Incredible! 10 Things You Already Knew About Yes

There isn’t a progressive rock fan on the planet Earth who hasn’t heard of the band Yes. They are often a young person’s gateway drug into the world of prog.

However, equally trivial are the following facts that should be completely obvious and even banal to all progressive rock fans who are even somewhat familiar with the band. This list will neither blow your mind nor shock you.

1. Yes is one of the small number of bands that has a 3-letter name.

You may be able to think of some others: REM, A-Ha, and so forth.

2. Yes albums are available in vinyl.

It should be obvious to you that Yes albums were once primarily pressed into vinyl records. However, it should also be obvious to you that Yes albums are still available in vinyl. Yes albums are also available in formats other than vinyl.

3. Yes features a guitar player.

There is a guitar player in Yes. Before, there was a different guitar player. The guitar player in Yes has changed.

4. A non-zero number of people really dislike Yes, but another non-zero number of people are huge fans of Yes.

There are people who like Yes, people who dislike Yes, and people who are generally disinterested in Yes. Some people don’t know about Yes. It may be helpful to think of a normal distribution curve, where most people have neutral or average opinions of the band Yes, but the extreme left and right of the curve represent the distributions of people who are either huge fans of Yes, or totally hate Yes. This may resemble the actual population, though it might not.

5. Yes fans are totally into Yes and often go to concerts.

The best place to find a group of Yes fans? Yes concerts. There, you will generally find the people in an area who are most into Yes, though there are exceptions.

6. Members of the band Yes like each other to varying degrees.

Some members of Yes are real friends and get along with each other. Some members of Yes find it harder to create a working relationship with other members of the band Yes.

7. Yes has a number of influences.

To create their signature sound, members of the band Yes were influenced by different musicians who recorded music prior to the creation of Yes.

8. When played backwards, Yes albums contain hidden cacophonous gibberish that only sounds like something significant when you are stoned.

This gibberish was not intentionally placed in the music, but is rather an artifact of the normal music encoding process. The altered state of consciousness that results from psychoactive drugs may cause a person to mistake these acoustic artifacts for something significant.

9. The logo of the band Yes is a stylized word. The word is “yes.” This is the logo:

10. Trevor Rabin is a fantastic guitarist and deserves just as much respect and admiration for carrying the Yes standard through the ’80s and ’90s as Steve Howe did for the ’70s and ’00s through today. In other words, the idea that Steve Howe is somehow the “definitive” or canonical guitar player for Yes, and Rabin was at best a fill-in, is a laughable parody of the true state of affairs. Rabin was not only capable of playing Howe’s parts live, he was also an accomplished singer, songwriter, and keyboardist. It’s not that Rabin is better than Howe, just that he should be considered a peer to Howe in the most relevant ways to the legacy of Yes.

Obviously.