Sometime in the late 80s, Matt and Luke Goss began to reject their pin-up role as iconic alien android incest twins, beefcake jerky for squealing hordes of 12 year old girls. About the time of the second Bros LP, one twin sourly and inadvisedly let slip that the brothers yearned to be recognised for their musicianship. Or so it was reported. Not an utterly depraved ambition; at worst - considering the snobbery of those who confer such recognition - a bit naive. And perhaps just a rumour, or a misunderstanding. But their infamous informal fan-club, the Bros-ettes - the Millwall Barmy Army of teenybop - took it seriously, responding accordingly. To them, such an attitude on the part of a Smash Hits idol amounted to betrayal. 12 year old girls don't give a tuppenny cuss about whether Icon X drums or sings on his own records: if they did, they'd be boys. If pop heartthrobs can't respect the adoration their fans offer, it can always be withdrawn. By 1991, it had been. Bros's third LP Changing Faces (the irony!) peaked at 18 after only two weeks in the charts. Bros have not been heard from since. The conventional wisdom says that a record company's greed for sales is the enemy of artistic freedom in the commercial world. There's another: the demands of the people that actually grant the fame. Breach of aesthetic contract with the audience is far more likely to kill a star off than any dispute with OmniConsumer Records Inc, however tortuous. And a good thing too: most artists - popular or otherwise - would be far less interesting if they freed themselves from their audience to pursue their unfettered inner visions, sad and conformist as these are generally in all of us. The difficult cases come when a popular artist is specifically licenced by his or her constituency to test the limits of such contracts: to revise, to surprise, to confront, to overthrow. Hired precisely not to conform to the ordinary run of stardom, in other words. But when we subcontract our imaginative freedoms to others to flesh out and explore, we are jealous of how they interpret this freedom; often to the point of contradiction.

Unacceptably out of character

Sometime in the mid-80s, Geffen Records sued Neil Young for making records "which were not commercial in nature and musically uncharacteristic of Young's previous records". Since leaving Reprise, Young had released a string of records - Trans, Everybody's Rockin', Old Ways, Landing On Water, Life - which lurched from Euro-Techno Vocoder pop to Country-MOR to bar-band rockabilly. Geffen - future home of Nirvana and Sonic Youth -ought to have been ideal for Young the amped-up guitar rocker if not Young the mimsy folkie. But the marriage wasn't working. "Geffen tried to force me to do things... when they saw I was on - tangents," he told Greil Marcus for Spin in January 1994. "'Make a record that sounds like you.' That was a very tough thing to do." I think I was disillusioned, continued Young. With what? asked Marcus. "With life. For whatever reason, I chose to disguise the music, and keep everything inside the music, and not reach out, do things in styles that I knew would piss everybody off, so nobody would even buy it or listen to it... I don't make excuses for those records. I think those records are going to stand up, in time. I don't feel the records are not as good as the records I'm doing now, I just feel they're not aimed at success - in any way."

Rock actually challenges its audience-preconceptions as patchily as any branch of the entertainment business, and yet (unlike most other branches) it really does have a heightened awareness of the expectation that it mount this challenge, and of its duty that it never be Elvis again, merely acceding to entertainment-industry customs and practices. The first idol of permanent revolution is actually Miles Davis (recall those ex-fans leaving his electric show in tears; his playing "with his back to the audience"), but jazzers never realised that jazz-central was in more need of challenge than chart-pop, so didn't respond properly. The next was Bob Dylan, who did a Miles on Greenwich Village folk, somersaulting to the core of counterculture rock. From that point, he indulged the habit of estranging all fans who listened too comfortably: if he went electric to bug the Dave Van Ronk crowd, and Country to rile the hippies, he went Born Again Christian to alienate the young and the sane. "Psychiatrists assert," asserted Fred and Judy Vermorel, "that the most popular figures for their patients to believe themselves to be are Jesus Christ and Bob Dylan."

