I am in the third year of a Phd in history. That is not a boast, more of an important starting point. Whilst working as an undergraduate one thinks quite ‘academically’, this is really ratcheted up as a postgrad. Academia becomes all consuming; one constantly ponders the works of other academics, knows who is where, who does what, who wrote what, who is any good, and who is not. You know who is worth getting to know, who is best avoided, and who would rather not be known. Consuming academia on a regular basis, a number of questions came to mind again and again.
What is Dr. Feelgood‘s Phd in, and where was it obtained?
What institution gave Professor Longhair his title and how long did he lecture there for?
Does Master P really have a Masters?
The various obsessions in my life are continually colliding in such a way. What are the connections between baseball and the First World War? What links exist between my favourite writers and football (thank you Albert Camus)? Can we link the worlds of football or music to that of academia?
In the case of music, academic pop stars seem to be a little thinner on the ground than one might initially think. The university was the meeting place for many bands of course. In fact, it has become almost clichéd that bands, particularly of the Britpop era, would meet on campus (and swiftly drop out of their courses). This was the route for bands such as Suede and Blur. Similarly, in the mid-to-late 70s a number of punk bands got together through art college, such as The Clash. However, we can’t really speak of many of these bands as being particularly academically inclined or of their members achieving much as academics.
Brian May is one exception. His Phd in astrophysics at Imperial College was interrupted by the success of Queen and put on hold for thirty years. The singer-songwriter Kris Kristofferson was a prestigious Rhodes Scholar at Oxford in the early 1960s. His counterpart, Townes van Zandt, studied at the University of Colorado at the same time. His undergraduate essays were so brilliant that his lecturers held onto them permanently, according to John Kruth’s biography. Van Zandt never completed his degree on account of his manic depression. Robert Quine, lead guitarist with the Voidoids, was the nephew of Harvard philosopher W.V. Quine and himself held a degree in law before pursuing more serious matters in late 70s New York.
Vampire Weekend have emerged in the past two years as one of the most exciting and popular alternative groups around. Each of the bandmembers English Literature at Columbia University in New York and they make a virtue of this in their songs, writing about finer points of punctuation, amongst other things. Here is a properly academic band.
In a chance meeting with them in Austin, Texas, in 2007, I experienced this at first hand. Chatting with the lead singer, Ezra, I got to talking about my plans for my Phd. He sustained interest in the conversation longer than many of my academic colleagues, suggesting genuine empathy. A few weeks later I found myself talking to an old blues singer in a Memphis venue who goes by the name of Dr ‘Feelgood’ Potts. At no point in our brief conversation did his academic past come up…
Great post. I can think of a couple more to add to your list. Shearwater’s (great band, terrible name) lead singer and main songwriter, Jonathan Meiburg, was a graduate student in ornithology, and has written quite a number of songs (and the title of the band) about that fascination with birds and nature. See the brilliant ‘Leviathan, bound’, about a harpooned whale, from the under-appreciated 2008 album ‘Rook’.
Brian Eno, Talking Heads, etc, all have their roots in art school, which seems to be a building ground for good music – and I think that Eno at least, with his continuing interest in art and lecturing, and his *huge* influence on modern music, deserves a mention.
A different note: Lambchop’s album ‘Nixon’ comes with a reading list; Ry Cooder’s ‘Chavez Ravine’ is an interesting history of a part of LA.
Nick Drake is another who comes to mind, although his interest in his studies at Cambridge University, if Trevor Dann’s extremely disappointing biography is anything to go by, appears to have been affected, like everything else in his life, by shyness, marijuana and depression.
On the ‘do you think he made this up?’ side of things, I might add the legendary reggae producer Dr Lee PhD. Quite what that PhD is in I could never quite fathom. Same goes for the lesser-known indie Dr. Dog.
The Beastie Boys, of course, also sang about ‘The Sounds of Science’, with that fantastic Beatles sample thrown in, and they are from upper middle-class stock, but not too enamoured with college/school/university in the late 1980s by all accounts (see the giant penis stage props).
And as a sidenote, one wonders where American (and global) music might have gone if there hadn’t been groups of US middle- and upper-class college kids willing to go into black neighbourhoods, seek out their blues heroes and put on gigs to spread the word. Joe Boyd’s memoir ‘White Bicycles’ is excellent on this.
Ok, I’ll stop now. That appears to be enough of a distraction from real work.
I think that quite a few bands claim to be academic and write about ‘big’ issues in a very po-faced manner, but aren’t actually academic themselves, if that makes sense. I suppose my starting point in this was really someone like the Manics, who have always made the claim to be politically and historically informed (based on their degrees in political science). But I think only two of them went to university (Swansea) and they scraped through. This isn’t about intellectual snobbery, just a curiosity about musicians with academic clout.
It’s an odd phenomenon: bands like to be seen as deep and informed, yet at the same time being part of such a community was always viewed with suspicion and not quite being rock and roll. If you come from a privileged background people won’t take you seriously, especially back in the day (see Joe Strummer’s attempts to ditch his public school past).
I completely forgot to mention Ian Dury who lectured at Art School for a bit.