and more often occurring during the recording session.
The arc of songwriting for many acts from the 1960s onward follows a similar trajectory, starting with “composing in the bedroom” or “composing at home between gigs” to “composing while on (larger and longer) tours between shows” until success itself crowds out time to write. Simultaneously, that success was rewarded by the record companies with few limitations on studio time. (It was also rewarded with greater pressure to produce albums as frequently as possible, putting more pressure on the composers in the band.) Competition between groups could be as much about how they recorded as what they recorded. Bill Bruford recounts how if one group went out to a country farm-turned-into-a-studio for two months to do an album, six other bands needed to do the same, but for at least three months.
All of this is a gross generalization, and there are many exceptions. But from the late 1960s until at least the end of the millennium, these were the tropes and tendencies for many in the pop music industry. The later technological change from physical to virtual tape, with the rise of digital audio workstations (DAWS) like ProTools, ended up reinforcing these habits. With unlimited tracks and the ability to try out an infinite combinations of possible mixes, effects, and arrangements, bands could spend entire days on the minutia of a single cymbal hit. (Eventually DAWS and sampling would make the band itself extraneous, but that’s another topic.)
The documentary Some Kind of Monster (2004) is about the rock band Metallica dealing with internal conflict while recording the album St. Anger, but has what I believe is an unintentionally revealing scene about this composing-in-the-studio-with-DAWS issue. The recording session starts with a group improvisation, rather than an already-written song. As the group goes into the control room to listen to the results, it turns into a visual experience as much as an aural one as the room is dominated by a huge screen displaying the audio tracks as they appear in ProTools. The group is able to literally point to a moment in the music as something to keep or in need of replacing. The musicians, gathered, looking up at the screen, appear a bit like they are worshiping at the altar of ProTools.
Note also that the album was recorded at The Presidio, in a facility the band converted into a studio, a process that took three months – so before the recording even started, the band had matched Bruford’s early-1970s example of the excess in recording session time! The recording itself was interrupted when James Hetfield entered rehab, but appears to have taken at least a year in the studio.
Some Kind of Monster provides a window into how these excesses of the rock recording (and composing) process still lived on 35 years after Sgt. Pepper’s. Yes, the majority of songs were still being written in relative solitude by one or two people and it has always been so. But for the big money makers, this slow shift of composing in the bedroom to composing in the studio became common.
There was another effect the loose money had on songwriting in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Just as bands both imitated and out-did each other in the studio, muscial styles themselves tended to get exaggerated. Just as groups such as Cream and Led Zeppelin took the blues to extremes (in volume, length, etc.), early art-rock gradually transformed into a parody of excesses, at least for some bands. The exaggerated traits might be the length of the song, the pretentiousness of the words, the concept of the concept album, the increased use of orchestral instruments or classical music quotation, an ever-greater rhythmic and/or metric complexity, or any combination of these.
Yes’ Tales from Topographic Oceans is an often used (and abused) example of these excesses, and it certainly checks a few of these boxes. Most notably, perhaps, is the success of the group’s previous album, Close to the Edge, which included one song (or suite of songs, really) that filled a whole side of the record (meaning roughly 15 to 18 minutes of continuous music). In the spirit of the excesses of the time, or perhaps the philosophy that there can never be too much of a good thing, the group conceived of a double album made up exclusively of songs that filled a single side of a record – four sides, four songs – all grouped around a high concept involving Hindu texts. This was Tales from Topographic Oceans.
I would argue that Tales is just one example, of which there are many from around the same time (1973), of a kind of character-exaggeration that can result from the artistic echo-chamber of success, caused, in large part, by the money that came from that success. Each of Yes’ albums up to Tales (their sixth) tends towards the extremes of Tales: the songs get longer, the lyrics more obtuse, the arrangements more complicated, the instrumental sections longer. For any single listener, there may be an album that hits their personal sweet spot, but the trajectory would suggest that by the time Tales was released, many fans who liked Fragile, for example, would be turned-off. The same happened with some band members, with Bruford leaving after Close to the Edge and Wakefield after Tales. It’s a bit like inbreeding dogs, which might, at first, produce traits that are desired, until things go too far, and suddenly the snout is way too short or the back legs too long, and the dog now has severe health problems.
But because each album sold better than the last (and it should be pointed out that each album up to and including Close to the Edge did sell better than the last, and Tales sold well, too, although not as well as the previous album, Close to the Edge), there was every indication that continuing to exaggerate these traits was the way to go. Certainly, the record company wasn’t going to suggest they back-off, or (God forbid!) change, which would alienate current fans. Meanwhile, with each success, other bands would see some of those traits as desirable as well, whether as a means to stay popular or as a means to initial success – that is, signing a record deal. (Even the hugely successful Rolling Stones felt compelled to copy Sgt. Pepper’s with Their Satanic Majesties Request, even though it hardly played the their strengths.)
