New Prog - Reception

Reception

The genre has received both a great amount of critical acclaim and criticism throughout the years. Progressive rock has been described as parallel to the classical music of Igor Stravinsky and Béla Bartók. This desire to expand the boundaries of rock, combined with some musicians' dismissiveness toward mainstream rock and pop music, insulted critics and led to accusations of elitism. Its intellectual, fantastic and apolitical lyrics and its shunning of rock's blues roots were abandonments of the very things that many critics valued in rock music. The simplicity of punk was in part a reaction against the elaborate nature of progressive rock.

These aspirations toward high culture reflect progressive rock's origins as a music created largely by upper- and middle-class, white-collar, college-educated males from Southern England. The music never reflected the concerns of or was embraced by working class listeners, except in the US, where listeners appreciated the musicians' virtuosity. Progressive rock's exotic, literary topics were considered particularly irrelevant to British youth during the late 1970s, when the nation suffered from a poor economy and frequent strikes and shortages. Punk rock, a simpler and more aggressive style that emerged in this era, labeled prog bands as "dinosaurs" whose time had passed. This new music rejected virtuosity and embraced the immediacy of minimalistic song structures. Punk and disco, which also emerged during this period, helped move UK critical opinion and popular support away from progressive rock.