Progressive music
However, contrary to formalist tendencies, eclecticism foregrounds discontinuities between historical and contemporary styles and electronic media, sometimes referring simultaneously to vastly different musical genres, idioms, and cultural codes.
The online music guide AllMusic states that, along with Kenton, musicians like Gil Evans, Toshiko Akiyoshi, Cal Massey, Frank Foster, Carla Bley, George Gruntz, David Amram, Sun Ra, and Duke Ellington were major proponents of the style.
What was so revolutionary about this post-hippie music that came to be called 'progressive' ... was that musicians acquired the facility to move between styles—the umbilical link between idiolect and style had been broken.
[24][nb 4] The Beach Boys' leader Brian Wilson is credited for setting a precedent that allowed bands and artists to enter a recording studio and act as their own producers.
[28] Assisted by the mid 1960s economic boom, record labels began investing in artists, giving them freedom to experiment, and offering them limited control over their content and marketing.
[37] According to Macan, the album may be the most influential to progressive rock for crystallizing the music of earlier "proto-progressive bands [...] into a distinctive, immediately recognizable style".
[42][nb 9] Post-punk, which author Doyle Green characterizes "as a kind of 'progressive punk'",[44] was played by bands like Talking Heads, Pere Ubu, Public Image Ltd, and Joy Division.
[42] Musicologist Bill Martin writes; "[Talking] Heads created a kind of new-wave music that was the perfect synthesis of punk urgency and attitude and progressive-rock sophistication and creativity.
[48] According to Geoffrey Himes, "the short-lived progressive-soul movement flourished" from 1968 to 1973 and demonstrated "adventurous rock guitar, socially conscious lyrics and classic R&B melody".
[52] "Progressive electronic" is defined by AllMusic as a subgenre of new age music, and a style that "thrives in more unfamiliar territory" where the results are "often dictated by the technology itself".
According to Allmusic, "rather than sampling or synthesizing acoustic sounds to electronically replicate them" producers of this music "tend to mutate the original timbres, sometimes to an unrecognizable state".
[53] Tangerine Dream's 1974 album Phaedra, recorded with a Moog sequencer, was described as "an early masterpiece of progressive electronic music" by Rolling Stone.
[54] In house music, a desire to define precise stylistic strands and taste markets saw the interposition of prefixes like "progressive", "tribal", and "intelligent".
[59] He criticized terms like "progressive" and "intelligent", arguing that "it's usually a sign that it's gearing up the media game as a prequel to buying into traditional music industry structure of auteur-stars, concept albums, and long-term careers.
[63] Early works of progressive rap such as the 1982 Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five song "The Message" and the music of Public Enemy featured expressions of anger about chaotic urban life.
[62][63] Other formative groups such as De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, and Brand Nubian helped establish the genre's thematic mode.
[64] At the turn of the 2000s, Outkast and The Roots were among the few progressive-rap acts who "ruminated on hip-hop's post-millennial direction" and "produced records in an avant-garde vein purposely intended to evolve the music" while achieving commercial success, according to Miles Marshall Lewis.
[65] Kanye West, another influential artist in hip hop's progressive tradition, achieved even greater success with his opening trilogy of education-themed albums in the 2000s.
[66] His 2010 album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy has also been associated with prog-rap due largely to its sampling of records from progressive rock as well as its ostentatious sensibilities.
[67] The UK has also produced notable performers in progressive rap, including Gaika and Kojey Radical, who are credited by Vice in 2016 for working "deliberately outside the confines of grime and traditional UK hip hop to create genuinely progressive rap that rivals the US for creativity, urgency, and importance, and portrays a much broader black British music landscape than you hear on the radio".