Lester Bangs was Lou Reed's most eloquent, excessive, demanding fan. Having motored The Velvet Underground to the peak of the rock canon, almost single-handed, he wrote the following caveat: "What I've long suspected is that the people today dropping 'Velvet Underground' all over the place are the EXACT SAME PEOPLE who in 1967-8 woulda called 'em what they got called then, Faggots Who Couldn't Play Their Instruments, and that furthermore none of these namedropping assholes ever sat around listening to "Sister Ray", for fucking pleasure, ever..."
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"Sister Ray" is a 17 minute distortion-Improv thrash-epic about refusal of the 'proper': proper playing, proper sound balance, proper amplification levels, proper song structure, proper song subject, proper song length. How can ordinary notions of worth be changed? Is the provisional restructuring of all judgement a notion that a rock group's supporters are ever likely to cluster round? As is almost too well-known, The Velvets were not popular while they lasted. And no one worked as assiduously to fuck off their ordinary fans as Reed did in the early 70s, in the name of this same unspoken deep contract-of-challenge. He mimed shooting up on stage. He released the obscenely bleak Berlin - Stephen Davis (later, with Hammer Of The Gods, the definitive Led Zeppelin biographer) said of it that "certain records are so patently offensive that one wishes to take... physical vengeance on the artists that perpetrate them". When Sally Can't Dance sold well, Reed rubbished it himself ("I was imitating me"). And he bleached his hair, cropped and shaved a cross into it, and put out Metal Machine Music - The Amine B Ring. "An act of despicable elitism," wrote Ed Ward. Reed insisted that MMM stood comparison with Xenakis: four sides of screaming process-electronics, each exactly 16:01 minutes long. RCA put it out as a standard Reed release and suffered the consequences. Withdrawn within two weeks, it immediately becoming a rite of overamped passage for the true Lou fan, the prize, behind the feedbacking fuzz-drone, a dancing moiré of overtones, delicate and endless. The pleasures were there, if you only trusted the artist: La Monte Young's Theater of Eternal Music Dream-House in your own home, and without all the phoney number-mysticism. But most fans and rock critics were unwilling to buy into such High Art justification. Other explanations proliferated for why Reed would choose to release MMM, two favourites being the revenge-on-the-record-company theory and the getting-out-of-a-management-contract theory.

There may be no more abiding myth in rock culture than that of the rotten LP released to fulfil a contract. "That?" say Group Z airily, years after. "That was a deliberately bad record. We had one album left in our deal with OmniCon, and we wanted out..." Legends circulate. In the mid-80s, northern Industrial funksters Chakk are said to have taken MCA for a lucrative ride, repaying a huge advance with an unsellably tedious debut record. MCA panicked and sacked them. Chakk took their half million, so the story goes, and set up their own studio in Sheffield. OK, but think of this: a great Chakk record, a deliberately dull Chakk record - who among us could honestly distinguish? The rushed double live album or bodged compilation can be a cover for a group in creative disarray or deadlocked renegotiation. But clearly no star can afford casually to rip off his/her audience while in conflict with his/her label bosses: the support of the kids is the last best leverage. When Marvin Gaye put out Here, My Dear on Motown in 1978, as a part of a complex divorce settlement, 80 per cent of the royalties to go to his ex-wife Anna (also Berry Gordy's daughter), he considered filling it with garbage. Thinking of "the fans", he made it instead a brilliant, bitter, haunting concept album on the marriage's breakdown, blaming Anna. So a successful and money-accruing record also meant unparalleled public humiliation for Gaye's ex-wife as well as his former label boss/father-in-law. So is the contract-fulfiller pure myth? One iconic example is the probable source of all stories: The Rolling Stones in 1970 famously delivering as their final Decca single "Cocksucker Blues", a sloppy, foulmouthed playground prank of a song, knowing that Decca would never dare put it out. (Obsessives later canonised the bootleg.) Of course, in a sense The Sex Pistols topped this in 1977, without particularly intending to, with their first (and final) unreleasable single for A&M, "God Save The Queen" (which afterwards Virgin found perfectly releasable). After The Pistols collapsed into unalloyed mutual loathing and lawsuits, the slack in the Virgin contract was taken up by compilations of offcuts, radio-promo and other rubbish, sleeves a blizzard of swastikas and Situationist contempt. As early as the 1976 EMI release of "Anarchy In The UK", Malcolm McLaren had quipped that the real fans weren't buying the single: what does this make the latecomers who put Flogging A Dead Horse into the charts in early 1980? Or those who will pack out London's Finsbury Park this month to see the reformed Pistols pour scorn and contempt down on their eager, spiky heads?
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Being who you are for a living

David Bowie killed off his Ziggy Stardust persona at the Hammersmith Odeon in 1973. In the TV documentary made of the event, the moneyshot is the moment when he sings the final lines of "Rock 'N' Roll Suicide": "You're not alone/You're wonderful/You're wonderful/Gimme your hands" - vaudeville shtick you can imagine in the mouth of Al Jolson, Ethel Merman, Tommy Steele - and a forest of little pink paws reach hungrily up from the audience into the spotlight's beam. What the documentary chose to omit - what shocked rock journalists are said to have hushed up - was the outrageous sex-riot staged by certain enraged Zig-fans, a public but unspeakable protest manifesting as group masturbation and mass fellatio. Bowie's career over the next decade was a flurry of masks donned and doffed - until he made the mistake of growing up, being himself, acting natural. Faking it, he found a home in everyone's heart: when he finally bared his soul, no one cared.

