CHAPTER 16

LEADERSHIP

A group embodies an ideal for living. Therefore, any member of such an organization is a kind of ideological evangelist, a leader. If you choose to be in a group, this is the role you must be prepared to accept, however reluctantly. And though you will be imbued with this authority, don’t expect people to defer to you or salute as if you are a rear admiral, CEO, or parliamentarian.

Most people won’t know of your estimable position. They’ll chuckle, sneer, roll their eyes, or smirk at whatever costume your exalted rank demands you wear, outraged at the gall that you, a mere mortal, would deign to wear the getup of the stars.

Wearing a strange haircut, studded leather, or whatever the sartorial demands of your subculture is, to square society, similar to a layperson hanging around dressed up as a nun or bishop—it’s an affront and a provocation. To your average schmoe, the right to dress up is the exclusive dominion of a special class of people, who only materialize in music videos. But, though their taunts can sting, you mustn’t begrudge them their enjoyment of their indignation. Their response to the provocation of your dress is classic counterrevolutionary reaction. The fuel that runs the engine of the radical, it represents the symmetry of protest. If you attain notoriety, they will dutifully brag of their one-time proximity to you.

Your authority, though often unacknowledged, will incite this response in tribes outside of your jurisdiction. You are like Caesar walking amongst the yet defiant Gauls. Going to the bank or the drugstore can be a dangerous excursion. Your role, unknown except to a tiny cadre of believers, is akin to that of a Mafia boss. And, like the Mafia leader, you must never be caught giving orders.

You may use inference and suggestion in songs, records, and interviews. Or you may dispatch lackeys, accomplices, and go-betweens to wreak your vision. But you must be careful not to be found directly culpable for the chaos you create, lest the moral and legal authorities of the state determine you a public pest. Your songs and records, therefore, can’t be explicit in their instructions. Instead, you must disguise the orders you give with fictional characters, metaphors, and imaginary scenarios. Your songs must be seen as exercises in formalism. Otherwise, there could be class-action lawsuits against you for whatever bad behavior they inspire.

Remember: you are using magic. Songs, performances, and even record covers are incantations that directly affect the listener on both a conscious and unconscious level. When the Masons direct the populace using coded inscriptions on the dollar, zodiacal designs in institutional architecture, and official symbols and insignia of the state, they are working in a similar manner.

Your responsibility as a leader mustn’t be taken lightly. Though the Velvet Underground began as a record industry hack’s fun idea to merge the “it” sound of Highway 61–era Dylan with the trendy junkie lit of William S. Burroughs and Alex Trocchi for a far-out new group, it had a visceral effect on the lives of many of the people who listened to it. These listeners, or so the old saw goes, all formed groups and proliferated VU’s ideology to their own audiences. Part of this ideology was a grotesquely exaggerated version of the average American’s conceit of outsider-ism. VU, like Apple Computer, Inc., is a brand which, to the minds of its millions of buyers, confers anti-establishment connoisseurship.

The Velvet Underground is a stark illustration of the resounding effects one fellow’s innocuous stab at “hep” status can have. Whether the mid-’60s “psychedelic” or drug phase of rock ’n’ roll was a government conspiracy to subdue political activism by aggressively promoting a “stoned,” “wasted,” or “high” lifestyle can be debated, but it certainly had that effect. The drug culture in music on a teenybopper level was promoted by the entire rock ’n’ roll industry, and with especial vigor by anti-Communist underworld associates at record labels such as Roulette, Buddha, and Kama Sutra.

Like the shadowy figures behind high finance and political fixes, you, as a rock ’n’ roll leader, must deny that there are any directives or instructions to give, let alone any followers. As with the Mafia “don,” there will be those who resent your role, who will attempt to expose you, shame you, defrock you, and trash you as pretentious. The stronger the vitriol, the more you can be assured your influence is being felt. The resentment you inspire is a direct reflection of the perception of your influence. You must utilize this perception, however misguided, to your own ends.

As with any leader of men, you are constantly in danger of insurrection, and you will be scapegoated and held responsible for people’s paranoia, personal foibles, and bloating. You shall be the subject of ridicule, hatred, and contempt. You will encounter particular scorn on the Internet, a disembodied hate cloud where the assassins are anonymous onanists, striking out blindly in every direction. Don’t concern yourself with such “fuzz.” The only thing these creatures respect is your own disregard for them. Though they excoriate you bitterly in private, holding you up to an unflattering fun-house mirror, in person it will be all deference. Stay far away and a magic wall will sprout between you and your foes, keeping them in an enthralled state, paralyzed and beaten. Although groups are leaders, they might submit to the ultimate authority: the audience. As self-styled anarchists, the groups make heroic claims with regard to their autonomy from this body, insisting that they create their music just for themselves, that they are ideologically inflexible and driven only by their muse. At the box office and record store, the crushing oppression of mob rule grinds its jackboot into the neck of the groups, who eventually conform to the audience’s mundane dictates. Still, the pretense for the group is casual totalitarian control.

If groups are leaders, then the listeners are their followers. This realization might cause discomfort with many of the free-thinkers who enlist in rock ’n’ roll’s unkempt ranks. To these characters, it might seem immoral or unethical to recruit followers—unpaid, at that—to act for them. But in the USA, corporations (sometimes christened “nonprofits”) commandeer hundreds of thousands of young people in the prime of their lives to act as uncompensated laborers or “interns” every year.

These people are degraded, ordered about, and made to comply with the most tawdry, predictable demands. Meanwhile, consumers are programmed, bullied, forced to comply with ownership of useless sundries and “innovations,” cell phone “apps,” and computer systems. Prisons utilize inmates as chattel labor, completely uncompensated. A superexploited workforce, often unpaid or slave labor, has always been the engine which runs the US economy. Since your group will be part of this foul system, whether it likes it or not, the important thing is for the band itself to show deference to an even higher authority (such as “the blues,” an ideology, a maharishi or baba, or another group or musical idol). This will be the key to rehabilitating the rock band’s authority for its fans.