Mellotronists

>  In addition, the knee-jerk reaction of prog fans to leap
>to his defence makes it amusing as well, particularly when they trot out
>the usual 'impressionism with words' tripe that they parrot from JA
>himself as his own somewhat limited defence.

Well I heard that David Bowie used to write lyrics, cut the sentences 
up into individual words, and throw them together like some demented 
scrabble on steroids -no one's taken the piss for such a 
'pretentious' approach. Or does chance immediately bestow street cred 
on DB and not JA?
>
>As an aside, it's interesting to observe that this is at least one of
>the reasons why Prog Rock has managed to maintain its level of
>unfettered ridicule over the years; grown men still argue about the
>'meaning' and 'value' of clearly randomly spouted lyrics, fuelled in a
>hazing fug of dope smoke, from a record that is about 35 years old.

Bollocks -the unfettered ridicule has been from people now ashamed to 
admit that they bought such albums at the time, and then wanted to be 
seen to be cool when they bought the Sex Pistols/name your own genre. 
And as an aside, Johnny Rotten spouting about how he wanted to go 
over the Berlin Wall was laughable -well fuck off over it and stop 
whining. There are a lot of prog fans still out there; yes it's more 
of a cottage industry because prog fans don't give a toss about 
fickle fashion.

Even more ironic is the fact that Yes have lasted a good two decades 
longer than all the bands that were supposed to have toppled them. 
Quality music can still win with those who think musically for 
themselves, which is why we're having this discussion and 
followers/haters of the Spice Girls and Sclub7 aren't. And as for 
Jonathan Richman -don't get me started on that arsehole (or asshole 
for our U.S. contributors).