Uh-oh.

I have bad news, guys. Please don't scream. It's kind of a confession.

...I'm a prog fan. D:

I don't know when it happened. ..actually, yes, I do. I've been slowly becoming one over the course of the past five years. I became an official pretentious ponce around the time I met some random guy on Omegle who couldn't understand the point of a song that's longer than ten minutes. When you defend bands such as Genesis and Dream Theater for their musical abilities and songwriting talents, rather than defending bands like Megadeth and.. well, Genesis, for melodic gifts... I guess that's when you become a true prog fan.

Allow me to elaborate.

Prog- noun, abrev. - "Progressive rock," or, in some cases, "Progressive metal." A musical genre that is pretty damn tough to literally define. Often recognized for how fucking awesome it is its many similarities with jazz and classical music, it was mainly popular back in the 60s and 70s.

Allow me to elaborate in a different way.

If music were literature, The Beatles would be.. I dunno, Ernest Hemingway or somebody. Metallica would be Stephen King. Justin Bieber would be... Twilight. >_> Yes, Twilight is an author now. Shut up. To give an example of prog, Rush would be Orson Welles. Genesis would be some modern form of Homer. Pink Floyd would be.. uh.. hm. Pink Floyd would be JD Salinger-- really popular, doesn't care much for mainstream shit, only wrote about one particularly good book. Now Dream Theater... hoo, boy. Dream Theater would be..
I don't know! I do not know. At all. o_o If I could compare Dream Theater to anybody in the world, I'd compare them with Christopher Nolan. Hasn't directed a bad movie yet, in my opinion, though I haven't really.. SEEN many of his movies. <_< He made Inception, though. Inception is the first ever movie I've seen that I could not criticize. Shit, I even criticized some parts of Citizen Kane! In other words, I love Mister Nolan, and I love Dream Theater.

I still have not done a very good job of describing prog. I guess I haven't gone with the textbook definition yet.

Prog is, basically, music that does not follow any common song structures. It is a lot like jazz in the sense that it often features long, improvisational instrumental sections. A lot of the time, prog songs tell stories, rather than are about some single concept. In Dream Theater's case, a band might make a certain album about one concept, and make the individual songs about stories based around the concept.
Due to its uncommon structure (rarely will a prog song follow "Verse-Chorus-Verse-Chorus-Bridge-Chorus") and extended sections, prog songs may clock in at anything from thirty-three seconds to fifty-six minutes, and beyond. Oftentimes, bands will write entire suites, so that's cool, too. :D One particularly famous suite is "2112," by Rush. It's only twenty minutes, though. xD Even Genesis has written longer than that ("Supper's Ready," 23 minutes).
Fun fact: Prog bands can feature weird-ass instruments. A few bands out there feature floutists, or other odd instruments.

...well.. yeah, there ya go. I'm turning into a prog fan. The bad part about that is that prog fans are pretentious, ostentatious, elitist pricks. 8D I already hate songs that have longer choruses than they do verses. D: And songs that rely too much on 4/4 aren't necessarily my favourites. One of my favourites, "The Cinema Show" (Genesis) features an extensive 7/4(ish) synth solo. :DDD Oh, and I dislike Pink Floyd because they seem to be the only prog band anybody might possibly know, and I'm not too fond of their almost generic-sounding.. sound. Rush is good, though, even though they can be considered to be even more mainstream than Floyd. :P EMOTICONS

I will write more on this in a later entry.