Hi, everyone! Welcome to Prog Progress, a blog series in which I journey through the history of progressive rock by reviewing one album from every year of the genre's existence. You can read more about the project here. You can learn about what I think are some of the roots of progressive rock here. You can see links for the whole series here.
One of the most enduring images of British punk rock's first wave is that of John Lydon, alias Johnny Rotten, the rambunctious lead singer for the Sex Pistols,
wearing a Pink Floyd t-shirt, on which he has scribbled "I HATE" above the band's name.
In 1977, Pink Floyd released
Animals. Also in 1977, punk rock killed progressive rock.
That's the standard logline. The likes of Yes, Genesis, and Jethro Tull had made rock fluffier and stuffier, and it took Johnny Rotten and co. to destroy these lumbering dinosaurs once and for all and return rock to its pure, anarchic roots. And on the surface, that idea makes sense: The Clash, The Sex Pistols, Wire, The Damned, and The Jam all released their debut albums in '77; Johnny Rotten really
did wear a shirt that said "I Hate Pink Floyd"; punk's urban, working-class aesthetics seem an obvious foil to the puffed-up medievalry and prep-school roots of prog's image; punk's short, punchy songs with traditional instrumentation are definitely striking compared to prog's sprawling, symphonic compositions, and the socially conscious, snide lyrics seem a far cry from the sci-fi epics of prog's lineage. It's a conflict between a bloated monarchy and a scrappy proletariat uprising, and it's one from which punk emerges triumphant. The king is dead, long live the king.
However, as is usually the case with historical loglines, it's not nearly so simple as that. For starters, prog never really had a throne to depose; critics were, with a few exceptions, never super keen on prog to begin with, favoring instead glam (in the UK) and proto-punk (in the US) all throughout prog's golden years, and neither were audiences, at least not in the monolithic way suggested by the narrative of punk usurping prog—even in prog's home field of the UK, it was radio mainstays like Led Zeppelin, Rod Stewart, and Elton John who ruled the album charts during the prog years, so if punk deposed anyone, it was them (and looking at the charts from the end of the '70s, not a lot of deposing was had anyway; Zeppelin's still there, and Blondie's the only punk-adjacent group to get a #1 album by the end of the decade, unless we're counting Gary Numan [1]). The punks didn't even consider themselves completely in opposition to prog, and Johnny "I Hate Pink Floyd" Rotten apparently liked Van Der Graaf Generator.
Closer to the truth is that progressive rock killed itself. As I've mentioned several times in the last few posts of this series, the mid-'70s were a bloodbath for prog, as groups fractured or went on hiatus and key creative figures left to do their own thing outside of the prog idiom, and by 1977, you've got Yes (the real canary in prog's coal mine) doing fine but inessential work like
Going for the One and Queen completely jumping ship with
News of the World. Even assuming that punk
did replace prog (a dubious assumption, but fine), it was hardly a battle; progressive rock practically opened the door and said, "You take over, punk; I'm going to take a nap."
There's also the strangeness of Pink Floyd being the prog band for Lydon to hate [2]. Pink Floyd often get lumped in with the progressive rock movement—sometimes even evoked as
the embodiment of progressive rock—and there are reasons for that. Their peak commercial era is right smack in the center of the prog's golden era in the early-to-mid '70s; they did a bunch of concept albums; they had elaborate live shows; they're closely associated with psychedelic drug culture; their albums often have lengthy, multi-part compositions with unconventional instrumentation; they are almost certainly the most commercially successful band with proggy tendencies. If I went out into my hometown of Knoxville, TN, and asked random people on the street to name a progressive rock band, Pink Floyd is probably the name I would get most often.
And yet, Pink Floyd has never really been an easy fit with the prog world. The band formed way back in 1965, making them the second-oldest band, behind The Moody Blues, that I've covered in this series, and like The Moody Blues, Pink Floyd (or The Pink Floyd Sound, as they originally went by) was much more closely associated with the avant-garde psychedelics of London's UFO Club than the conceptual arms race that occupied a lot of the mainline prog bands in the late '60s and early '70s [3]. Their debut,
The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, is comprised of mostly short, trippy rock songs, including one about band leader Syd Barrett's cat and another about riding bikes, the exception being "Interstellar Overdrive," which, even at 10 minutes, still feels a lot more spacey than proggy. Even once Barrett (in an oft-chronicled mental breakdown) left the band and Pink Floyd tended toward more sinister, experimental work on
A Saucerful of Secrets (1968) and
Atom Heart Mother (1970), the band never quite loses that sense of goofy whimsy that defined the early years in London's musical underground [4], and even the side-long experimental suites (which include, for example, an orchestra and a sound collage of field recordings on
Atom Heart Mother) feel more in tune with the kitchen-sink ethos of Frank Zappa or what Brian Eno would be doing by the end of the '70s than it does in league with contemporary Genesis or even King Crimson. Even once you get to their albums that are often most confidently named "progressive rock"—
The Dark Side of the Moon (1973),
Wish You Were Here (1975), and
Animals (1977; hang in there, I promise I'll talk about this album eventually)—the band's sound has funk and soul touches that in some ways make these albums more in step with George Clinton's psychedelic funk of that era.
All that is to say, they're a weird choice to be
the prog band.
