Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #507916 in Books
• Published on: 1998-02
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Customer Reviews

Just Scratches the Surface
Whatever you think of author Bradley Smith or any of his sins of omission in The Billboard Guide to Progressive Music, you have to admit that he at least tried to give prog fans a useful compendium of prog rock and its practitioners. The chosen theme is a vast subject and in tackling it Smith was bound to attract naysayers who think that either his definition of progressive rock is too broad or is too narrow.
Though like many other reviewers I can think of bands that Smith should have included, there are also many others I had never heard of and so I enjoyed learning something about them. The book is largely very well written and informative and it is the nature of the beast that it was bound to be opinionated as well.
I have only two real complaints: Smith seems to get overly verbose about bands like Throbbing Gristle which is not prog at all but rather is avant-garde. He makes the same mistake with jazz-fusion groups like Return to Forever and Passport. The other is that he focuses too much on certain groups that he obviously favors.
If you like progressive rock music, you should find this guide interesting at the very least. But given the huge number of new quality prog recordings since this book's publishing date, you may also find this guide badly dated. I say its time for Smith to give us an encore!

A Good Writing Effort!...
May be this Bradley Smith book has some mistakes owed to whatever (I must complain about missed bands like Gentle Giant, Rush, Triumvirat and others), but may be we must see that the greatest asset of this book is the trying effort to clasificate the diverse musical roots of all kinds of the Progressive movement. He begins with important topics, as the social, political and cultural context that surrounded that Prog music. Because we must to understand that The Progressive Music was only one, and this was developed, defined and polished in sixties and seventies. Eighties and nowadays Prog and experimental music must be called Neo-Progressive or Post Progressive music (or whatever), because it responds to another social, political and cultural needs of new generations. So the great asset of Bradley was to clasificate by musical forms (as it should be done since the begininng), the diversity of this Prog music using the correct and universal tags for this like: Classical formalism, Impressionism, Surrealism, Dada/ Absurdism, and the Postmodern music style trying to give with this, an structured solid base to his musical ideas.

Although this effort presents some problems like the evolution of Prog music for every band, like Rush that it presents three musical stages: The Hard Rock stage (1973-1976), the Classic Prog stage (1977-1982) and the Neo Prog stage (1983- 2005?) making this job a little bit difficult to follow by the musical evolutive crossover stages. By the other side, a tag like the "Canterbury Scene" tells us only the geographic place were the roots of a determined musical style of Prog music began, and nothing about the musical form that it owns (it resulted in a more cientific way to express it and talk about the topic). Of course, this will oblige us to study and investigate a bit more about the Prog music, but what a better form to do this! Doesn't it?...Good Luck!

Horrible.
One guy's opinion. Like reading the ramblings of a troll on a mailing list.