Lifecycles - Writings on the movement of music in time and economy
By Henry Warwick  

"…a movement is accomplished in six stages, and the seventh brings return…" -Pink Floyd, 1967

Greetings My Dear and Gentle Reader.

To you I owe my most humble and earnest apologies for having been so delinquent in my SPARK columns. Apologies are no excuse, so as a palliative to your most righteous indignation at my absence permit me a few moments to digress upon just what exactly I’ve been doing for the past few months. This will be a fairly long and dense SPARK. But hold with me for the next several weeks, and pay close attention - the rewards here are great.

1. I was laid off from Napster, 6 weeks after September 11^th. (My time at Napster would make a fascinating SPARK. Unfortunately, I signed so many Non Disclosure Agreements - I can’t really talk about any of it.)
   
   After 9.11, I (and I imagine much of the USA) fell into a serious funk. I felt that whatever I could write in SPARK would be of such little consequence that I felt silence was the only reasonable conclusion. I especially felt disturbed by it all, as I had completed a video in June 2001 called "Cricket Point" which anticipated the events of 9.11. When I watched the morning news on 9.11 and saw large twin jet planes fly into buildings in a way that was emotionally identical to my video (where 7X7 twin jets fly and crossfade into office buildings followed by radical scenes of destruction while the squalling feedback of my song "Cricket" howls in the background), I was, well, devastated. I felt completely vindicated and utterly horrified at the prescience of my work. I wanted to scream "I TOLD YOU THAT SOMEDAY THIS WAS COMING!!! IT WAS INEVITABLE, YOU FOOLS!!!" At the same time, I realized that it would do no good.
   
   People won’t get out of their SUVs, people won’t turn the damned lights off, and people won’t pay one lick of attention until they are forced to consider the implications and consequences of their actions. My hope was that such illumination would be market / legislation driven – that we, as a society, could educate ourselves on our wastefulness, and as a species, become aware of our destructiveness driven by our overpopulation and the technology used to maintain this enormous population. After 9.11 and the reaction on that event, I have a number of misgivings and qualms over such hopes. I still hope them, but I am afraid that the blinding hollow plastic tunnel of our corporate media (liberal, conservative or otherwise) is in such a state of reaction that I fear such hopes may be futile for the next decade.
   
   
2. In January, I started Grad School. Yes, dear friends, I have concluded that my only hope regarding long-term employment is in the field of higher education. To engage such a career path, I must acquire a "terminal degree", and in my field that’s an MFA. However, with mortgage and child, I must work. Therefore, I could not apply to Berkeley, or SF State, or Mills or any of the other local colleges and Universities, as they would require that I attend day classes, and that is clearly not a responsible option in my present circumstance. I had to find a Graduate School that would offer an MFA in what I do - inter and multidisciplinary art making – and not have requirements that I attend day classes. Through the Internet, I found there are a number of schools that would do this. Most of them are less than worthless. A few are dead brilliant. I looked into a few of them, and concluded that given my interests and background, Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont, would do nicely.
   
   I sent them a totally insane and utterly KICK ASS portfolio (a SPARK column unto itself) and was accepted. Now the Genius of the Goddard System is its limited residency. For a week and a half, you go to this idyllic setting in the middle of rural Vermont to confer with advisors and classmates about one’s work and plans for that semester. There is usually a massive party at the end of the session. This suited me fine.
   
   I was not prepared for the "dorm room" I was assigned. It seemed the interior designer was Mickey The Crackhead. I had forgotten how dire school dorms can be, and mine was most dire. Once I got over my jetlag and got into the swing of things, the state of the filthy hole I affectionately called "My Little Crackhouse" receded into the background.
   
   Suffice to say; I think Goddard has a fine program that fits my needs exactly. In this program, I will give myself the time and space to more tightly integrate my art practice. To that end:
   
   
3. I am writing this column and the next several all at once. It is a development of the lecture/rant I gave at the Refrains Conference on Electronic Music in Vancouver, BC, in late September. In that event, I briefly went over the basics of my theory of Lifecycles.
   
   Since then, I have determined this theory worthy of a book, once I extend it to other areas and performed due diligence upon detailing the results of my research. But for you, my dear, patient, and gentle reader, I have cooked up a special version for the web. It will detail my ideas enough so that you can get the general "gist" of my perceptions. For greater detail, you will have to wait for the book to come out…

Please note: this is MERELY a reduced pass at a very large animal. What I am describing can be assigned to Jazz and HipHop as well, as well as most any other style of popular music. The book I will write will specifically address Jazz, Rock and HipHop. This version ONLY looks at Rock and Roll, simply because I know Rock best, and have done the most research on it. The final work would do the following:

Analyze the lifecycles of musical styles ROCK and JAZZ, showing how they operated according to the parameters I herein describe, and then look at HipHop as a predictive case. I don’t know the history of HipHop that well, but I know many people involved with HipHop, and will call upon their expertise and experience. General research will be fairly simple, as it is younger and comparatively well documented, as opposed to Jazz, where the originators are dead and suffer posthumously under the yoke of halos the Entertainment Industry has bestowed upon their rotting bones and 78s.