(Besides Tales from Topographic Oceans, the other great punching-bag of art-rock disparagers is ELP’s 1978 alubm Love Beach. This is easily dismissed. Love Beach was a contractual obligation for a band that had been on the decline and was now breaking up. Even as the album was made, two of three band members left well before it was finished. Between 1970 and 1973 ELP put out five albums that best represent the group. Two other lessor albums came out between these five and Love Beach, so there is more than enough legitimate material to evaluate the band on – material which, of course, you are free to like or dislike.)
The record companies and the people within them making decisions, are major players in this dance as well. There’s much to say on this topic, but in its simplest form, success was most easily assured if your first album sounded like (or could be marketed as sounding like) an already successful artist, and once you had a hit, just keep doing that. It needs to be the same, but all new, the great paradox of commercial music.
Somewhat tangential to this topic: it’s also been posited that record executives went from being old guys smoking cigars who admitted they didn’t know what “kids” wanted to listen to, but trusted the musicians, to being younger guys, hired by the old guys who wanted some of those “kids” on the payroll, who grew up, but still thought they knew what “kids” wanted to listen to, and didn’t trust the musicians. (Those are the guys who gave us "80s music.") This harkens back to my original point: it was hard not to make money signing acts and making records in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The mistake was thinking your success in finding hit-makers was due primarily to some innate talent-detection ability, and not just dumb luck to being in the right business at the right time. (Let's leave the influence of payola out of the equation for this discussion, although it is important to note success is connected to advertising in all its forms.)
The stylistic changes the fictional group Spinal Tap goes through over their career are a reflection of this system, which was on the prowl for music that sounded like an already successful act or hit. Just as some groups’ music accumulated exaggerated qualities through the “success feedback loop,” and some acts got record deals based on sounding like (or, in some cases, just looking like) an already successful act, some bands chased the hits, drifting on the winds of musical trends. For Spinal Tap, this included the early skiffle-influenced Beatles (All the Way Home), the Sgt. Pepper’s era Beatles (Cups and Cakes), Stones-influenced blues-rock (Gimma Some Money), the late-‘60s “summer-of-love” sound (Listen to What the Flower People Say), the concept album (The Incredible Flight of Icarus P. Anybody), 70’s metal (Tonight I’m Gonna Rock You Tonight), art rock (Stonehenge), and 80’s metal/video-rock (Hell Hole). The truth is that the lack of any kind of artistic center, which the Tap display, is a parody not only of certain bands, but the industry as a whole.
In defense of art-rock, therefore, I would submit that its excesses were a product of its success, really no different from other genres at that time. The exaggerated traits that plagued art-rock even plagued successful genres that followed this “golden era,” genres such as disco, punk, 1980s hair bands, etc. Imitation and loose money eventually led to inferior product flooding the market. It could be argued that most (maybe all) highly successful acts from 1970 on suffered from either falling into the echo-chamber trap, or of going the Spinal Tap-route trying to up-date their sound. (For the latter, think of that awful synth-laced “80’s album” your favorite 70s singer/songwriter put out.)
There are expections, of course. In looking particularly at bands, it helps to start off with more than one "sound," and with more than one main composer in the group. Andy Partridge has asserted this in regards to his band XTC, noting specifically that they were following in the model of The Beatles. I'm partial to Queen as an example as well. There are also songwriters would have consciously and deliberately left previously explored styles, or ways of working, to try new things, such as Sting, Joni Mitchell, and Bruce Springsteen. Note these three also changed the musicians they worked with to facilitate growth and change. The same could be said of art-rock icon Robert Fripp and the various incarnations of his band, King Crimson.But getting back to the main point: I posit that art-rockers were particular vulnerable to the echo-chamber because they were playing with ideas that lent themselves easily to excess. Bands that hugged the center line of the superhighway of rock and pop in the early 1970s were unlikely to drift onto the shoulders or rumble strips when subjected to the echo-chamber. If they ended up as parodies of themselves, their music was likely to come off as generic, without strong identifying features. Art-rockers started on one of the outside lanes, pushing the norms in instrumentation, song length, subject matter, style, and so on. Enough exaggeration of those elements, and groups could find themselves drifting outside the yellow lines, going off-road, possibly ending up in a ditch.
To disparage art-rock by holding up the worst examples is like shooting fish in a barrel, and frankly can be done with any style. Rather, use the best examples to fairly assess the music. Often these are the earlier albums, but as Yes shows, for some groups it took a few records to get to their "mature" style, and whatever your opinions of their post "Tales" records, they did pull back, with their next album, "Relayer" mirroring "Close to the Edge," with a total of three songs. Subsequent albums contained more, shorter songs.
Not liking art-rock, or any music, is perfectly fine, of course, but dislike it honestly, judging in on the best examples of the genre, not the worst.