Justin Frankeny is originally from Pittsburgh, PA and completed his Bachelor of Music in both composition and music history at Baldwin Wallace University near Cleveland, OH. He is currently a PhD student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he also completed his MA in 2020. Justin’s primary research interest is in relationships of power within and between musical practitioners, institutions, and styles. His master's thesis explored the power dynamics between musical "snobs" and "omnivores" in the progressive rock fanbase, using the band The Mars Volta as a case study and drawing on discourses in online fan forums. His forthcoming dissertation will examine the era of “serial tyranny” in the 1950s-70s, in which the dominance of serialist compositional technique in U.S. academic institutions often limited freedom of compositional expression in young composers.

Prog Rock or Rock’s Progress?

The Snob, the Omnivore, and the Music of The Mars Volta

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R. Justin Frankeny

In the early 2000’s, The Mars Volta’s popularity among prog rock fandom was, in many ways, a conundrum. Unlike 1970s prog rock that drew heavily on Western classical music, TMV members Omar Rodriguez-Lopez and Cedric Bixler-Zavala routinely insisted on the integral importance of Salsa to their style and asserted an ambivalent relationship to classic prog rock. In this paper, I build on existing scholarship on cultural omnivorousness to assert that an increase in omnivorous musical tastes since prog rock’s inception in the 1970s not only explains The Mars Volta’s affiliation with the genre in the early 2000s, but also explains their mixed reception within a divided prog rock fanbase. Drawing on Jack Hamilton’s work on race in rock music, I suggest that progressive rock emerged as an unmarked category of white masculinity, but by the early 2000s omnivorous listening practices had increased and The Mars Volta’s marked Latino identities helped “diversify” prog rock to the genre’s more omnivorous fans. Contrary to existing scholarship that suggests that the omnivore had largely supplanted the highbrow snob, I argue that the snob persists in the prog rock fanbase, as distinguished by their assertion of the superiority of prog rock through discourses of musical complexity adapted from classical music. Using online forums, reviews, and interviews, I examine discourses on The Mars Volta in order to understand how these two sides of the fanbase relate. I conclude that disagreements between snobs and omnivores regarding the quality of TMV’s music revolve around conflicting understandings of the word progressive and its implications for the intersection of gender, race, and class.

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Keywords: new prog, cultural capital, highbrow snobbishness, cultural omnivorousness, intersectionality

Video presentation