KWES, Motown, Prog

- A Tribe Called Next is interviewing KWES, who lists Robert Wyatt as a source of inspiration.

- In Mojo Robert Wyatt tells us that Smokey Robinson & The Miracle's "Ooo Baby Baby" (1965) is his Motown favorite.

- In a couple of days some of you may see "Prog Rock Britannia" on BBC, so let me just point you in the general direction of the article "Musical ambition, cultural accreditation and the nasty side of progressive rock" by Jay Keister and Jeremy L. Smith, in Popular Music (2008), 27:433-455. Were the prog rockers snobs, who tried to make classical music, or were they counter cultural rebels? The authors seem to think that the prog rockers did not deserve all the negative reactions they got. They focus mainly on the bands Yes, Genesis, King Crimson and Emerson, Lake and Palmer, but touch Henry Cow (Chris Cutler) too and Robert Wyatt is represented by a couple of citations from Greg Bennett's Soft Machine book ("Out-Bloody-Rageous", 2005). Soft Machine is mentioned as a band "the establishment" liked, and Wyatt says that the famous concert at The Proms was a "..failed effort to make us look respectable...".
If you want to read the article, you have to pay, or you have to have access to journals from a good library. If not, read the abstract.