{"id":7913,"date":"2011-07-11T16:15:14","date_gmt":"2011-07-11T20:15:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/?p=7913"},"modified":"2011-07-11T16:07:04","modified_gmt":"2011-07-11T20:07:04","slug":"degree-of-difficulty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/degree-of-difficulty\/","title":{"rendered":"Degree of Difficulty"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-8161\" title=\"degreeofdifficulty\" src=\"http:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/07\/degreeofdifficulty-300x232.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"232\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/07\/degreeofdifficulty-300x232.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/07\/degreeofdifficulty.jpg 531w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>As any musician can tell you, it&#8217;s tough to build an audience of any size. Can you imagine how hard it must be to churn out million-selling albums and release singles that become radio staples for the next 40 years?<\/p>\n<p>Now, imagine building that audience, selling all those albums, and garnering all that airplay with 8-minute songs involving complex time signatures and multiple &#8220;movements&#8221; while being sung by an elfin flower child with a high-pitched voice, spouting off fastastic tales of chess and outer space. (And this elfin prince of rock &#8216;n roll may be the best-looking guy in the bunch, despite the shocking results of a popular rock blog&#8217;s fan voting for <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/index.php\/making-the-case-for-the-sexiest-man-in-prog-rock\/\" target=\"_blank\">Sexiest Man in Prog-Rock<\/a> 40 years into the future.) Imagine taking these ingredients and producing actual <em>songs<\/em> with parts that could be sung, whistled, and hummed from top to bottom by an average\u00a012-year-old kid.<!--more--><iframe class='youtube-player youtuber' type='text\/html' width='425' height='355' src='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/H4Pspv2Gmq8?rel=0&amp;fs=1&amp;ap=%252526fmt%253D18' webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen frameborder='0'><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m talking about <strong>Yes<\/strong>, of course, the most tuneful of prog-rock bands, and the band that made it possible for a half generation&#8217;s worth of classically trained musicians to earn their rock &#8216;n roll credibility and taste the same delights of rock stardom as any traditional, macho\u00a0guitar-based band.<\/p>\n<p><em>I&#8217;m not the world&#8217;s greatest Yes fan by any stretch, but in terms of <strong>degree of difficulty<\/strong> did any band in rock achieve wider public and\u00a0commercial\u00a0acclaim for such (on the surface, at least) unformulaic music?<\/em><\/p>\n<p><strong>The Grateful Dead<\/strong> may come to mind, but their few radio hits from their prime are the ones in a folky, country vein. The legendary &#8220;St. Stephen,&#8221; for instance, isn&#8217;t a staple of Classic Rock radio nor a song that even casual rock fans can hum out all the parts to. &#8220;You had to see them live,&#8221; and plenty of people did, but they did not necessarily absorb their records. In contrast, I bet a great percentage of rock fans, even\u00a0those heavily opposed to prog\u00a0rock, such as <strong>andyr<\/strong> and <strong>E. Pluribus Gergely<\/strong>,\u00a0can cite all the key parts in &#8220;Roundabout&#8221; or &#8220;Starship Troopers.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As any musician can tell you, it&#8217;s tough to build an audience of any size. Can you imagine how hard it must be to churn out million-selling albums and release singles that become radio staples for the next 40 years? Now, imagine building that audience, selling all those albums, and garnering all that airplay with <a href='https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/degree-of-difficulty\/' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[342],"tags":[96,23],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7913"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7913"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7913\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7913"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7913"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7913"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}