boo boo

I guess Gong since they don't take themselves that seriously.

Of course not, that is the philosophy of many a prog band.

It's not that we don't realise these bands are pretentious, of course we do. I love these bands regardless of their level of pretentiousness. I don't consider pretentious to be an automatically negative thing, actually I consider it a good thing, the only kind of music that is not pretentious in anyway is probably stuff like hair metal, bands who are only in it for the drugs, sex and money, and therefore write songs about drugs, sex and money. And without taking themselves seriously in anyway.

If you think that's what music should be, then be my guest.

If you ask me, what's even more pretentious than prog is the whole singer songwriter thing. Lets take guys like Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Tom Waits, Elvis Costello, David Byrne, Morrissey. All great songwriters, sure. But they also play "characters", they have all built up this public persona, based more on their music and stage act than what kind of people they actually are, Dylan especially admits to being a character actor type of songwriter, he's played so many "characters" that no one really knows who the real Bob Dylan is, if there is one.

These songwriters have built up all this mystery and cult of personality around themselves. I don't see how that's any less pretentious than prog bands like Yes and King Crimson who write songs about the things they're truly interested in, in fact very few prog musicians are guilty of the kind of pretentiousness that guys like Dylan and Bowie are guilty of, Peter Gabriel and Ian Anderson being some of the exceptions.

I consider all (great) music and art to be pretentious to an extent.

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