c/d: The best English rock & roll has always been made by art students

c/d: "The best English rock & roll has always been made by art students"

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Without wishing to be unduly unsupportive of the overall thrust of the argument, I demand a recount!

Maybe in an ideally simplistic world all the good / adventurous / imaginative / inspirational / ones should have gone to art school; but then you remember that actually Sid Vicious went to art school and Mark Perry was an ex grammar school (iirc) trainee bank manager, and all the facile generalisations disintegrate around you.

And quite right too - that was (an essential part of) what punk was all about, after all.

I think this is almost certainly true.

However I do not believe that this is true of all art students; and I most certainly do not believe that all - or even most - people who "think more about aesthetics and mass culture and style that sort of stuff than the average person" necessarily end up being art students.

I think Mark E Smith has already been mentioned....

No, they quit because they thought the Fall were a branch on the tree of show business.
-- Tim Ellison (thefriendlyfriendlybubbl...), October 28th, 2005.

what does THAT mean????
-- petesmith (plsmit...), October 28th, 2005.

Haha Peter it's a quote from "Dice Man" (from the Dragnet album).

Where you two going?
Where you two going?
Is this a branch on the tree of showbusiness?

Do all these musicians
Have a social conscience?
Well, only in their front rooms

But I am the dice man
And I take a chance man
Do you take a chance, huh?

They stay with the masses
Don't take any chances
End up emptying ashtrays

But I push, push, push, push
Throw the bones and the poison dice
No time for small moralists

Cos I am the dice man
And I take a chance, huh
Do you take a chance, fan?

They say music should be fun
Like reading a story of love
But I wanna read a horror story
Where are you people going?
Where are you people going?
Is this a branch on the tree of showbusiness?

But I am the dice man
A balls-on-the-line man
Do you take a chance, baby?

(a) the best (English) Rock & Roll has always been made by people;

(b) those people who possess a propensity to make Rock & Roll also tend to be artistically inclined in other directions - hence the proportion of them that have have also attended art school is statistically higher than that of the population as a whole;

(c) this really shouldn't actually surprise anyone.

(x-post)

a) If Mark E Smith hadn't been born where he was when, he was, into the social class that he was, it's far more likely that he would have gone to art school.

b) If Mark E Smith hadn't been born where he was when, he was, into the social class that he was, he'd probably still be working on the docks or doing something similar today.

Discuss.

Hint: this is not a "true or false" question and the two alternatives are not mutually exclusive....

(x-post)

LOL! I'd be inclined to believe that attending a music school actually represents an obstacle to producing good rock & roll.

Exceptions? Ummmmm.... that guy out of The Passage who was apparently a classically trained percussionist....

Paul McCartney, whilst regularly hurling money at a supposed "rock school" in an apparently self-contradictory manner (far be if from me to use the words "tax dodge" in this context!) has always refused to learn how to play "properly", frequently expressing the opinion that it is the very act of learning how to work with / around personal technical incompetencies that frequently gives an individual musician their own unique approach; and that consequently learning a technical approach to playing an instrument is frequently an actual barrier to individuality and inspiration....

It's not just the arts - by now obliging the population to pay to send more than half of our school-leavers to University in order to pursue any number of supposed Degree-level courses; most of which have absolutely no practical real-world applications; our government gets to: (a) reduce the unemployment statistics dramatically; (b) get another 3-4 years to teach those kids some of the basic skills that our rapidly failing education system had failed to do so beforehand.

Ooops, little bit of politics there, my name is Stewart Osborne, good night!

I am asking because he is sort of the creative type that I would have expected to. On the other hand, I have the impression, from lyrics such as "Common People" that he has a rather archetypical working class background, which makes him less likely to have gone to such a middle class-like kind of school.

God, I don't agree with this whole notion at all. Learn what you want to learn! McCartney has certainly learned things. He took piano lessons in the mid-sixties, IIRC.

I studied music at the university level and had classmates other than myself interested in Can and the Velvet Underground and whatnot. (As a matter of fact, Cale studied music.)

I don't think McCartney's argument was actually quite as simplistic / linear as maybe I've represented it / you've reduced it, but was mpre to do with his belief that the fact that he had to find his own way around certain peculiar personal technical incompetencies (didn't he start off trying to play a right-handed bass the wrong way up because he couldn't find / afford a left-handed model?) was what made his playing style - and hence his song-writing style - unique / distinctive.

I'm inclined to believe he was probably right about this; but I think you're also right in what you say - and don't think the two concepts are in any way contradictory.

I suspect that the probability that a bit of training would almost certainly enable Mr. McCartney to find more / new / better ways to express himself, would be a very small attraction compared with the fear that this "training" might make him lose the very thing that makes him distinctive and makes people want to keep buying his albums, thereby killing the goose that'slaid so many golden eggs for him.

... apart from Peter Christopherson possibly

mark e smith calls bullshit on class war? oooooh suuuuure.

er, riiight. so have you listened to the lyrics of 'common people'? 'that's where i /caught her eye'. ye gods.

Buzzcocks = NOT ART STUDENTS
PiL = NOT ART STUDENTS

He was a shipping clerk, he worked in an office, let's not make out he was a docker or stevedore or summat

Yes, but their original name was the title of a track by Bowie who was an ART STUDENT.

As with every cliché, there's some truth to the "best British rock'n'roll = art school" myth, for the 60s and 70s at least. I think it's due to the very different ways pop developed in the States and the UK. Because pop was largely based on American musical traditions, UK acts couldn't mine so easily the seam of rootsy authenticity and had to rely more and pastiche and surface, which was closer to what was happening in the art/design/etc worlds.