Writings about music: Progressive Rock. This is quite a curios musical style for today’s tastes. Shortened as prog rock, it was born at the end of the sixties, and it is usually accepted that the first disc was “In the court of the Crimson King” by King Crimson. The musical style, as always happen, did not appear from nothing, the main influence was the entire art rock movement, huge in the music scene of those years. Art rock was born when artists like the Beatles or the Beach Boys started to taking themselves more seriously than ever, the consequence was a more elaborated and complex music, with wide ranging influences. This artsy turn made that the studio song and the live song were, for first time, very different things. Progressive rock was just the logic evolution of this entire situation. The art pop/rock of the sixties created new song structures and made the songs longer, a good example with its six minutes it’s “Like a rolling Stone” by Bob Dylan, but prog rock made the 10 minutes song something very usual. Regarding the structure of the song, prog used collections of short pieces organised in complicated ways, also known as suites. Mixing styles was another novelty in the sixties, many people would remember the classical inspired violin in “Eleanor Rigby” or the piano in “In my life” both by the Beatles; in prog the classical influence was, nevertheless, a lot bigger, and also the Jazz elements were very common. The complexity was raised in general: the songs were very long, many times involving lots of different instruments, the lyrics were serious and important, and in general they tried many times to be epic. However, the initial ambition turned into a problem when some bands thought that being complex is synonym of being good, and because that they produced some self-indulgent and dull music. It is not surprising that punks criticised the music style, they claimed the simplicity of the old pop/rock, just the opposite as in prog.