Quote:
Originally Posted by Neapolitan
Duran Duran is a band full of exceptional musicians and had a lot of great songs. If you can cherry pick the Trevor Rabin era Yes, then the same can be done for Duran Duran. The best of Duran Duran would totally wreck the best of TREY.
I hardly ever use RYM, and I don't find it necessary to check how they tag things. The point being made was that just because Yes had a history of Prog Rock, doesn't mean that 90125 is a Prog album, and that it wasn't so Proggy that it should considered an example of Prog-Pop hybrid album.
That line of thinking that once a banded in labeled than all their output should be carry that label is kinda like saying Sgt Pepper is Beat music cause The Beatles were known as Beat band, or In Between the Buttons is a Blues album cause the Stones were known as a Blues band. 90125 is just an 80s Pop album, plain and simple. I am not saying that TREY is totally devoid of Prog. Maybe their are some elements of it in the music. But it I don't see how TREY is "progressive" or even pushing the envelope music-wise if they are just following other 80s bands, and at the same time not really creating music that is as good as those other bands. In Through the Out Door has more going for it to be considered a Prog-Pop album, and the songs are better over all than stuff by TREY.
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Bleh, we can argue semantics all day. To these ears, 90125 doesn't really sound like other pop albums of the early 80's (least if we're talking '82 through '83), and that's due to the inherent progginess behind Squire and White as they polished Rabin's initial ideas. Duran Duran are a good band, but you'd never get a song like 'Hearts' or 'Leave It' or 'Changes' on
Rio or their debut. Plus, if you really look at Yes overall, you can see the clear progression of ideas from Going For The One to Tormato and then Drama through 90125 despite the differing lineups. Trevor Rabin merely served as a catalyst for the Drama "sound" to manifest in a more commercial setting and gave Anderson an excuse to come back.
Also, I think you are missing the forest a little through the trees here. You keep focusing on Rabin's songwriting like he doesn't measure up somehow, but Trevor Horn was coming into his own as a producer at the time and had a massive impact on the sound of 90125. He somehow took Jon Anderson's distinctive harmonies and melodies and applied them to AOR-inspired cuts that would work on radio, yet obviously went to some lengths to preserve the adventurous spirit at the root of the "idea" of Yes. He essentially pulled a Lazarus and brought them back from the dead for a younger audience to discover, which is something that hasn't happened that often in the history of the music industry.
So if anything, the work he did on there ended up influencing everyone else to some degree in 80s music as the middle of the decade because Horn was instrumental in creating the sound of that album...and then he became one of the biggest names in music production right after it came out. So take that for what you will.
If you can accept King Crimson's Discipline or Genesis's Duke as prog/pop records because they tried to synthesize aspects of both worlds and succeeded to various degrees, then it should be obvious why 90125 is often regarded positively in a similar sense.