The Velvet Underground vs. Compliance

Depending on context, compliance can be beneficial, neutral, or detrimental to an individual or a group. It is a key concept within social influence, or the ways that people impact each other’s behaviors, beliefs, or feelings. People often conform, or change their behaviors or beliefs, as a result of some kind of real or imagined social pressure. Compliance specifically is usually defined a branch of conformity where people publicly act according to an implicit or explicit request. This can happen in a number of contexts. An act as simple as crossing the street within a crosswalk is a type of compliance. Due to factors such as the size and unanimity of a group or perceived expertise or status in the person making a request, people often wind up complying with requests that they privately disagree with. However, people often resist social influence. According to reactance theory, people find threats to their free will to be unpleasant, and often they will act against requests that they see as counter to their free will. This is why people sometimes feel a desire to do the exact opposite of what they are told.

A key example of reactance theory and noncompliance came from New York in the mid-1960s. The experimental rock band the Velvet Underground, headed by Lou Reed and John Cale, were in the middle of a two week residency at a club in Greenwich Village. Their sound was extremely different from the rest of the rock music coming out around that time. Where bands like the Beatles had songs with rich harmonies and lyrics about love (though increasingly about psychedelia and Eastern philosophy), the Velvet Underground had an extremely dissonant and abrasive sound with much darker and stranger lyrical content. To that end, one of the most abrasive songs they had was called “The Black Angel’s Death Song,” which is dominated largely by a scratchy sounding electric violin, feedback, and fairly creepy lyrics that were chosen for their sound as opposed to any meaning. It is extremely avant-garde for a rock song of the mid-1960s.

After playing it at this club, the manager immediately told them not to play it again. They responded to his request by playing it again louder, and the manager fired them. This is a prime example of reactance theory driving noncompliance. The manager had a request that they perceived as a threat to their free will, and they responded by doing the exact opposite of what he asked. In the long run, it only helped their reputation, as Andy Warhol eventually took them under his wing, allowing them a platform to change music forever.