After “Close to the Edge” finished, I flipped the record around, playing all six sides of vinyl in proper order, then all mixed up as I chased those magical moments. I fell in love with the entire idea and enterprise of progressive rock. The discovery of Yes wasn’t just the moment I fell in love with a record. The Beatles, after all, were just a silly little pop band that got a bit psychedelic by the end, but it’s hard to quantify the palpable impact they had on, in all likelihood, a billion or more people in uncountable facets of our lives.
#DROWNING IN DARKNESS ALBUM FREE#
Some skeletons tilt more strongly toward a certain shape than others, but much as the flipper of the dolphin obscures slender bones like that of human fingers, we sometimes can find two seemingly contradictory bodies when comparing the work against the way it shapes and reshapes our lives, the way a song plucked free from context or original intention can wildly reshape our approach to the world, to ourselves, to politics and the people in our lives. Art is not the same as pure mechanism it is by nature experiential, crafted by a creator but created for an audience, an audience which provides boundless and sometimes contradictory flesh to the skeletal framework of the work itself that a creator alone cannot provide. This is a greater importance than the mundane story of its mechanical creation. It is also impossible to tell the story of songs and records without telling the stories of the people that it touches. This human element often helps answer some of the most pernicious and frustrating critics of progressive rock, who often see it as bloated excess and not as real emotional sentiments from its creators, view it as pomp and virtuosity, which is wrong, rather than something from the heart, which is right. In the storied case of records such as Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours or Marvin Gaye’s Here My Dear, those human tales behind them can offer a new flesh and contour to a record that otherwise would have been flat, two-dimensional, cryptic, confounding. This is a valuable annex of the tale of art, and a necessary one to incorporate within the broader ecosystem, both for understanding the problematic and grimy elements of things we once loved as much as to flesh out the human character of things we might otherwise have been indifferent or scornful toward in a manner that can sometimes be redemptive. Art produced in waves of despair and psychosis, mania and grief, boredom and cynical ploys for more money.
This is due to a mechanical element in the production of art-it is made by people, the packages are designed by people and the bands signed by people, all of whom have lives and personal taste and emotional character that shifts with the sometimes brutal and sometimes comforting events of our lives. It’s impossible to tell the story of a song, of a record, a band, a genre, without also telling the stories of people.
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