10
giving the impression of hopping gracefully from the progressive rock genre to the new wave,
without making any great changes in his essential approach to music. All along, of course,
Eno was coping, on both conceptual and practical levels, with entirely different musical gen-
res, notably minimalism and post-Cage experimentalism, the overtly "classical" aspects of
progressive rock never interested him much. The term "progressive rock" is not without its
ambiguities, since for some its progressivism was a political or philosophical matter, and for
others a purely musical tendency or ideal, furthermore, unlike many of rock's sub-genres,
progressive rock does not denote a specific musical style so much as a complex of styles,
united, if at all, only through a common interest in musical experimentation and diversifica-
tion. Progressive rock musicians were interested in playing about on the borderlines between
musical genres, notably those between classical music, jazz, avant-garde music, non-Western
music, and rock.
Thus in spite of the problems associated with the term, progressive rock must be viewed as
the generic background for Eno's first recorded musical efforts. The term "art rock" is less
suitable, primarily because of the inevitable association of the word "art" with the Western
European classical music tradition. The leading proponent of the term "art rock" is John
Rockwell, who in his fine article of that title in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock
& Roll found the distinguishing feature of the genre in the self-consciously artistic attitude of
its diverse practitioners.
11
Self-consciousness is what makes Stravinsky's Rite of Spring not a
primitive, but a primitivist piece, a similar act of removal or distancing is what made the mid-
1970s performances of art-rockers like Patti Smith, or of Talking Heads who followed, not
simply primitive rock shows, but statements about primitive rock shows. This sort of detach-
ment, according to Rockwell, is one of the things that makes art rock "art." Eno's primacy of
place in Rockwell's scheme of things is shown by his placing Eno, along with Frank Zappa,
the Velvet Underground, and Pink Floyd, in their own separate, unqualified discographical
categories, all other art-rockers are grouped by subject-headings, some of them slyly deroga-
tory "Chart-Topping Classical Bombast" (Moody Blues, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Yes),
"Arty Primitivism" (John Cale, Terry Riley, Patti Smith). The catholicity of Rockwell's point
of view, which deserves close attention by anyone interested in the shifting and blending of
popular, art, and folk genres in the world of twentieth-century music, is also evident in his
book All American Music, which finds Neil Young's "rock populism and transcendental
primitivism" alongside Milton Babbit's serial structuralism, and Keith Jarrett's "mystical fu-
sion romanticism" rubbing shoulders with Laurie Anderson's performance art.
12
Brian Eno began his public career in the early 1970s working primarily within the genre of
progressive rock, toying with the expectations that are part of the listener's experience of any
genre. In ways that we shall examine fully in Part II, he pushed back the boundaries of pro-
gressive rock until much of his music could not be called rock at all by any stylistic criterion,
lacking, as it did, drums, a steady pulse, and vocals.
Most of Eno's music is characterized by a certain simplicity of conception, a sense of confi-
dence in making a simple thing work. This, along with a preoccupation with the formal ele-
ments of music, is reminiscent of Mozartean classicism, certainly romantic breast-beating of
11
John Rockwell, "Art Rock," in Jim Miller, ed., The Rolling Stone llustrated History of Rock
& Roll (New York: Rolling Stone/Random House, 1976), 322-6.
12
John Rockwell, All American Music: Composition in the Late 20th Century, (New York:
Knopf, 1983), table of contents.