Introduction

I have divided the presentation of this work in several parts for your reading convenience. I have been working on this (in fits and starts) for the better part of 20 years, and only recently have things fallen clearly into place for me to actually develop a conclusion I feel is accurate and warranted. This project began as a research paper for a Political Theory class when I was attending Rutgers University in the early 1980s. My research and advisors at that time led me toward the likes of Horkheimer, Adorno, and Lukacs. The paper went nowhere- I never turned it in and failed the class. I could have finished it, but it would have been "wrong", and I’d rather take the "F" than write something I couldn’t stand behind. Over the years the idea sat in my mind and refused to leave. As it took up more and more space, it surrounded itself with more and more relevant and related material, ever searching for a suitable and correct conclusion.

One of the most important books to this work, and formed a major and original foundation for the paper and this presentation, was the book "Hip Capitalism" by Suzanne Krieger from the early 1970s. In the early 1990s, I found out that she was teaching (relatively) nearby in the University of California at Santa Cruz. I emailed her some of the ideas I had regarding the ideas behind this paper and asked for her help. Primarily, I needed a copy of "Hip Capitalism". The only copy I had ever seen was moldering some 3000 miles away in the Rutgers University Library. In hindsight, I unfortunately bungled the email- it was largely incoherent and Ms Krieger had the good sense to politely decline her assistance in this project. This was somewhat expected- a strange elliptical email about an older work that arrives out of the blue is not likely to get the most optimal response. What was tragic, however, was that she indicated she could not help me find "Hip Capitalism." Given the book was close to 30 years old, I doubted she had boxes of them in her closet, but I was hoping she might know where I might find a copy. She thanked me for my interest in her work, and she is most welcome.

Without the book on hand, I had to rely on 20 year old and extremely vague notes I had taken during my research phase for the original paper, and all the attendant distortions of personal memory. I felt very uneasy about the direction of the project, and finally abandoned the effort.

Another book valued in the making of this conjecture is "File Under Popular" by Chris Cutler. I had the very good fortune to talk with him about the ideas for this work, which at that point had been rusting in my brain for many years, and that afternoon he provided much useful insight and criticism. From there, the project was re-energized a bit. I also realized that it had a lot of major gaps, and most significantly, it needed a proper conclusion – I realized that Ms Krieger’s analysis was incomplete, through no fault of her own. Her analysis was limited to the historical window of the research she performed on the co-option of a specific radio station in San Francisco, KMPX / KSAN. My purview is one of finding patterns in musical style development in history, a more developed and macrocosmic application of the structures she found in the microcosmic workings of a radio station in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

If the reader really wants to know "roughly where I’m coming from", I recommend the following books:

• "Hip Capitalism" by Susan Krieger

• "File Under Popular" by Chris Cutler

• "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" by Walter Benjamin

• "Simulations" by Jean Baudrillard

• "Legitimation Crisis" by Jurgen Habermas

• "Origin of Species" by Charles Darwin

• "Noise" by Jacques Attali

• "Cannibals and Kings" by Marvin Harris

• "History and Class Consciousness" by Georg Lukacs

• "Man and His Symbols" by Carl Jung

• "The Hidden Dimension" by Edward T Hall

I would also recommend a video, "The Selling of Cool" from PBS Frontline, by Douglas Rushkoff, and Rosalind Krauss’s brilliant article from one of the earliest Octobers- "Notes on the Index".

Some of them are long out of print, and some are just plain obscure, so you might have a great deal of trouble finding them. I know I did.

Those books will give you a vague and general idea of where this all came from, and can provide a general road map of where this is all going, and from whence it came.

Dedications and Thanks

I would like to thank my wife, Beth Scannell, for being such a sweetly patient person to one as trying as myself. Without her love and support, none of this would have been possible. I’d like to thank Ms Krieger for lighting the match, and Chris Cutler for fanning the flames. And thanks to the Marxists for being so utterly right on target and so horribly Horribly HORRIBLY wrong in practice – and doing all of it at the same time. I thank international corporate capitalism for permitting the middle class barely enough time to enjoy music and read this. I thank the Deconstructionists for showing us how to have fun with big ideas and how not to go about developing a coherent philosophy.

