CAMBRIDGE, MA—Following a three-decade-long, multimillion-dollar study to evaluate the progressive rock group’s music, a team of scientists at Harvard University announced Wednesday that they were no closer to determining if the British band Yes is good or not. “While deep sonic analysis reveals technically interesting aspects to the band’s discography—1971’s The Yes Album and 1983’s 90125, in particular—we continue to struggle in our efforts to conclusively demonstrate whether Yes is actually a decent band,” said head researcher Dr. Jeremy Loach, confirming his team successfully replicated the findings of earlier studies that concluded the band’s album covers are pretty trippy and the bass guitar groove on “Roundabout” fucking rocks, but could establish little else with certainty. “Take a song like ‘Close To The Edge’: The organ performance and the vocal harmonies certainly sound as if they’ve been recorded by a good band. But then you realize they’re tucked inside an 18-minute, multi-movement song with lyrics about witches, and it’s unclear exactly what Yes was even going for, let alone whether this is good music. At the same time, the band has been together for more than 50 years now, and if they were bad, surely they would have called it quits long ago. Right?” While research into Yes remains inconclusive, Loach noted that his team long ago uncovered hard scientific evidence definitively proving that Emerson, Lake, and Palmer sucks.

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