ROCK BANDS are like jackalopes, amazing freaks of nature. With full racks of antlers, you’d think that the top-heavy jackrabbits would fall over and die, rather than hop about the Western prairies.
Rock bands, of course, are not mythical monstrosities, yet they’re as unstable as jackalopes, ungainly groups amalgamating characteristics that are usually kept strictly segregated. A band is a work group with a specialized division of labor and goals to accomplish. But it’s also a small group imposing an intense intimacy on its members.
The tension between the values of efficient task performance and a sense of community is intensified by the role that bands play in the contemporary capitalist economy. The entertainment industry minimizes the risks of creativity and innovation for itself by relegating those functions to smaller entrepreneurial entities that engage in a Darwinian struggle for survival.
The need for rock groups to be creative introduces acute strains related to the balance of influence and power into their structure. Bands are enveloped in the romantic myth of the authentic creative artist, introducing an element of individualism that tends to disrupt community.
The structural and ideological strains endemic to rock bands are played out in a number of spheres in which creativity is demanded, all of which can become flash points for conflict and disaffection. Songwriting is the main focus of discussions about creativity, but the list of other areas in which rock bands are called upon to be creative—sonically, verbally, and visually—is extensive. They include everything from concert set lists, stage moves, clothing, and hairstyles, to facial expressions in posed and not fully posed photos that accompany the “stories” they give to the press.
Given the strains that they endure, it’s a wonder that rock bands survive at all. Most don’t. Those that make it learn to mitigate the inherent tensions. Success (fame, money, or even critical acclaim) helps, providing extramusical incentives for cooperation. (Sometimes, of course, success can break a band, as when the creative center thinks it’s all due to him, and his ego swells to intolerable proportions.) Bands that survive either develop an authority structure that violates romantic ideology, creating a gulf between the way the band presents itself to the world and how it actually operates, or members reach an accord on a division of labor that all can live with, acknowledging the value of one another’s contributions.
When the imbalances of creative power are not mitigated by adaptive structures, bands crash. According to the romantic ideology, the only legitimate justification for a band to break up is “creative differences.” That term is used as an alibi for any reason for a breakup—and there can be many such reasons that have nothing to do with the creative function. Yet the appeal of creative differences is at least one case in which ideology is often not so far off the mark—creativity is the rock band’s most sensitive function, and creative differences and accords are genuine factors that determine whether or not a band will survive.
Deena Weinstein is a professor of sociology at DePaul University. She writes music criticism (including her most recent book, Heavy Metal: The Music and its Culture) under her nom de rock, Deena Dasein. She will participate in the panel discussion, “Self-Image,” at 10:30 a.m. on Fri., April 12.
