There is always a pecking order.
Even among hens there is a pecking order.
Even in punks infancy there was a pecking order.
But, not the pecking orders we have now.
As rock gets wider, the space between the haves and have nots get deeper.
And as rock royalty gets whinier and more distanced, the rock aristocracy is a million miles away from the people they, yes, I’ll say it, serve.
The Streets nailed it on “When You Wasn’t Famous” but it is a truism that seems even more confused now then before.
You have an aristocracy of scum money at the top, a tidal wave of professional musicians below em, and a world of fans who are baffled as to what their position is below that.
When Saint Strummer was strumming, and despite it being a self-evident tautology, everybody was both a part of the band and a part of the fan. The walls came down, however briefly.
New Wave brought them back very carefully because, well, because it was a tautology. If everybody CAN do it, if it is a communism of gifts, where can anything rise to. In theory it sounds like a heaven, and in theory it sounds much like what is happening on the next strata down from the reality of Billboard bombast.
But punk’s commune attitude to rock couldn’t last because, well because Warsaw became Joy Division while Slaughter And The Dogs remained Slaughter And The Dogs.
And in the middle world the difference is something I pointed out when I wrote about Brooklyn last year: it is a community of musicians and not of people: it is insulated to the extreme.
The dream is the old Lennon dream: “think you’re a superstar? Well alright you are” but the reality is layers upon layers upon layers of social distancing while the fans, me, are, as Helen pointed out , being conned by social networks into believing they have a relationship with people they have no relationship with at all. It’s a tricky contradiction and prices are paid when you fool your audience.
Anyway, the hippies, the punks: they were like the armed forces in that they were social communities of equals and the band s they listened to were both the soundtracks and members of that community.
That is not true of the indie scene, Brooklyn, alt, anybody today: the community isn’t social per se, it is musical between musicians. On all musical scenes today it is us against them and them are the musicians. It’s all about money and who comes first and you are neither nor.