Phase III: Professionalization - More, Better, Faster
- Henry Warwick

I’m just a singer in a rock and roll band! - Moody Blues 1972
The fate of all mankind, I fear, is in the hands of fools. - King Crimson 1969

Professionalization was a logical consequence of Legitimation, and the rate of Professionalization was the result of the investment in Legitimation. The Professionalization phase of Rock music was what made Rock and Roll "Rock", and like the music itself, the Professionalization phase exploded out of the Legitimation phase.

The harbinger of the Professionalization phase in Rock music was the avatar of the Legitimation Phase - the Beatles. Just as they demonstrated the legitimacy of Rock and Roll, so too, they demonstrated a few of the main aspects of the Professionalization phase — stylistic diversity, technical excellence and proficiency, and compliance with corporate structure. The stylistic diversity is easily demonstrable- from the pretty pop of "Help", to the abstract musique concrete of "Revolution #9", the Beatles demonstrated their enormous talent in songwriting with the proficiency of their compositions and prodigious output. The same developments were seen in the style — from Holly to Hendrix, from the Fleetwoods to Frampton, the Professionalization of Rock Music was an unambiguous response to the increased competition in the Rock Music market and the stylistic inflation experienced at the behest of its varied and wealthy demographic.

Indeed, one of the cardinal aspects of the Professionalization phase is its stylistic diversity. Because of the level of investment, the diversification was rapid — so rapid that the sub-genres didn’t have time to flourish into their own proper genres. Rock music devolved from Rock and Roll, and as it reached into other stylistic references the age of "hyphen" Rock or simply, "Rock" began. The Roll in Rock was left to denote music of the Initiation and Legitimation Phase. In a curiously inverted twist, Rock and Roll thusly became a genre of itself. With (hyphen) Rock, Rock’s stylistic diversification became indexical and thusly all pervasive. Rock is a product of its own Professionalization phase.

Each category of Rock soon diversified so as to exploit every possible taste and preference, resulting in the filling of every niche. At the same time, musical virtuosity and technical proficiency competed to dizzying heights, reaching a zenith in the early to mid 1970s with groups like Yes, Genesis, King Crimson, Renaissance, Henry Cow, National Health, Soft Machine, Pink Floyd, Curved Air, and others. With playing abilities second to none, frequently classically trained, and production standards and capabilities orders of magnitude beyond what had obtained a mere 5 — 10 years earlier, the new "Progressive" Rock musician set new standards for musicianship in Rock Music playing. As Rock diversified and increasingly became the domain of white musicians playing to white audiences, the parallel developments of music in American black culture were forming their own path through the pattern of Commodity Lifecycles.

As the almost completely white Rock music dominated American culture by virtue of its demographic, the Baby Boom, black American music was also deeply affected, and resulted in largely parallel developments of musical styles by and for black America. This also followed the Lifecycle Process of Rock, albeit at a different pace and scale, due to the exigencies of the relative size and status of its constituent demographic and level of investment. By the time Rock appeared in the Professionalization phase of the late 60s and early 70s, black Americans had developed and Professionalized their own styles, resulting in Motown, Soul, Funk, and (later) Disco.

America, racially polarized as ever, internalized and acculturated its apartheid. As apartheid was officially abandoned in the civil rights legislation of the 1960s, racial distinction was transduced into cultural diversity. Whites had (hyphen) Rock, blacks had Funk, Soul, R&B, etc. Oddly, this was not accomplished from the top down, but rose naturally from the social contradictions that obtained and the purchasing decisions of the relevant consumer audiences.

As with Jazz, in the Professionalization phase of Rock, much of it had developed into something essentially undanceable. Just as people sat around nodding their heads to the complexities of Parker and Monk, so too, Rock audiences were nodding their heads to the complexities of King Crimson, Genesis, Yes, Emerson Lake and Palmer, Pink Floyd and other progressive rockers on the one end, and the likes of Carly Simon, Jackson Browne, Elton John and others — all described by their musical categories. The Professionalization and Renewal of Jazz had gone horribly horribly wrong for Jazz, and resulted in people fleeing Jazz with the development of interest in Rhythm and Blues and a stronger pop music market of amplified vocalists. The result was a catastrophic loss of listenership for Jazz. In 1946, Jazz was more than a mere majority of record sales- it was more like there was a Jazz Record Market with other styles crowded to the periphery in single digits each. By 1956, a mere ten years later, Jazz had shrunk to single digits, with pop vocalists, rock and roll, country, and rhythm and blues, racking up the vast majority of sales.

