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Progressive pop is pop music that attempts to break with the genre's standard formula, or an offshoot of the progressive rock genre that was commonly heard on AM radio in the 1970s and 1980s. It was originally termed for the Proto-prog. Some stylistic features of progressive pop include hooks and earworms, unorthodox or colorful instrumentation, changes in key and rhythm, experiments with larger musical form, and unexpected, disruptive, or ironic treatments of past conventions.
The movement started as a byproduct of the mid-1960s economic boom, when record labels began investing in artists and allowing performers limited control over their own content and marketing. Groups who combined rock and roll with various other music styles such as Indian and Asian-influenced melodies ultimately influenced the creation of progressive rock (or "prog"). When prog records began declining in sales, some artists returned to a more accessible sound that remained commercially appealing until the 1990s.
Similar to rock and roll, the tonal structure of progressive pop overthrows harmony as its basic organizing structure. However, unlike rock and roll, progressive pop inverts received conventions, playing with them ironically, disrupting them, or producing shadows of them in new and unexpected forms. Some stylistic features include changes in key and rhythm or experiments with larger forms. Electronic techniques such as echo, feedback, stereo, loudness, and distortion may be used to give the music the impression of space and lateral extension.
In December 1966, Melody Maker attempted to define the recent developments in pop. In this article, titled "Progressive Pop", Chris Welch categorised artists using terms previously associated with jazz; in the most advanced of these, "Avant-Garde", he placed the Beatles, Cream, Love, the Mothers of Invention, Pink Floyd and Soft Machine, while "Modern", the next category, comprised the Byrds, Donovan and the Small Faces. After the release of the Beatles' 1967 album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, magazines such as Melody Maker drew a sharp line between "pop" and "rock", thus eliminating the "roll" from "rock and roll" (which now refers to the 1950s style). The only artists who remained "rock" would be those who were considered at the vanguard of compositional forms, far from "radio friendly" standards, as Americans increasingly used the adjective "progressive" for groups like Jethro Tull, Family, East of Eden, Van der Graaf Generator, and King Crimson.
In 1970, a Melody Maker journalist described progressive pop as music appealing to the masses, but less disposable than the "six weeks in the charts and the 'forget it' music of older pop forms." By the late 1970s, "progressive pop" was roughly synonymous with "rock music". Authors Don and Jeff Breithaupt define progressive pop in the 1970s and 1980s as a "leaner breed of pomp rock" that was derivative of the Beatles. Producer Alan Parsons, who worked as an engineer on the Beatles' album Abbey Road (1969), remembered that even though he considered some of his songs "pure pop", others continued to categorize his band (the Alan Parsons Project) under the "progressive rock" label. Parsons thought "progressive pop" was a better name, explaining that "what made our progressive was the epic sound and the orchestration which very few people were doing that at the time."
Citing a quantitative study of in music from the era, musicologist Walter Everett identifies the Beatles' 1965 album Rubber Soul as a work that was "made more to be thought about than danced to", and an album that "began a far-reaching trend" in its slowing-down of the tempos typically used in pop and rock music. In mid-1966, the UK release of the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds was accompanied by advertisements in the local music press saying that it was "The Most Progressive Pop Album Ever!" Clevelands Troy Smith believes that the album "established the group as forefathers of progressive pop, right from the beginning chords of 'Wouldn't It Be Nice', a Wall of Sound style single". In October, Pet Sounds was followed by the psychedelic and elaborately arranged single "Good Vibrations". According to Reed, the song became the "most obvious starting point" in the genre.
The Beatles' Paul McCartney intimated in 1967: "we the got a bit bored with 12 bars all the time, so we tried to get into something else. Then came [Bob Dylan]], the Who, and the Beach Boys. ... We're all trying to do vaguely the same kind of thing." In the opinion of author Simon Philo, the Beatles' progressive pop was exemplified in the double A-sided single "Strawberry Fields Forever" / "Penny Lane" (1967). In a further example of the reciprocal influences between themselves and the Beach Boys, the Beatles demonstrated "paradoxical lyrical content matched by music that was at once 'young' and 'old', rock and Tin Pan Alley, LSD and cocoa, progressive and nostalgic" – all features that were shared on Sgt. Pepper's. Musicologist Allan Moore writes: "At that time, Sgt. Pepper seemed to mark rock music's coming of age ... Now, of course, with jaded memories, we think of it as ushering in an era of pomposity, with varying degrees of seriousness ... The question after 1967 was whether 'progressive' pop/rock was to be trusted, because it was dealing with issues 'deeper' than simply interpersonal relationships. In the long run, the answer turned out to be 'no' (at least, that is, until a later generation of bands discovered the delight of pastiching the Beatles)."
Towards the end of the 1960s, progressive pop music was received with doubt and disinterest. The Who's Pete Townshend reflected that "a lot of psychedelic bullshit was going on", referring to "garbage" being promoted in the charts, and that many artists who were doing ambitious works were instantly being labelled "pretentious". He believed: "Anybody that was any good ... was more or less becoming insignificant again." In 1969, writer Nik Cohn reported that the pop music industry had been split "roughly eighty percent ugly and twenty percent idealist", with the eighty percent being "mainline pop" and the twenty percent being "progressive pop developed an esoteric feel". He predicted that in ten years, the genre would be called by another name (possibly "electric music"), and that its relationship to pop music would be similar to the one between and Hollywood. While progressive pop did not "shrink to a minority cult", as Cohn wrote one year later, "in England, I wasn't entirely wrong ... But, in America, I fluffed completely – the Woodstock nation has kept growing and, for all his seriousness and pretensions to poetry, someone like James Taylor has achieved the same mass appeal as earlier stars."
The Buggles' Geoff Downes, who considered his band to be a continuation of ELO and 10cc's progressive traditions, says: "Those early 10cc records such as 1973 10cc and Sheet Music were pretty out there, and Godley & Creme took that even further. Even ABBA had sections in their music that were quite intricate. We loved all that studio trickery and experimentation. Parallel to that were bands like Yes, who were experimenting in the studio in a more progressive rock format." Porcupine Tree founder Steven Wilson opined that there were "hugely ambitious" progressive pop records in the 1970s and 1980s that were "quite accessible on the surface, but if you chose to engage with them on a deeper level, you could find layers in the production, musicianship and some thoughtful lyrics."
Some mainstream pop acts, such as Tears for Fears, continued the traditions of prog-pop. In 1985, Simon Reynolds noted that the new pop movement attempted to "bridge" the divide between "progressive" pop and its mass/chart counterpart, describing their general relationship as "one between boys and girls, middle-class and working-class." In 2008, The New York Times John Wray observed a recent progressive pop trend that involved large bands or collectives "with a disdain for clearly defined hierarchies", noting examples such as Arcade Fire, Broken Social Scene, and Animal Collective.
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