Rock has certainly grown to more professional levels if we measure v.s....
Look-up Jethro Tull throughout their career: They always grow and make a progress towards sophistication techniques and were becoming more and more interesting with every new album they made especially during 80's.
Same with King Krimson merged with Yes drummer Bill Brufford in 1976.
Interesting note can be found on Talking Heads started as punk band and than after David Byrne separated from them and merged with Brian Eno producing highly sophisticated and interesting records. Further-on David Byrne merged with Laurie Anderson realy starting a new era of experimental artistic and newly developed rock.
The almost same path took Phil Manzanera towards David Byrne and Brian Eno also with successfull intersection with Robert Wyatt from Soft Machine.
The very trivial example with Paul McCartney who begun to merge with Scoffield, Sanborn, Andy Summers(BTW another great rock evolution example) to produce a very serious level of music compared to trivial Beatles. Even Beatles albums became to be more sophisticated starting 70's due to more desire to progress certainly driven by Paul.
Along with american classic rock Europe developed in mid-70's their own Jazz-Rock less known in US but was different and interesting by its difference.
And that's realy where the v.s. difference lies IMO i.e. higher sophistication, blending with jazz and blues, involving more electronics even involving classical music as well. Also in addition there were Heavy Metal and Hard Rock that were less-sophisticated but was a good way too get the crowd up as I guess was the realy first meaning of rock.
Look-up Jethro Tull throughout their career: They always grow and make a progress towards sophistication techniques and were becoming more and more interesting with every new album they made especially during 80's.
Same with King Krimson merged with Yes drummer Bill Brufford in 1976.
Interesting note can be found on Talking Heads started as punk band and than after David Byrne separated from them and merged with Brian Eno producing highly sophisticated and interesting records. Further-on David Byrne merged with Laurie Anderson realy starting a new era of experimental artistic and newly developed rock.
The almost same path took Phil Manzanera towards David Byrne and Brian Eno also with successfull intersection with Robert Wyatt from Soft Machine.
The very trivial example with Paul McCartney who begun to merge with Scoffield, Sanborn, Andy Summers(BTW another great rock evolution example) to produce a very serious level of music compared to trivial Beatles. Even Beatles albums became to be more sophisticated starting 70's due to more desire to progress certainly driven by Paul.
Along with american classic rock Europe developed in mid-70's their own Jazz-Rock less known in US but was different and interesting by its difference.
And that's realy where the v.s. difference lies IMO i.e. higher sophistication, blending with jazz and blues, involving more electronics even involving classical music as well. Also in addition there were Heavy Metal and Hard Rock that were less-sophisticated but was a good way too get the crowd up as I guess was the realy first meaning of rock.