Creative Accommodations

One of the key structural challenges of contemporary Western capitalism is to harness knowledge and creativity to produce new commodities and add value to old ones. This is in part about reconstructing as many workers as it can in the image of the new economy - turning Fordist 'hands' into flexible and self-propelling 'creatives' - and conscripting the momentum generally associated with recreation/play for the market. This article reports on biographical narrative research amongst young men with creative ambitions. We find that most do not easily assimilate to the demands of this transition: that the conscription of creativity is not 'lived' as smoothly as is suggested by creative industries discourse. Our data demonstrates that the new economy inflicts hidden injuries on aspiring artists and workers alike. Far from embracing the vague, disparate and precarious pathways of the self-assembled careers, our interviewees struggle to come to terms with frustrated ambitions and precarious lives. We look at young men who have sought to build 'careers' in the music industry none of whom makes a living out of music. They exemplify distinctive strategic responses to the elusiveness and transience of rock and roll, the classical 'fast-burn' creative vocation. Our analysis illustrates how (1) ambition is formed and sustained, (2) the pressures of poverty and precarity give rise to negotiations/compromises (day-jobs, marginal roles in 'creative industries') (3) in the face of at best limited success, creative identifications are resolved and outcomes reckoned. Our interviews challenged them to make sense of their lives and revealed that they are not the idealised 'frictionless' workers of flexible capitalism. Rather the non-conformist tendencies that drew them to rock and roll in the first place limit their ability to move with the vocational currents of the new economy.