I’d like to thank all the musicians in the world for spending so much time in trying to bring the Muse into this world. Whether devotees of Polyhymnia, Euterpe, or ancient Aoede, we workers in song are the very stuff of which this volume, this column, and this website is all about. Don’t stop your work. Our redemption as a species depends on it. Most of all – remember that what you are doing (MUSIC) is not a commodity. It existed before markets and will exist after markets. It existed before science, and will exist after science. And you were there then, and you will be there then, no matter how temporal or evanescent your work.

Most especially, I’d like to thank most, but not all, of the executives in the Media Conglomerates (that largely own the Music Industry) for being the single most amazing collection of traitorous thieving slime balls, petty charlatans, greedy con artists and thoroughly squalid and contemptibly criminal vermin mother nature has ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of this good sweet earth. Your actions, contracts, and perfidious history speak louder than anything I could possibly write, and I am certain that as historical actors, you will be remembered with neither kindness nor mercy. I would like to think that future generations will merrily piss on your graves, but I sincerely doubt they’ll bother wasting their time or precious bodily fluids on such a worthless lot as you all, who are so utterly beneath contempt for your crimes against creativity, culture, and the human spirit.

For those executives who really do understand the workings of the Muse and feel compelled to help bring her voice into the world in the form of music as performed by honest and earnest composers and musicians, and who develop contracts with composers and musicians based on reason, fairness, generosity, and enlightened mutual interest – you are the rare ones and are blessed. I encourage you to continue your efforts in reforming the corrupted rotting carcass of the music industry. Yours is an unenviable task.

And finally, I’d like to thank the future generations yet to be born. Everything we do, we do for and to you. Please remember that not all of us alive at this time were part of the problem, and that some of us were working toward an enlightened solution.

Henry Warwick, San Francisco, 2002

Part Zero: General Statements

The Basics

Good, yes! You’ve done well

Here is a small prize-

The History of the World.

- Gang of Four 1979

I have found that stating the obvious can bear some useful results.

1. We live in a commodity capitalist society, based in the exchange of value (cash or credit) for the objects we use, which are presented as commodities. The system of exchange will prefer to mediate the exchange of value for goods by rules of commodity market economics. Every material aspect, and many immaterial aspects, of human existence are thusly reified as commodities. Packaged, marketed, and sold – none of it of significance in itself. Largely interchangeable, the needs artificial, and of no permanent or even semi-permanent facture or use, the modern commodity is necessarily disposable and its lifecycle quantifiable and understandable.

This lifecycle of the economy of the commodity follows a pattern:

1. Initiation
2. Legitimation
3. Professionalization
4. Renewal
5. Intensification
6. Dissipation

2. Investment changes the rate and quality of development of a given phase.

3. That this structure is mapable and scalable onto other cultural artifacts in the society, even those things that aren’t physical commodities themselves, such as styles or qualities of commodities.

4. That this structure is largely, but not necessarily completely, universal in commodity capitalism. It’s all historically so new that there are significant exceptions, but I hope to show that the exceptions can usually be seen as proving the rule.

Rather than go through each thesis as theory, and argue it out in the field of rhetoric, I will show through historical demonstration and description how this process works. I believe that this process is terribly important for anyone involved with cultural production to understand, as it can provide a framework for understanding the character of a cultural commodity at a given time, and provide some guidance for making predictions.

The historical example I will use to demonstrate this life cycle will be the movement of music in the 20^th century, specifically the spectacular commercial success of Rock Music. I am firmly convinced that the life cycle pointed to previously is abundantly apparent in the history of Rock Music. It can (and will and should) be applied to Jazz and Hip Hop, and as the record of Rock Music is so vastly more complete, meticulously documented, and close at hand than Jazz and is further along in its process than HipHop, Rock thusly serves as a superior example for this presentation.

With such a well known example it will be easier to illustrate the various stages of the Lifecycle. As I detail each of them in a SPARK column, I will use some artists as Avatars that epitomize a given stage, or as Harbingers of the next, or both at once. It is not that a given artist I look at is rigorously an Avatar or Harbinger or both, but more that they are so, for the sake of this present discussion. Also, I will tend to use more "well known" artists, as

1. They are "well known" for the successful sale and distribution of their music, which is a point central to commodity cultural "success".

2. As "famous" artists, their mythologies are better known and can therefore communicate and illustrate my points more quickly and easily.

Societies have to have a mechanism by which new and disruptive trends are brought into a non-disruptive state. Sometimes the disruptor is removed from society, sometimes society changes to accommodate the disruptor. Usually, in terms of cultural styles, the disruptive style is co-opted and mainstreamed. This co-optive process that defines the Lifecycle of the disruptor in a commodity culture, is knowable and occurs in certain stages. It is the stages of the Lifecycle that I will here briefly outline.