Between Neil Young and John Zorn in last year's Spin Alternative Record Guide, an entry is missing. If Young (with Lou and Iggy) can finesse their maverick way out of 60s dinosaurdom into 90s hipness, why not Frank Zappa? It's not as if he's too alternative for the delicate tastes of the compilers: as well as Zappa fan Zorn, Eugene Chadbourne, Albert Ayler, Henry Cow and Derek Bailey all get in. A sad instance of unlucky timing. In the same year that Bowie killed off Ziggy, shocking hundreds of little glitterkids into the process of self-reappraisal and permanent distrust that birthed punk rock, Zappa - who almost certainly first injected the word punk into rock discourse - embarked on a series of projects and notions which very largely turned off those fans who could have made a bridge for him into acknowledged punky precursorship. From Overnite Sensation and Apostrophe (') in the mid-70s through to the multi-LP epics of the early 80s, Joe's Garage I-III and Tinseltown Rebellion, he took a turn through what many of his early freak-power constituency considered reactionary arena-rock mainstreaming, combining this for a fatal season with a stubbornly self-indulgent and Scargillite failure to reach out and make useful new alliances. His original art rock following felt betrayed; a potential new constituency felt insulted, patronised by Zappa's clumsy satire of punk ideals, and didn't sign up. Curiously enough, while The Pistols were baiting EMI and A&M, and CBS were defanging The Clash, Zappa was embroiled in a significant complete-control dispute with Warners: he delivered four LPs to them in 1978, they failed to divvy up, he re-edited the four into a box-set, Läther, which he hawked round the majors before turning it into a sanctioned bootleg by broadcasting all eight sides on a small California station, advising that listeners record it. As the dispute dragged on, Warners put chunks of the four LPs out according to their schedule, their track programming and with their chosen sleeve designs. Zappa, for a while in contract limbo, eventually set up his own label: but operating on the scale he was accustomed to was expensive, so a much higher proportion of crowd-pleasing guitar and smut began to lard the Zappaness.
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Overreach overdrive

The source of punk's allergy to scale and its suspicions about intellectual ambition was not hard to seek: in 1977, after a three-year gap, ELP released a double LP with the worrying title Works Vol 1. It came in an artily minimalist black sleeve, and the first side was given over to Keith Emerson's Piano Concerto #1, complete with full symphony orchestra (which they then toured with). Even diehard fans were taken aback by the mix of austerity, preening and pompous self-regard in this package. ELP's strongest suit had always been post-Hendrix spectacle, Emerson's knife-throwing, fire-eating carnival flamboyance, Carl Palmer's big drumkit. By comparison with their 1974 heyday, Works 1 sold poorly. Works Vol 2, released within the year, was only a single LP (cobbled together or hastily scaled-back). It sold even worse. The era of Prog bombast was well over by then, its suffocating hold on rock always somewhat exaggerated. As these ex-gods were revealed as buffoons, and worse, losers, the fan-rats began to desert the art rock ship. Today they all claim they'd always doubted its seaworthiness. No one likes it known that they used to room in the Dustbin of History. Other Pomp Rockers dropped the theatre for transition into chart-pop: Genesis probably sold more records in the 80s than the 70s. Yes had always had a secret pop heart, and so carried their fans with them a while, only blowing it when they hired Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes to replace outgoing members (presumably to avail themselves of Horn's studio skills). Too severe a boundary-transgression: Yes-fans could not forgive Horn and Downes for the overt and unapologetic pop-silliness of The Buggles. That Prog rock's self-regarding seriousness was itself deeply silly earned it the undying condescension of posterity, the contempt of the belatedly wised-up disciple, yet Prog rock's true crime was not that its reach exceeded its grasp, but that it refused to 'fess up to foolishness. Deep Purple's concerto For Rock Group; ELP's Pictures At An Exhibition: these were cited by some ideologues as the ultimate rock crime, but were little different in content if not spirit from Rick Wakeman's deliberately daft extravaganzas, King Arthur on ice et al. Their error was naive explicitness of purpose, just like Bros (and Wakeman's goofing was in truth a very sly get-out clause).

