When Art School Ruled the Earth

Well, if not the Earth, at least the radio.

By the late 1970s, rock music couldn’t figure out which way to turn. Its original daily drivers, blues and country, with the occasional music hall fenders, had run out of gas. Guys with Irish Setter hairstyles and Selleck-staches were busy touring arenas and writing one song after another declaiming that tonight they’re really gonna rock you tonight. Nothing wrong with that, I guess. It was dumb fun, and the fellows had finally learned how to play their instruments properly and sing in key, more or less, unlike a lot of the sixties stuff that preceded it:

It was inevitable that the blues-based authenticity myth would collapse under its own weight eventually. The blues dudes came a cropper before the rockers did, when they ran out of ways to tell you that they woke up this morning. The rockers not long after. The time was right for something — anything, really — new. Art school geeks took over, and had themselves a New Wave.

There was a more or less clean handoff in 1978. Mark it on your calendars. Well, that old Snap-On calendar, featuring fully clothed women for some reason, that’s still hanging in your dad’s garage.  First, the last gasp of AOR rock credibility showed up. Dire Straits released Sultans of Swing, which was the last memorable, unironic, nostalgia-themed, guitar hero song before the walls came crashing down on the genre (My friend Gerard (PBUH) and me had some fun arguing about that one).

At the same time, this appeared on Saturday Night Live, which means it hit the mainstream in a big way, right away:

It’s telling that Devo chose a hoary rock hit like Satisfaction to deconstruct and make their pop culture bones. They’re using irony, parody, and repetition instead of anything close to virtuosity. They’re not defining popular culture, the way the Stones did. They’re taking pre-cooked popular culture and using it as raw material. It’s not pop. It’s meta-pop, art-school style.

That’s what art school was churning out in spades back then. I’m not sure exactly what it’s churning out now, but I imagine it’s going to take a bigger sewage treatment plant working around the clock to handle it. In the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, art school’s main product was musicians. I know this for a fact, as my own brother is one. Here are his RISD (the Island School of Road Design, natch) classmates in the same year:

One notices a certain, erm, shift in the topics considered apropos for rock music in that video. The Talking Heads must be the ultimate example of art school kids who dominated the New Wave, but there were innumerable examples.

Lene Lovich, anyone? She might be the ur-example of an academy person who disappears entirely into a persona. She’s got art school, and many other things, written all over her. She’s not performing. She’s a performance.

So no more guitar heroics, please. Clapton is God, the old folks said, but a new generation of Art School Nietzsches said God was dead.  New Wave musicians deliberately looked different, sounded different, and performed differently than their predecessors. They smushed high and low culture together and treated their identity as a constructed object, not a personality cult like a guitar hero or a pompadoured hip shaker would cultivate.

Speaking of pompadours gone supernova, here’s Liverpool College of Art alumnus Elvis Costello, also from 1978:

There’s many more examples of New Wave artistes from artsy schools. Musicians as disparate as Joe Strummer of the Clash to David Bowie came up with their very different styles out of their tenures at art schools. Herman Brood was an artist. Joy Division and Ultravox had guys who would have had paint on their smocks, if they ever attended their college courses instead of playing in bands. It might not immediately come to mind, but rock groups like Pink Floyd and The Who had art college backgrounds. That’s how you end up with rock operas with Ann-Margret dogpaddling in a puddle of baked beans, and concept albums like Dark Side of the Moon.

The granddaddy of art school chic is likely Roxy Music. They were already weirding out at the turn of the seventies The Beatles were art-adjacent, of course, and earlier. Original Beatle Stu Sutcliffe went to art school, and Lennon fancied himself an artist. But their Pepper period is more like a stoner’s version of the British music hall than atelier rock. I don’t know exactly what Roxy Music was, but it sure was something:

Bryan Ferry, front and center there, not only went to art school, he had paintings hung in the Tate Gallery at one point. He was an art teacher, actually, for a short stint. Well, that’s if you call teaching ceramics at a girl’s school teaching. Got fired, too. That might not sound like a rock ‘n roll pedigree, but it fits just fine on a New Wave resume. Over on the left side of the picture is Brian Eno, another art schooler. You may remember him from his solo album, Here Comes the Warm Jets, with the hit song The Paw Paw Negro Blowtorch. Or maybe not.

Roxy Music had a big hit with Love is the Drug in the seventies, and got big in the eighties, making more or less uncharacterizable music and putting on offbeat stage shows. Viz:

So Sir Oswald Moseley and Long John Silver had a love child, and he sang a weird song about the kind of love de Sade would recognize, backed up by a couple of off-duty stewardesses and a bubble machine. All in a day’s work for Bryan Ferry, who held glamour in a pit in his basement, and told it to rub lotion on its skin from time to time.

But wait, there’s more. You can’t fully understand art school’s reach until we visit Dusseldorf. You don’t come up with concepts like this by attending agricultural college:

I once wrote that all current music is either Kraftwerk or James Brown. I stand by that comment, mostly because I forgot about country music at the time. On the other hand, they put autotune on everything now, so maybe I’ll forget it again.

Eventually the art school weirdos made the world safe for people with the same aesthetic, but who found themselves a little short on art school tuition. You can’t tell me that this isn’t directly downstream from the art school rendering plant. even if it’s the GED version:

You could easily slide Grace Jones into the conversation here, too. I don’t know what kind of schools they have on Saturn, or if she attended. She simply hired out the art school chores to Jean-Paul Goude, didn’t waste any money on singing lessons, and saved herself four years of skipping art classes.

MTV rewarded artists who had a profound visual appeal. Art rock was perfect for the multimedia world of Max Headroom and Grace Jones.

Then, if you were really into the art school scene without ever attending, probably by listening to your sister’s Joy Division and Siouxsie and the Banshees records, and you got to reading Lord Byron and Shelley and Baudelaire while as stoned as Coleridge, you might gave birth to another downstream side effect of Art Rock: Goth Rock:

So everything changed from that moment when Sultans of Swing ran into the back bumper of Devo driving the art school bus. Roxy Music gave birth to glam rock and hair bands. Punk bands were all style and no substance, on purpose. Goth rock gave us metal bands with spidery logos. I don’t know what Grace Jones gave us, but I assume I’d be afraid of it.

Devo on SNL. It was the moment when something that looked ridiculous replaced something that suddenly looked ridiculous.