Band Politics

Carl Homer asks if your band can suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

It's a truism that a band can only stay together for so long without anything happening before they split up. Sometimes, of course, you get the Glorious People's Revolution of the rhythm section, in which they seize power and sack the singer; but mostly bands dissolve after a certain amount of inactivity or water-treading.

Inactivity usually occurs because the band falls into one of those cyclical activities than eats the group up eventually: the Demo cycle, or the New Song syndrome. The new demo tape is barely duplicated before everyone's written two new, brilliant songs. These new ones would be far better for getting gigs/deals; let's record them. Sequence then repeats

In the New Song Cycle, a set order has been decided and refined, but after a couple of gigs with it, everyone's bored with the slow songs in the middle of the set. They accept, rationally, that you've got to have slow songs to have set dynamics; but the audience don't enjoy it much because punters only enjoy slow songs they already know. So the band writes some new ones, and rehearsals for a month are spent refining them instead of playing the set, so now the whole set sounds sloppy. And then everyone reckons that they really ought to record the new ones, just to get them 'finished'. Band stops rehearsing altogether and enters the Demo Cycle (above).

Then, of course, there's that most cretinous state of all, where the band has re-arranged an old song to make it 'fit in' with the style of the new ones, and blithely starts recording new versions of old songs, the fools.

Now, it wasn't always this way. The problem tends to be the type of democracy toward which most bands aspire. If you were in a 30's big band, there'd be none of this. There would be a clear bandleader (often the drummer or bassist, bizarrely) by whom everyone else was 'employed', and the resulting despotism would be pretty efficient. Ditto most small jazz groups, who obey the star soloist. Unfortunately, the days in which anyone wants to be a backing musician are gone. It's all the fault of people like Charlie Christian; amplifying bits of the rhythm section to create new lead instruments and thus a second or third outrageous ego in a fragile status quo.

In 'Leviathan', Hobbes identifies the aspirations of individuals as products of a desire for personal glory in tension with a fear of death. Well, in music we could read instead a desire for critical and public acclaim (and money and shagging, obviously) in balance with a fear of blowing it and having to get a proper job. It's the same thing, anyway, and there's certainly nothing daft or risible about applying seventeenth century political philosophy to pop music.

So what does Mr. Hobbes recommend to us? Well, since everyone's goals of personal success are in competition, the only thing they can agree upon is that none of them want a nine-to-five job. Not enough to make them co-operate smoothly. But what if they were to elect a leader, who would then have supreme executive power over them? They'd be unified by having agreed on the leader, and so decisions would be made autocratically, quickly and smoothly; by one person. This is what most singer-songwriters would like, but find hard to achieve until they're already successful and can pay good moolah for good musicians. Even then, it's not like being in a proper band; so to be happy with a bunch of session musos you have to be a total egomaniac. This throws up problems. If your songs are shit, for instance, you bear the blame alone. Being in a proper band has the advantage of solidarity, and the disadvantage of bad decision-making processes.

And anyway, as John Locke pointed out to Hobbes, just electing the canniest member of the band to be an autocratic leader implies "that Men are so foolish that they take care to avoid what Mischiefs may be done them by Pole-Cats or Foxes, but are content, nay think it safety, to be devoured by Lions". Good point by m'colleague.

Both Hobbes and Locke fall over on the predication of a Natural Law or Natural Right upon which everyone agrees in principle. If that were true, then electing a leader to interpret it for everyone would bypass no end of futile bickering. However, as we well know, the singer secretly wants to be a solo artist but thinks he/she will most likely get signed in a band; and the guitarist actually wants to make dance music (ie music where you only have to punch the rhythm into the drum machine once, rather than dealing with bassists who want to be guitarists and drummers who like any style of music and therefore excel at none).

Machiavelli's 'The Prince' is a handbook of 'policy', which at the time denoted a particular line of bullshit that a monarch fed foreign monarchs to conceal his real plans. By the time of Hobbes and Locke, the monarch's own people had become literate and informed enough to have opinions of their own, so the monarch had to use 'policy' on them as well. This is not only the problem with the modern political discourse (the only way to unify an educated people over legislation is to bullshit them), but it's more importantly the problem with bands.