But even so, it's hard to deny that there's something essentially proggy about Pink Floyd. They are still making sonically and lyrically ambitious rock music within epic compositional structures, even if it's not emblematic of progressive rock's most common lyrical or sonic traits. And further still, the idea of punk killing prog in 1977 is, like
Nevermind killing hair metal or
The Sopranos inventing artsy television, one of those helpful synecdoches for describing broad cultural changes, even if it's not quite true in the specifics. There really
is a change in musical sensibilities and personnel as rock music transitions from the mid-'70s into the late-'70s, and the fading of prog and the growth of punk makes a convenient narrative out of that.
All of this makes it particularly interesting that in 1977 Pink Floyd released
Animals, an album that is at once Floyd's proggiest and also their punkiest release. On the prog side, you've got the usual suspects: it's a concept album; all of its songs (except for the less-than-two-minutes-apiece bookends of "Pigs on the Wing") easily pass the ten-minute mark, and one of them, "Dogs," is over 17 minutes long; there are long instrumental passages and strange production effects and inflections of jazz (especially on "Dogs," which, if I'm not mistaken, relies on a jazz chord progression in its main verse). Nobody's going to mistake this for anything but a prog album. But for an album from the band that Johnny Rotten singled out as the enemy,
Animals also shares a lot in common with its punk contemporaries. It's a concept album, sure, but it's a particularly socially conscious one, spooling out a bitter allegory of how the UK's population is divided into back-stabbing dogs, wealthy pigs who manipulate the dogs for profit, and mindless sheep who do what they are told until they rise up in a violent wave to kill the dogs.
Animals is far from prog's first socially conscious work or even the first work critiquing the social structures of UK society (Gabriel-era Genesis comes to mind); however, the way this album foregrounds economic power hierarchies and the fascist tendencies of capitalism puts it much more obviously in-line with punk's leftist leanings. These lyrics are straight punk, rendered with an eye for sarcasm and irony that walk the album right up to the edge of nihilism in much the same way the prodigious punk debut albums do. And then there is Roger Waters's sneering delivery of those lyrics, an intentionally ugly and grating vocal affectation that's new to this album (as compared to the generally smooth vocals of previous PF albums).
In fact, in many ways, this is Roger Water's album. The group in-fighting and growing dominance of Waters over the band's creative direction in the '70s is well-documented, and
Animals probably represents the tipping point that sent the band shooting toward the Waters-controlled
The Wall (1979) and
The Final Cut (1983). Waters had been the sole author of Pink Floyd lyrics since
The Dark Side of the Moon, and they all share a certain cynicism and worldview that feels consistent. But
Animals and the two albums that follow show a rapid intensification of this worldview that's also reflected in the music of those albums, as the band lost the saxophones, vocal harmonies, and female backup singers that had given their previous '70s albums a warmth that counterpointed the lyrical pills, and whether or not Waters was solely the cause of this change, it's clear who was steering the ship.
But part of what's fascinating about this album is that in other ways, this record belongs at least as much to guitarist David Gilmour's record. As the '70s progressed, Gilmour became Waters's foil in the band, and by this point, they were essentially the two combative elementary forces that drove the band, Waters the bitter realist responsible for the scathing lyrics and ragged vocals and Gilmour the melodic romantic responsible for the sense of grandeur and sonic expansiveness. Gilmour's guitar was long a staple of the Pink Floyd sound, but
Animals is practically wall-to-wall guitar, especially the long instrumental passages that feature Gilmour throwing down his typically melodic, twisty style for five minutes at a time. Past Pink Floyd albums had been more collaborative efforts among the band's four members (the other two of whom are drummer Nick Mason and keyboardist Richard Wright [5]), but with
Animals, aside from a few keyboard passages and tape loops, this is basically the Waters and Gilmour show, and a violent one at that—by the album's climax, "Sheep," the embittered vocals and the screeching guitar are at war with one another in a scorched-earth battle to drown each other out in the mix. This isn't just an album about class conflict; it's an album about band conflict, one that Gilmour would briefly lose on
The Wall and
The Final Cut, where the band's prog elements are essentially dropped entirely in favor of hard rock, before winning once and for all when Waters left the band in the mid-'80s [6].
It's also not hard to view this as a battle between the punks (Waters) and the proggers (Gilmour), the cynical social commentary versus the high-minded sonic experimentation. That would likely be a simplistic interpretation, but whatever; as long as we're leaning into dubious cultural narratives, we might as well go whole-hog (or whole giant inflatable pig). And regardless of how "true" the narrative is, it's hard to argue that 1977, after which the surviving prog bands go even more into free-fall than they already were, isn't the end of the first prog era along with Pink Floyd's second. Whether you're reading the lyrics or looking at broad historical trends,
Animals ends with a revolution.
Until 1978!
1]
Bowie wouldn't.
2] For the record, Lydon did walk back the PF hate
in 2010. I'd like to think he was always a closeted Floydhead.
3] I've already touched on this slightly in my
pre-prog piece.
4] Which we should distinguish from prog's sense of whimsy, which is much more interested in what happens when you jam Tolkien into Buck Rogers rather than it is in psychedelic breakfasts and hearts of the sun.
5] Wright would, as a result of the progressive sidelining of his and Mason's contributions, leave the band after
Animals.
6] Though we the listeners all lose—the Gilmour-led albums that ended Pink Floyd's run (
A Momentary Lapse of Reason,
The Division Bell, and
The Endless River) are by-far the band's weakest.
