I think what we are really arguing over is essentially the balance of heart and mind. For the most part, the public does not want their art to make them think. They want to feel. Whether they want to feel good, sad, glad, or bad, there is a song for it. But they usually just want to feel something they can relate to without having to think about it very much. Thinking is too hard for the general public.
Most of us that are into progressive rock tend to gravitate toward it because it has a tendency to be a little bit more on the cerebral side. But it still makes us feel something. When a band can find that nice balance between making you think and making you feel (As Dark Side did) then you have happened upon something that is very difficult to do. Because, as I said, the public doesn’t like to think. So getting them to think and feel at the same time is extremely difficult. Getting them to feel ....not so much. To be fair, it does take a measure of talent to elicit an emotion. It takes a little bit more to make somebody truly think. And it takes a lot more to do both at the same time.
Look, Jammin, you and I are buds and always will be. I love the degree to which you think about this stuff, and that's sincere. I think of anyone here, I am one of those that appreciates that, and I'm also one of those that could reasonably be accused of over-thinking things on occasion. Having said that, I reject this notion that somehow one (or both) are better than the other. In fact, in my opinion, I think it's EASIER to make people think than it is to make someone feel. I think "Yesterday" - two minutes, three seconds of acoustic guitar and vocal, with a couple vocal and orchestral overdubs - is a FAR greater achievement than say, "Dance Of Eternity". I have something like 30,000 songs in my iPod library, and I can count the number of songs that make me cry on ONE HAND. I can give you 100 off the top of my head that make me think.
Where music - art - differs from, say, a toaster, is that it can do BOTH. I've long said this to my daughter (a huge Taylor Swift fan): like what you like, and apologize to NO ONE about it. If it makes you close your eyes and pump your fist, or if it chokes you up, or if it makes you go get the lyric book to see what she's really saying (or who she's saying it about), then you're on to something. Everything else is... pffffft.
I give you this quote from Het (regarding Re-Load, but still): "Fast thrash just wasn't exciting to us anymore, really," Hetfield said. "If I wrote it, then we'd use it, but none of us were writing that stuff. On 'Fuel' there was some pretty quick down-picking — just kind of moving around with root notes — but that's about it. It's was a little more exciting for us to figure out more fucked up chords — things that grind — dissonant bits. In a few of the songs there's helter-skelter tension built in there. That kind of stuff excited us more than the speed stuff."