Nah, plenty of concept albums outside of prog, though to be fair they do have the lion's share. But just having a concept album doesn't make you a prog band by itself. You could almost - almost - call Born to Run a concept album; certainly there's a story thread running through it. And Springsteen is about as far from prog as you can get.

Actually, if you want to talk about concept albums (forget about prog), you can say it really started with Frank Sinatra who made a series of thematic albums in the fifties.

Yep. What's the one: Night and Day or something? And I believe jazz artists also wrote albums based around themes too. Hell, you can go back to classical: what about Peer Gynt by Grieg or The Planets by Holst?

Fair point. I meant to say that a concept album is almost a requirement. Given that OK was being compared to so many others at the time, I would have believed that they were progressive, at the time. Nowadays, with the blips and beeps, etc, I wouldn't call that progressive.

Thanks for pointing that out. I'm just back from vacation (holiday to those outside North America, based on another thread), and I'm still in vacation mode.

Actually, if you're not a fan of prog, you might be surprised how few concept albums there are in the genre. I mean, more than any other, certainly, but of the big names, maybe one or two out of their discography. Genesis have one (The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway) maybe two (Duke?) while Marillion have two (Misplaced Childhood and Brave) and other bands have few or even none. It's definitely not a requirement, and in fact these days prog bands tend to shy away from it, as it's seen as typecasting them as such and unoriginal in many ways.

My knowledge of the progressive bands from that era is limited. I go back to The Wall, or Operation:Mindcrime, or 2112, or more recently, Coheed and Cambria's stuff, which is all part of one big story. That's more or less how I linked the progressive tag to the concept album.

The way I see it, King Crimson is different from Pink Floyd who are different from Genesis who are different from Jethro Tull who are different from Emerson, Lake & Palmer who are different from Yes, Rush, National Health, Mothers of Invention and Gentle Giant.

The first wave of prog bands were diverse. That's what makes it so great and so much fun. It can very hard to set up rules because one or more of the founders will probably break it. Long songs? Gentle Giant didn't. Exotic instrumentation? ELP didn't. Weird time signatures? Pink Floyd generally didn't.

However, they were united in their want to elevate the rock band and their music to artistic heights and places not heard before. In doing that, they certainly didn't want to sound like eachother. They were after their own sound.

The treatment of prog as a strict genre is a very taxonomist view of music which doesn't work in any neat way. It's the prevailing attitude, but I find it somewhat embarrassing. The point wasn't to copy and confirm to genre rules and the bands that sound like that's what they're about generally get a pass from me.

For a time, I considered myself a proghead, but the term prog leaves me with a slight distaste these days. I prefer to describe myself as interested in avantgarde music, prog or otherwise.

Some people define prog rock by it's virtuosity and those tend to be the ones who contest Pink Floyd being prog because (aside from maybe Gilmour) they were not as technically gifted or flashy as their peers.

But it's never been about just chops, to me prog rock has always been a vibe, Floyd had it even if their approach was more simplistic.

Trying to limit prog rock to so many strict rules is missing the point of it, it's always been a very broad category, the boundries are kinda muddy and there will always be disagreements over what it really means to be prog and that's fine, it's nothing to get worked up about, genres are just a fun thing we made up to make exploring art easier to navigate, don't make a religion out of it.

I'm pretty sure they're contested as prog rock because of how cleanly they fit into the psychedelic rock genre. They're progressive but that doesn't seem to be a requirement for prog made after symphonic prog was established. All things considered, isn't it only the long songs and suites that connects them to prog standards?