Dammit, I was beaten with the Dexter Holland reference.
FWIW, jimmy pop ali and evil jared from the bloodhound gang met in college, and I assume both graduated. The doors met in college, etc.
I really think it depends on the genre of music. I can see a lot of 80s heavy metal bands as fitting that bill of having members who had very little formal education, but those bands generally came across as fairly dysfunctional anyway and formal education generally requires self discipline and an ability to delay gratification that you don’t assume with metal bands of the 80s or early 90s. Those bands came across as pretty hedonistic and live for today-ish.
So years ago my husband was in charge of an online entertainment site. One of his writers went out to interview Dave Mustaine (which Wiki implies did not graduate from high school). In the interest of not asking the same old questions, the writer asked Mr. Mustaine what he was reading…“Pilgrim’s Progress.” Which had been recommended to him by some other metal musician. Just because someone has a minimal formal education doesn’t mean they are dumb.
Woonders of the Solar System (which was made by solar doost), an interesting Science Channel documentary is narrated by Brian Cox, who was the keyboardist in D:Ream, which was most remembered here in the U.S. for Things Can Only Get Better.
Brian Cox is particle physicist with many, many accolades. Whoa whoa whooooa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa!
There ARE a lot of very stupid, poorly educated rock musicians. There are also a lot of highly intelligent, well educated rock musicians. There are rock musicians who dropped out of school because they were stupid, but there are also many who dropped out of school because academics just didn’t interest them, and they wanted to pursue music.
Regardless of whether they’re geniuses or idiots, rock stars DO often exhibit a sense of entitlement, and that can be dangerous for them, as well as annoying to everyone else. Elvis certainly could have used a few friends with the sense and guts to tell him “No” occasionally.
Seems to me that you could make the same generalization about artists in general. With the possible exception of writers, artists are not selected for their education, do not become artists based on their education in a general, non-artistic sense. If artists don’t have to be more than minimally educated, it is no surprise that few in a random sampling will be.
Exactly. Kate Bush rather famously passed 10 O Levels, but left school after her “Mock As” choosing instead to concentrate on her music, training in dance and mime. Todd Rundgren completed his High School educational requirements, but blew off graduation because he considered it a farce.
College is not a requirement for every career path.
John took, but failed, his O-levels, but was allowed to attend university anyway.
He was, however, kicked out for bad behaviour before finishing that.
So a ‘kick out’, rather than a dropout. >_>
This via Wikipedia. Their cite is not online, so I can’t say for sure it’s accurate, but it jibes with my memory.
George attended the same school as Paul (The Liverpool Institute High School For Boys). Unlike Paul, he didn’t do his O-levels, deciding to take a job as an electrician instead. Still not really a dropout, from what I gather - just someone content to stick with finishing high school.
I think the same kind of idea applies to entrepreneurs. (See Shagnasty’s list above) and for much the same reasons. A formal education simply isn’t an important factor in becoming successful in these fields. Having some smarts probably still helps quite a bit if you want to get and stay in the game though, so I would expect the more successful people to be mostly capable of getting much more than minimal education if they chose to do so.
Billy Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins graduated high school and was plenty smart enough to go to college, but decided to pursue Rock Stardom instead. Definitely the “too cool for school” type. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s a common profile among people who start bands and are successful at it…
Rock schmock - I’d say most musicians are poorly educated. If they go to conservatory, they get years and years of training, but damn little education.
I’m a (largely self-taught) musician. I’ve worked with a lot of these people. They can be incredibly insular.
My general impression is that a lot of them sign bad contracts, or did back in the 1960s, or piss away a lot of money with cars, homes, cocaine etc. Perhaps they are better now but there are always “Behind the Music” shows on how MC Hammer lost millions.
But then the only musician I ever got to talk to was Sheryl Crow when she mad a record store appearance/mini set when her first album came out. I told her to make sure she got a good lawyer because I didn’t want to see her get ripped off (and told her I wasn’t a lawyer). She smiled, said that was sweet but not to worry, “I have a good lawyer already”.
I suppose that if you are spending a lot of time on the road, you can become educated by reading while waiting in hotel rooms, plane flights, etc But I also feel that a lot of them (not all) that are driven to become stars have egos that don’t think anything bad will happen to them.
I don’t claim to know “more than the rest of us,” and I don’t know about the rest of the people on your list, and never claimed to. Indeed, the point is that that the facts about McCartney’s and Jagger’s education are very well known (what with them being incredibly famous, and all). I am just saying that the fact that you got the first two (and the best known) names on your list wrong hardly inspires confidence in the rest of your unsupported claims.
Liverpool College of Art was not university (not back then), but I take your point. John was even less of a “high school dropout” than I implied. George, I guess (going by your information), would have counted as a dropout if he had been in the American system, bu,t in the England of his time, his school attainment would have been considered perfectly adequate and normal, not the sort of failure (or rebellion) that “high school dropout” tends to imply in America.
I’m not sure the question is answerable in its present form. Do you mean “Rock n Roll musicians who are under contract with a recognized major label” or are you including guys in bar bands, cover bands and mid-life crisis garage bands? How you set your parameters could impact the answer you get. Limiting it to professional musicians with contracts, Rock n Roll stopped being the dominant form about a decade or so ago. (Are we counting boy bands and white rappers from Orlando? Pop princesses and recent Disney employees? Road warriors who haven’t had an album out since Nirvana broke?)
If we just limit it to drummers, yeah, most of them are high school dropouts. Many need help feeding themselves. And even the ugly ones get amazing chicks.
> I am just saying that the fact that you got the first two (and the best known)
> names on your list wrong hardly inspires confidence in the rest of your
> unsupported claims.
You could have just corrected me and moved on. Instead you felt it necessary to insult me. I did the best I could with a half hour or so for my entire post. Perhaps you think I should add the words, “I am not perfect. It’s possible that there are mistakes in my post. I would be happy to learn about them” to all future posts. I thought it was unnecessary to add that because it was obvious. In the meantime, can anyone go over my list and make any other corrections?
The premise is “In general, most rock and roll musicians are minimally educated.” What’s the point of immediately jumping in with the few individual well-known examples of musicians with higher education? I figured it would take about three posts until someone jumped in with “What about Brian May” or, better yet, “my brother was educated”.