Phase II: Legitimation - Bigger than God
by Henry Warwick

Can’t buy me love, no… - Beatles 1964

As enormous a success Elvis was in the 1950s, it was all to pale in comparison to the onslaught that was to follow in the 1960s. Elvis’s success hadn’t gone unnoticed, and soon dozens of rock and roll stars and wannabe stars burst onto the scene. In the 1950s, Rock and Roll was viewed with no small skepticism by the more reactionary elements of American Culture, and roundly deplored by the music critical establishment as well. It was seen as oversexed music devised by a despised class (blacks) to corrupt white youth, and purveyed by corrupt DJs - a provocative and explicit music for rebellious children - formally debased and of no musical consequence or value.

On the other hand, business interests, specifically the music publishing and recording industry, saw Rock and Roll in a somewhat different light, as its demographic potential was completely inescapable. To help placate the more reactionary elements of the American Cultural Establishment, more "wholesome" (i.e. white and conservative) purveyors of the genre had to be found to sell the new sound to middle class suburban white America. And stars were found- Pat Boone, Little Peggy March, The Fleetwoods, and others fit right in to the mold, and squeaky clean purveyors, like Dick Clarke, were found to replace the "corrupt" likes of Alan Freed and provide a sanitized Rock and Roll product to white America’s Children. It should also be noted that even with this level of investment and interest in the style, Rock and Roll was still just one style among several in the popular music spectrum, all of them competing for dominance.

The Beatles changed all that.

Cut from working class cloth not very different from Elvis, the Beatles were prone to wearing black leather jackets and blue jeans in their early years as they played off the "rebel" image projected into popular youth culture by the likes of Marlon Brando and James Dean. They toured Europe playing covers of Rhythm and Blues and black American Rock and Rollers (like Chuck Berry and Chubby Checker) and a smattering of original songs. This worked for a short time in the late 1950s, but the Beatles wanted more, and so did their new manager, Brian Epstein. He understood that for the Beatles to truly triumph, they had to break into the American Market, and the way to do that was with a brilliant mass media PR campaign, and a complete change in their presentation. America, a country beset with racial strife, a resurgence in repressive values reminiscent of Victorianism, and an exploding population of fantastically wealthy white kids bent on having a really good time, was ripe for the pickings.

Epstein knew the Beatles could never succeed as the greasy rock and rollers they had been hitherto been presenting themselves. James Dean was dead, Marlon Brando had gone on to other roles, and Elvis was property of the US Army. Some of their musical heroes, The Big Bopper and Buddy Holly, were also dead. The corporate distributors had found "cleaner" players and faces in the late Initiation Phase, and to make it big in the States, The Beatles had to "clean up" and re-package themselves. They grew their hair longer, but had it cut in modernist minimalist mop top cuts. They put their motorcycle jackets away, and put on trendy collarless suits a more fashionable friend had designed. And the songs they sang were less racy than the Rhythm and Blues they loved - they wrote songs that were more innocent pop than anything else. They didn’t want you to shake a tail feather - they just wanted to hold your hand. With infectious harmonies and jangling electric guitars, the prefabricated foursome demonstrated to white America that Rock and Roll was OK, even "European" - thusly carrying an odd sophistication bestowed by the mantle of European Culture. This also signaled to the music industry that Rock and Roll was truly Legitimate, Dominant, and able to be Really Big Business. International Business.

This legitimacy brought Rock and Roll into tighter focus, and this focus was the withering gaze of corporate capitalism. It didn’t take a marketing genius to see that middle class white Americans outnumbered black Americans 9 to 1 and out purchased them 20 to 1. Rock and Roll with a British accent, even in thick Liverpudlian, was exotic and fresh, and permitted white American teenagers (the teenager itself a recently devised concept) the mental and emotional checkpoints to be more involved with Rock and Roll music, which still carried the stigma of its origins. This stigma provided attraction to the rebellious youth, but the rebellion was blunted from the start by its frank focus on the archetypal adolescent issue of the Mating Ritual. Through the Beatles, as through Elvis before, white America could adopt/chop/and change black American music into its own. Elvis’s success was of such magnitude that Rock and Roll, especially a White Rock and Roll, was a clear and viable platform for mass marketed success. In this way, Elvis set the stage for the Beatles, and the Beatles set the stage for what followed them. Elvis’s success as the Initiation archetype of Rock and Roll was the precursor of the Beatles, the archetype of the Legitimation phase. It was the sophistication of the Beatles that set the stage for the next phase, Professionalization.