If the singer is the only person who knows how to get gigs, how to talk to A&R people (the use of 'policy' on other monarchs), and how to operate a recording studio, then no-one will argue. Since these days everyone's done the rounds getting gigs, meeting record company idiots in pony tails, and they've all at least got a four-track; we have a problem. Everyone has an opinion on every aspect of band function, and since they're all based on anecdotal evidence from their experience, they're equally valid. Not very valid, but equally so.

Now the band has differing ideas about the principles by which it functions, and so the singer is brought down by the Watergate scandal, and the bassist and drummer form a Committee of Public Safety and start vetoing songs from the set and guillotining the guitarists.

Technology plays a part in this state too. The singer can cultivate relationships with record companies via email when the rhythm section isn't online, but now that even the bassist has a four-track, everyone is bringing demos of crap ideas into rehearsals where previously only the singer did.

In the time when musicians were content to pay the rent rather than achieve the glory which the communications revolution allows, the actual band they played in was just a place of employment. Now, like Hegel, musicians put all their eggs in one basket and connect the mechanism of the band and their musical destiny. So he sees a logical progression in which the ancien regime of the big band and bandleader/conductor has been swept away by the revolution of communications and other technology, which allows greater musical autonomy and personal aspiration.

Still, as Marx says, "the philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to change it". So what do we do? Well, there seem to be two types of band that work. The first is the benign autocracy, where the songwriter (usually) makes all the big decisions and delegates certain tasks to others. If this leader is charismatic enough not to piss the others off, and makes the necessary pretence of listening to advice, then it works well. It means that this individual can use 'policy' to convince the others that something's happening all the time, thus keeping the band together. The only problem is that this individual ends up doing all the work.

For the second suggestion, maybe we should look to the city-states of ancient Greece. The problem with politics today is that a ruler governs a group of people far too large. There can't be proper debate because you could never get everyone involved (other than simple yes or no referenda), and there are too many viewpoints to build a consensus. Bands are smaller, however, so we could try participatory government. Meetings with a chairman, if you like. If this sounds dangerously like the very business world we become musicians to avoid, think again. The important difference is that in business, the chairman uses 'policy' on the board to get his way because a board is just the representative grouping of a load of factions, whatever Tom Peters might say. Think of it more like the way the Enterprise is run in Star Trek (Next Generation, not the shit original series). The songwriter, say, informs the rest of the band of upcoming decisions about songs, listens to opinions, but then makes an executive decision. The drummer does the same for gigs, the bassist for the money, and so on. Everyone has to bow to popular opinion in their area, or no-one will listen to them in he other areas.

Of course, this proposes a division of labour which isn't always possible, but people have to accept that if they don't do much work other than playing, they don't get much say. The songwriter may feel that he/she has the most at stake (possibly true), but basically if you want to be the main songwriter in a band you're accepting lots of other work as well in order to guide your baby to wherever you want it. In other words, if you can't give up the day job, stick to playing the bass and don't write.

The real barrier to efficiency in most bands is simpler than all this, though. Most of us want to be in a band with friends. That makes it hard to become businesslike (it just feels silly), and may bring arguments into the band that have nothing to do with it directly. One just has to either live with that, or (better) make the band relationship distinct from the rest. That is, after all, professionalism just as much as playing the right notes and remembering the lyrics. No-one would argue that handling money, for example, is a necessary part of being in a band (hopefully), and that to be fair, one has to be businesslike about it. Well, the same goes for politics.

Being a musician is a good job: it's the only Marxist industry (ie the workers control the means of production). A job where you can fire your manager rather than vice versa. But in order to be effective, musicians in a band must present a unified front to the suits, pony tails and people called Tarquin; and to manage that unity one needs a stable political situation in the band. Just remember, when deciding who should make the decisions, that the person who most wants to do it is probably the last person you should give power to...