The jump from club-level mod pop to creativity on a grander scale (to fill out LP-length vinylscapes and arena-size playing spaces) is where most such groups lose their bearings: the inevitable graduation from underground to overground. That the tail-end 60s kids were held in such low esteem for flubbing this jump is unjust: punk actually generated more unredeemable third LPs even than rock opera did. What could possibly have been more 'pretentious' than The Clash titling their triple album Sandinista!? What's more plausible: Joe Strummer as bandit-revolutionary, Jimmy Pursey as mature solo artist, Roger Daltrey as bellowing stud, Vangelis as virtuoso? The problem of self, audience, time, change and mutual growth has only been solved on a case-to-case basis in rock.

If 'self-indulgent' is an overused adjective of rock-crit dismissal (in a music that claims to take pride in going too far), it can only be because the call to permanent challenge is purely rhetorical. If treated as a formal principle, change for its own sake eventually canonises reactionaries as radicals. Pere Ubu, with their open commitment to total non-repetititon, soon got lost up avant garde creek without a following. When Wire put synths on Chairs Missing, they were denounced as the new Pink Floyd; so they included viola, cor anglais and Stockhausen's British acolyte Tim Souster on 154, then imploded in a highly enjoyable run of Performance Art-wank spectacles. The Pop Group pied-pipered a little army of agitprop groups into a freeform zone, where dub, funk and jazz made noisy connection and frightened off the punters. With beady-eyed intuition, John Lydon found a way out of the post-Pistols morass into PiL and Metal Box (that he managed to re-invent himself at all was a triumph; that he did it with such force a miracle): but subsequent twists against a 'wrong' public image damaged his credibility deeply. Like his Prog rock forebears, he was no Renaissance man (nor was this ever the job he was hired to carry out). John and Yoko's plunge into conceptual-gestural art gallery mindfuck had certainly been bankrolled by The Beatles' chart success: but then a good part of that success was a product of exactly the Lennon blend of naive enthusiasm and tart flipness that pushed The Beatles beyond mere Gerry And The Pacemakers-dom. Conjoined with Ono's rigorous experimentalist grounding (and formal discipline), they made a potent team; the very intensity of fan-hostility to their work together - beginning with "Revolution #9" through Unfinished Music #2: Life With The Lions to Hair Peace In Bed - was an affirmation of its effectiveness, if not its 'quality'. How else do you judge Musique concrete's success? That Enraged of Hampshire can still be moved to call Yoko a no-talent fraud and a vampire is a sign of just how lastingly unnerving some of these ephemeral monuments to unravelment were.
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Justify your love

Whatever he used to be called, he walks round with 'slave' written on his cheek these days, and no one can quite tell which of his recent records is meant and which are feints. Not so far away, tanned white soulboy George Michael garners no sympathy at all when he complains about the strictures of the deal he signed with the corporate devils. Madonna's 1992 Sex book, which cut-and-pasted the unapologetic values of gay male underground softcore erotica into an old-fashioned fan-market photobook, elicited very little response on its own terms (a handful of male gay libertarian critics were amused without being amazed), and a large amount of bigoted piffle from those who already loathed her. Her fans proper mostly ignored it: as they did the rather tepid Erotica, which she released at much the same time. In the straight-to-video hardcore porn industry, there has been an unexpected new development. Because most videos now sell on name-and-face recognition, those women who become triple-X superstars not only command higher fees than anyone else on a shoot, but - and this is new - a significant degree of production control. They get to hire and fire directors, cameramen, co-stars; they even get - within obvious limits - plot approval. The men, by contrast, are increasingly so much performing meat, hired for stamina and ejaculation-on-demand: the fans have never been less interested in them as names or faces. The power-shift has left many wannabe studs confused, angry, even impotent, in the face of focused market demand. As a profession, it still entails immense physical risk, not least unprotected sex with any number of utterly dodgy folk; but those few women who do emerge from the nightmare labyrinth of its lower reaches have won themselves - in collusion with their sad and scattered mass audience - a degree of artistic autonomy only matched at the highest levels of the recording industry. It is clear that plenty still enter such trades with no clear idea of the trade-offs involved, the unspoken contracts. "Everyone's a prostitute," sang Vic Godard and Subway Sect nearly 20 years ago, "singing a song from prison." With mordant Mortlake irony, they called their second single "Ambition", and dissolved. Godard "seemed to have seen through the circus which he was being enticed into, from day one," said an observer years later. "He saw all the contradictions and didn't want to be a pop star." Such squeamishness is clearly in breach of contract, and some of us have yet to forgive him.