As commodities live in the world of signifiers, so too, they live in the world of symbols and archetypes. Humans, as social organisms, want to have some connection to other people, especially the other people who make the objects they use. We yearn for relationship, we yearn for contact with others of our kind. And people we see as "successful" hold a special attraction. But humans have an individually fixed capacity for information assimilation and an individually fixed amount of time in which to assimilate it. Therefore, we reduce much of what we do to a manipulation of symbols and archetypes as much as possible. We can’t take in the producer of the commodity object- it is an alienated product of commodity capitalism- we have no connection to the people at the pressing plant. We do have a kind of relationship with the people who produce the music that is on the record itself — they record it, we buy it. We are curious about them, so we inquire about them and are met with Public Relations material, which must suffice — we can’t LIVE with them, they are not our neighbors, and so therefore we must satisfy ourselves with whatever material we can collect about them.

In the process, the artist is abstracted into mythology, symbol, and archetype- first they are someone of note or interest, then they are heroes, and then they pass to God status, depending on the level of popularity and abstraction. There are Big Heroes, there are small heroes. With persistence, effort, and luck, small heroes become Big Heroes, and Big Heroes compete for God status. This is all achieved through the monetization and commodification and distribution of every data point in the mythology of the Artist. Those artists who are most capable of manipulating their media image and public presentations will garner greater attraction or targeted attraction in a given market. Commodity capitalism will cheerfully sell every instance of the myth’s communications. In this way, the "Hero" is rendered product — reified for consumption, as every instance and aspect of the Hero’s myth is monetized and packaged. Artists with more generic appeal (as opposed to artists with more focused appeal) will tend to attract greater investment. Generic appeal is historical and temporary.

Just in order to participate in the market, the myth process and its attendant reifications are presented as a fait accompli — from the musician’s "One Sheet" and 8x10 glossy photo presentations to distribution networks and other corporate organizations, to an Artist’s Statement of Purpose in the gallery/museum/grant writing way of labor. Each of these is a conflation of life, in all of its messy complexity, into a narrow distilled object, subject to market forces and monetary interest, and all of it grossly distortive and mythological. Weaving their fictions through and with the archetypes, abstractions, and symbols, the style lives in and among these archetypes, abstractions, and symbols, as itself becomes an abstraction, symbol, and hypertype in the labyrinth of the language function of the human brain and exchange of symbols between brains.

These myth building exercises and objects reinforce themselves — myth feeds myth — and lead to further commodifications and monetizations. For example, early in their career, the Beatles were sold as being "single and available" even though John Lennon was married. Frequently, Mrs. Lennon was told by Beatles handlers to stay back in the shadows- a single John sells better than a married John.

All the Beatles were quickly mythologised. John was the smart and witty one. Paul was the pretty one with the nice voice. George was the quiet and spiritual one, and Ringo was the homely but funny and sweet one. These representations were easier to sell than the complex and contradictory people they represented. Lunch boxes, cartoons, trading cards, photos, posters, key chains, wigs, T-Shirts and boots — the list of Beatles paraphernalia was nearly endless, and almost all of it is presently rotting away in landfill projects around the world. But between the factory and the landfill, the object changed hands between producer and consumer, and money was made. Each dollar of profit made in the selling of the Beatles mythology, lent that much more Legitimacy to the uber-commodity of Rock and Roll, soon distilled into Rock.

The legitimacy of the Rock enterprise bestowed by the investment in the Beatles by millions of consumers of Beatle product, engendered a massive increase in the investment in the Rock project. Everyone wanted the "Next Beatles." This was sometimes carried to comic result — the progressive rock outfit "Faust" got their record contract in the late 1960s by being sold to the record company as "The German Beatles". The company was less tan amused when the tapes were delivered… The level of investment was amazing and steep, which is typical of the late Legitimation phase. After a few attempts with other record companies, the psychedelic / progressive band The United States of America was signed to Columbia because they "were really good, we showed up on time, and weren’t strung out on drugs." (according to Dorothy Moskowitz).

With literally hundreds of bands getting "signed" onto major labels, thousands more applied themselves to the investment system, and this created competition. Now, people had to be THE BEST rockers. And rock had to be THE BEST style of music. The competence of musicians on their instruments had to be excellent and innovative, but the style had to now branch out and fill every marketing niche possible. It is with the ascendance of the Beatles that they, like Elvis before them, were harbingers of the next phase: Professionalization. Thanks to the level of investment in the Legitimation phase, the Professionalization phase was not long in coming.

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.