Yes’ seminal Close to the Edge was released 50 years ago this month, on September 13th, 1972. I was twelve years old, having just started seventh grade at Coolidge Junior High School, and I was oblivious to the music of Yes, with the exception of their hit song from earlier in the year: “Roundabout”. It would be another couple of years before I was introduced to this work, but once I was, it became my favorite album, and the one I would measure all other contemporary music against, to this day.
In my mind, nothing over the now many years ever did quite measure up to it, with the exception of Yes’ Relayer album, released at the end of 1974, about half a year after I’d first heard CTTE. I’m hardly alone in my judgment, as CTTE seems to be, while not the consensus pick for best prog rock album in the genre’s history, at least a pretty clear majority pick. The album’s three songs embody everything interesting that was going on in music at the time, from the wildly frenetic polyrhythmic opening of “Close to the Edge” to the competing strains of minimalism, folksiness, and quasi-symphonic bombast of “And You and I”, to the more straightforward, syncopated rocker “Siberian Khatru”, its main theme consisting of a gentle repeating keyboard melody in triple triplet stabs played over a snappy fifteen-beat boogie.
In retrospect, Yes had a pretty short heyday. The arrival of guitarist Steve Howe in 1971 elevated them to a different level, but by the time they regrouped after the hiatus they took to record solo albums in 1975/1976, they seem to have somewhat lost the muse, and began producing considerably less adventurous music, for the most part. Yes was not the only prog band to lose the muse at that time, as the movement seemed to fizzle out as an artistic trend by the end of the decade. I’ve long pictured Steve Howes’ pedal steel guitar outro to “Awaken”, the last song on Yes’ 1977 album Going For the One, serving as the denouement to the original progressive rock project.
Especially by the 1990s, bands would come along attempting to rekindle an artistically serious species of rock – new permutations of Yes included – and while some of them are successful enough on their own terms, the pinnacle of the genre seems to be permanently located in the early 1970s – specifically in 1972, according to a plurality of prog fans. What I find most interesting about that is how it defies the assumption behind the genre itself: the notion that music can be taken to greater and greater heights through building on itself in a process of progression – as if music is just another technology to be mastered by degrees. Quite evidently, that is not the case; the “progressive” music movement flamed out in about a decade; its leading artists reduced to producing albums like Tormato, Duke, and Camera Camera. And in the music world more generally, the apex of musical genius appears – at least for now – to have taken place in the period before the rise of democracy and Romanticism; music is not getting better since then, even at the highest levels.
That’s not to say there’s not good music being made today. There’s even still good rock music being made today. Steven Wilson’s 2015 album Hand. Cannot. Erase. is the best rock album I’ve heard since 1974. But it’s an outlier. We’re on the cusp of seeing the pop music world dominated by musical content product produced by artificial intelligence algorithms. Serious composers and musicians will find some way to survive, and hopefully to thrive. And maybe someone will someday craft a rock album even better than Close to the Edge. But if it happens, it will be an organic development from a place of deep artistic insight and impulse, not an attempt at improving upon what was done before in a self-serving game of one-upmanship over the past, which was (and is) essentially the conceit of progressivism.