Though my favorite music has been in constant flux for as long as I have been alive, the band Yes holds privilege in my heart as the musical group that informed my perspective on the world. Yes is a progressive rock band formed in Soho, London, in 1967 amidst the dying embers of the British beat. This musical movement showcased besuited bands crooned sap-sticky ballads such as “I Want To Hold Your Hand” and “She Loves You.” As Beatlemania moved westward, many young Londoners gravitated to the Swinging Sixties’ dominant values, rooted in opposing approaches to social upheaval. Grassroots hippies professing free love, free expression and marijuana-fueled psychedelia mingled with other youth groups moving towards cultural modernism, anti-hegemonic dissension and amphetamine-imbued riffage. Yes’ values are drawn from this social flux—a product of social progressivism, utopianism and mellow psychedelic influences operating in harmony with incendiary cultural upheaval.
This coalescence informed a worldview dialectically opposed to conservatism, inequity and strife, willing to fight revolutionary battles of the word, spirit and body to overturn these social ills. Nonetheless, it maintains an unshaken commitment to love and life as sacral values to which revolutionary opposition would be sacrosanct. The band’s self-titled 1969 debut album exists as a perfect crystallization of this perspective, devoting its track listing to heart-softening balladry emboldened by mellifluous acoustic guitar. “Survival,” the highlight of the record and one of my favorite Yes songs, is a stirring reflection on the oneness of life, conveyed through a Darwinian portrait of nature’s beautiful impartiality.
Anderson paints pastiches of fecund animal life, singing, “Where is the parent bird, a loneliness arose and heard its name ringing / For lives begin, survival win, survival’s sin.” Oscillating into didactic proverb backed by choral vocal harmony and a noodling organ, Anderson intones in the chorus, “Don’t doubt the fact there’s life within you, yesterday’s endings will tomorrow life give you / All that dies, dies for a reason, to put its strength into the Season.”
Yes’ sophomore record, “Time and a Word” (1970), only expanded upon the high-minded and evocative by heightening their progressive rock ethos, and implementing the gravitas of classical music through hiring the Royal College of Music’s brass and string orchestra. The second track on “Time and a Word,” entitled “Then,” serves as the band’s thesis statement, painting a utopian vision of a perfected human society. “And in a time that’s closer, life will be even bolder then / Souls will be complicated, life will be consummated then / Hearts will be brought together, soon in our minds forever then,” Anderson rhapsodizes over a racing bass-led beat punctuated by cello. “Then” envisions a distant day in which human consciousness coalesces into sacred oneness, ending conflict through a fundamental human kinship, where “love is the only answer / And hate is the root of cancer then.” To Yes, this abstract science-fictional future is a promised outgrowth of humanity’s righteously indignant moral arc toward justice. To me, the worst that this song (and Yes as a whole) can be accused of is being effusively saccharine and naively hopeful about the necessity of deposing evil, loving one another and living together in peace.
The starry-eyed earnestness of Yes’ humanist music was not always typical within the progressive rock milieu. Their London-based contemporaries, King Crimson, are credited with creating the prog-rock genre on their debut “In the Court of the Crimson King” (1969), a record matching Yes’ grandiosity but sparing all of its assured belief in morality. “Court’s” opener, “21st Century Schizoid Man,” screeds metallic verses recounting the normalized atrocity of warfare: “Blood rack, barbed wire / Politicians’ funeral pyre,” a verse positioning cynicism and psychopathy as the only antidotes to an omnipresent modern cruelty that verges on the absurdist. The two bands are dueling sides of revolution. King Crimson presents the paradigm of modernity as one of gradually inculcated inhumanity, a status quo necessitating destructive non-compliance. Yes argues for the warmth, coalition and moral passion required to swing the pendulum of history toward goodness. King Crimson’s music is dissonant, abrasive, and largely played in minor key; Yes’ music is warm, classically-structured, and replete with heroic major chords.
Yes has always resonated with me just a bit more—every installation of their discography is a balm to the soul, soothing any weariness of spirit and invigorating the listener towards the pursuit of virtue. That radiating core at the heart of their ethos, professing a sincere belief in hopeful futures wrought by passionate people, vibrates throughout their music to create transcendent listening experiences. The climax of Yes’ “Yours is No Disgrace” from “The Yes Album” (1971) still manages to make my heart turn—and tears swell in my eyes—every time I listen. As Anderson croons, “On a sailing ship to nowhere, leaving any place / If the summer changed to winter, yours is no, yours is no disgrace,” I still feel like the 12-year-old who first heard the song, beholding the glistening sincerity of feeling in its creation.
As Yes evolved, the band incorporated a spiritual bent, leaning further into the overblown craftsmanship that defines progressive rock as a genre. Yes’ masterpiece, 1972’s “Close to the Edge,” sonically and lyrically borrows from the Buddhist influences of Herman Hesse’s novel “Siddhartha” to create a record reaching the zenith of the band’s virtuosity—both in the musical and moral sense of the term. Resultantly, the album presents an Eastern philosophy-inspired spiritual treatise as convoluted as it is clarifying. While the album’s 18-minute title track does convey genuine mystical insight, some of the lyricism constitutes spiritual psychobabble, calling into question the coherence of Anderson’s writing amid what was undoubtedly a heady marijuana stupor: “A seasoned witch could call you from the depths of your disgrace / And rearrange your liver to the solid mental grace.”
Ultimately, Yes’ unflagging commitment to its perspective is more a product of youthful naivete than exceptional wisdom. Discussing the making of “Close to the Edge,” Yes drummer Bill Bruford noted that the band hoped to “take longer than Simon & Garfunkel” took to create “Bridge Over Troubled Water” (1970), attempting to match the sheer effort of their idols and produce music of comparable quality. Yes’ sensitive balladry was not a product of moral paragons, but young, inspired musicians expressing playfulness through earnest musicianship. I believe the music of Yes, and music that holds young, sentimental, righteous passion, is increasingly necessary today.
As modern cultural outputs decline into repetitious simulacra and our communication becomes increasingly defined by post-ironic disingenuity and emotional apathy, media that rouses the spirit and stems from emotional sincerity is vital. Throughout my life, and I imagine for the entirety of my future, the band that has been that font of spiritual inspiration for me has been Yes. Give them a listen.