The resistance to the Professionalization trend in Rock music took several forms, the most famous being Punk Rock and Disco, both products of the indexical expansion of Rock Music’s Professionalized stylistic explosion. Punk and Disco were two polar opposite styles, and had little in common with each other, either in terms of their targeted audiences (aging first wave boomers partying their butts off to Disco, and second wave boomers coming of age and filled with disgust and anger at the society of their parents and the bloated hypocritical hippie drivel of their older peers all wildly overstated in Punk) except a disdain for the bloated professionals of Rock music on the Punk and, and its lack of dance ability and usefulness to a newer generation seeking their music for mating rituals. And it was from a direction of anti-intellectualism that Punk Rock developed in the British Working/Unemployed Classes of the mid 1970s, heavily influenced by proto-punk rockers like the New York sound of the Velvet Underground, The New York Dolls, and various garage bands from the sixties like the Seeds and the Trashmen, with a healthy blast from the early Who and Kinks, that Punk took its reactionary musical cues.

With the stylistic agonistics of Disco and Punk and ProgRock aside, the demographic was still growing for rock music, and the Index was there to provide ever-greater Rock stylistic expansion, and by the mid 1970s, the stylistic index of Rock was largely complete:

• Folk Rock,
• Country Rock,
• Jazz Rock,
• Classical Rock,
• Progressive Rock,
• Punk Rock,
• Psychedelic Rock,
• Raga Rock,
• Pub Rock,
• Heavy Metal,
• Heavy Rock,
• Hard Rock,
• Glam Rock,
• Soft Rock,
• Art Rock,
• Rock and Roll,
• DooWop,

The list went on and on and on and on.

Each represented a taste that needed satiation, an interest to be fulfilled, and a dollar to be made. At the point in the mid 1970s, it became clear that some of these interests were more profitable than others as they had a larger demographic. Raga Rock died quickly with Nehru jackets, but Soft Rock drones on to the present day. With the arrival of Disco and Punk, Dancing Fun and Blind Angry Teenage Rage had also been brought into the picture as marketable items. With that the consolidations began - there was great money to be made in mainstream rock, and the more efficient providers and more competent marketing schemes were transforming the market and the stylistic developments of the music, not to mention the imaginary soundtracks by which people measured and qualified their lives.

It was this level of consciousness in the mid 1970s that gave the world Punk, Disco, and Kiss that forced the music industry, now a huge concern and a vital part of American Culture as never before, into a Renewal period of consolidation and reappraisal. An example of this process reflected in creative output would be the career of Roxy Music, which began at the height of the Professionalization phase and vanished in the Intensification Phase.

Their first record started with ReMake ReModel, a standard rock and roll tune done very differently, with elliptical lyrics, synth bleeps, and a raging loud guitar. Three records later, the bass player from King Crimson, John Wetton, was providing his world class playing skills for Roxy, with Eddie Jobson from Curved Air on keyboards and violin. They, with Bill Bruford (formerly of Yes and King Crimson) and Alan Holdsworth on guitar formed UK, a progressive rock act with a mainstream hard rock sensibility. Wetton went on to form Asia, a very popular group of the 1980s,while Bruford went back to the complexities of King Crimson. During this same period, Roxy Music began making less abrasive rock music, as they and their demographic aged over the decade or so of their productions. During the Renewal Phase, Love Is The Drug, by Roxy Music, was a dance hit, and as their audience left the disco and settled into subdued lives, so too, Roxy Music made softer and softer music, and was met with increasing popularity. At the height of their popularity, they split up, at the flowering of the Intensification Phase. This was likely an unintentional parallelism- the various members of Roxy couldn’t have predicted the economic and lifestyle moves in their audience, nor could they have predicted the shifts in the demographic- Roxy Music just made Rock Music, and by intuitively following their own interests in their music that reflected concrete changes in their own lives, and adjusting the sound of their music accordingly, they were able to speak to others in their generation in a way that sold a lot of records.

It was the music industry’s marketer and analysts looking objectively at the latest developments in the Professionalization phase (mimicked by Roxy’s shift in tone) that brought about the next phase in Rock, the Renewal Phase.

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.