1. Initiation.

Initiation is where the product/style first arises, and differentiates itself from its antecedents. It is where a coterie of interested parties forms a group of appreciation, "fans", and thusly differentiated themselves from people who appreciate antecedent or competing product / styles. Crucial to this phase is the naming of the style/product. This permits it currency in the market of other like objects, and the formation of an objective identity. The critical establishment or the distribution networks usually perform the naming process. The artists themselves less frequently name novel methods of working.

With a sufficient and sufficiently affluent demographic, interest is garnered outside the status group of aficionados. Eventually the production of the style acquires enough of a business status such that the named style is commonly identified and identifiable, even in groups whose familiarity with it or similar styles may be cursory at best. With increased attention and demographical support, the style/product is seen as a reasonable focus of investment, which leads to Stage 2 in the Life Cycle.

2. Legitimation.

At this phase, the style/product is seen as a legitimate source of investment from above by people who aren’t ordinarily attracted by the style/product, and for investment from below by people who are anxious to support a legitimate enterprise of a newly established style/product. Being part of a clique that is "in the know" or "hip" or "cool" acts as a reinforcement mechanism for those involved with the style/product’s promotion. With promotion comes an influx of interest, participation, and money. The money feeds the promotion machine, which, in turn, generates more interest, participation, and money.

The money attracts other participants, actors, and aficionados in and of the product/style, reinforcing the legitimacy of investment in it. With the arrival of such participants and actors comes increased competition and a stylistic explosion as the style expands to serve a more diverse demographic. This brings about the next stage, Professionalization.

3. Professionalization.

The increased competition requires participants to be professional and competent at their work. The increased competition also means that the style/product will have to branch out into every possible market niche, so as to satisfy a growing customer base. An important component of this phase is the increasing importance of the critical establishment in the development, ranking, and analysis of the participants and actors in a given genre. The critical establishment is important, as its preferences will tend to propel the promotional preferences of the style as it informs the consuming demographic of the very style it undertakes to critique.

Eventually, the demographic, the critical establishment, and capital investment come to analyze and retrench/develop positions in the style/product. This leads to a new phase that indicates a maturity of the product in the market, and the effects of competition from within and without. This is called the Renewal Phase.

4. Renewal

The Renewal phase is characterized by a mature style/product that reassesses its position in the market. Market analysis becomes critical to the style, as its sub-genres and sub-sub-genres mature into their own styles/products, and parallel markets provide avenues of growth and co-option. Each of these sub-genres and child-style/products follows the same life cycle process that the parent style/product experienced.

The Renewal phase eventuates in a state of Intensification – sclerotic and explosive.

5. Intensification

This phase integrates all the previous phases and consciously develops its own markets in the style/product with ever-finer precision in product positioning and development. Trends and even mere whiffs of trends are examined, exploited, and quickly marketed. No stone is left unturned; no sliver of the demographic is ignored, all relative to their investment capacity and profit potential. This is the most brutal phase – the designs and basic nature of the professionalized marketplace in the style/product are most opaque and obvious. Consolidations that began in the Renewal phase are more manifest than ever. Eventually, with every possible market niche developed to exhaustion, the extent of artificial trends stalling due to saturation and inculcated cynicism in the demographic, its stylistic index saturated, the scale of the competition (from within and without) is such that the style/product stifles itself and relegates itself into a larger componentized market structure, and fades away as its demographic ages and dies off or loses interest. This leads to the next and final stage- Dissolution.

6. Dissolution

With Dissolution, the investing demographic shrinks or is so splintered by competition that the style/product either disappears or is set into a long holding pattern, where sub-genres disappear and are re-consolidated into the parent/style product, and the style/product itself slowly disappears as its demographic dies off. Capital moves elsewhere – with results similar to a star’s death-

The style/product dies out quickly and completely, like a supernova collapsing into a blackhole, or,

It dies quickly and brilliantly, but without extreme fanfare, and is relegated to a shelf in history, like a nova spinning into oblivion as a neutron star, or,

It slowly blows itself apart, like a planetary nebula, and is left with a tube up its nose in a state of suspended animation for a tiny group of interested parties, slowly burning itself out in time, like a white dwarf, or,

Some combination of the above.

That is a basic description of some of the salient features of each stage of the Life Cycle Process. Next SPARK, I will go through the first phase, and discuss the Initiation Phase of Rock.

Henry Warwick (hw@creativesynth.com)

If you would like to purchase a copy of Keraunograph, Henry's CD on Kether Records, you can get it at the CreativeSynth Store.