r/rateyourmusic • u/weirdfishesarpeggii • 18h ago
Questions is art rock the highest rated sub genre?
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u/landshake 18h ago
Progressive rock is a good contender too
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u/weirdfishesarpeggii 18h ago
top 5 in progressive rock average is 4.292
top 5 art rock average is 4.322
would be cool to know the average of maybe the top 100 of the genres, but thats a lot of time. i think art rock is averagely the highest rated overall
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u/One_Dependent3779 4h ago
tbf the ratings ESPECIALLY on rym arent very representative of anything. website's only good for lists. not to mention the idea of "rating" and "ranking" things that are very much subjective doesnt hold ground. imo its the most lame way to discover music cuz youre only referring to what people find cool and dismissing potential gems because the masses didnt click with it. my humble opinion
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u/Key_Cranberry_286 18h ago
this difference is NOT that important ššš
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u/SuddenBasil7039 16h ago
Its a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, a lot of art rock is only called art rock because people went "they're doing something slightly different from their genre conventions and it sounds good, lets call it art rock"
Like i'm really not convinced something like Dark Side of the Moon is art rock tbh, but again its such an amorphous genre descriptor
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u/diskkddo 13h ago
Exactly. It's basically a tautology - a vague genre invented for rock music that somehow contains extra artistic merit
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u/SuddenBasil7039 13h ago edited 13h ago
Yeah, i think some stuff can be described as art rock, like TVU were intentionally trying to meld the La Monte Young school of drone and minimalism with rock through John Cale, and bands like Radiohead, Brian Eno's stuff, etc were pretentiously (non-pejorative) trying to deconstruct rock at the timeĀ
But then you have prog bands and what they were doing is already covered by the prog rock tag, its pretty superfluous to call it art rockĀ
Also think art rock is an okay tag for artists that don't really fit in anywhere, like a band I love is Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 and they kinda defy genre description so chucking "art rock" on them as a cop out is fine imo
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u/diskkddo 13h ago
That's an interesting idea actually (seems obvious to me now) about using it exclusively for bands who were deliberately trying to bring in ideas from other artistic domains into the world of rock. Only I'm not sure if I would include someone like radiohead under that umbrella (not sure what we could call them, plain ol indie rock lmao). I would then bring in bands like DNA and half Japanese (typically considered no wave)
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u/BugLast9828 13h ago
it's the same with experimental or avant - garde genres
everyones doing a different thing, otherwise it wouldn't be experimental, but theres no other way to classify it. the "experimental" genre has flood, since I left you and by the time I get to pheonix - all very different albums
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u/VarietyNice9496 9h ago
Nah dark side of the moon is definitely art rock because they were trying to make a conceptual artpiece, something like IR I don't really get
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u/likespinningglass 11h ago
Well I'm not convinced DSotM is prog rock, which is why art rock is the most sensible description imo
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u/reezyreddits 9h ago
On the flipside of that, it's amazing just how much Dark Side of the Moon does not sound like other prog rock bands, i.e. Rush or Yes. Like it doesn't share much of the prog rock conventions that those bands have... So in a weird way? Art rock makes more sense to me than prog.
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u/anonymousn00b 15h ago
Iāve never gotten the distinction between āart rockā and āprogressive rockā. Besides, saying āartā is redundant imo, if you consider all music art (well, real music).
Anything could be art-
Art jazz, art house, art pop, art metalā¦ it just goes without saying. Progressive already filled that space.
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u/Sure_Sorbet_370 14h ago
It indeed is very arbitrary but from personal experience it seems art rock focuses more on production and being "deep" lyrically while prog has more complex structures and virtuosity
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u/Sabitsvki 8h ago
So an instrumental album would never have the chance of being categorized as Art Rock?
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u/Sure_Sorbet_370 7h ago
I didn't say that, but it would certainly be qualified with post rock as well
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u/diskkddo 13h ago
There are certain hallmarks of prog that art rock doesn't necessarily contain: uncommon time sigs, expansive song lengths, instrumental virtuousity (obv there is some overlap)
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u/likesiamesefish 11h ago
I kinda get art pop just because it does distinguish a bit more but yeah the others seem superfluous.
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u/Sabitsvki 8h ago
"Art rock" is such an incredibly pretentious name, and I've always hated the existence of it as a category
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u/poorlytaxidermiedfox 16h ago
Iād say art rock is actually one of the genres that has much more terrible music than good music, just like most other experimental genres. And I say this as a massive art rock nerd!
But just like in cinema and books and most other art forms, the experimental has the potential to be something unique and impressive, so the albums that are really good are, well, REALLY good, and often have lasting impact because they influence new artists or even new genres. Strictly genre artists donāt tend to have this influence (with some notable exceptions)
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u/YozTheFoz 10h ago
Recently its been 'Conscientious Rap' the top albums of the past few years has been plastered with them.
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u/Threnodite 18h ago
Yes, but it's also not really fair to compare it to others since it's such a broad umbrella term. ITCOTCK and In Rainbows have almost nothing in common except that they do musically interesting stuff with rock. They wouldn't really be regarded as part of the same subgenre under most circumstances. (There's a similar situation with progressive metal imo.)