Music + art school in North America (1987)

Excerpt from John A. Walker’s book, Cross-Overs: Art into Pop, Pop into Art.

John A. Walker (Cross-overs)
artdesigncafé | music + art room | Published 23 June 2011
Page 20 of 21

Music + art school in North America

The impact of art colleges in North America on Pop music has been much less than their British counterparts. A major reason for this is that the black culture of the United States, so vital to American popular music, has had little or no contact with the traditional fine arts. Nevertheless, there are some North American musicians who have benefited from an art training, for example Joni Mitchell, Chris Stein, Laurie Anderson and David Byrne.

Joni Mitchell, the famous folk singer, guitar player and song writer, was born in Canada in 1943. Her talent for visual art and music was evident from childhood and, in the early 1960s, she studied at the Alberta College of Art in Calgary. Finding the course too regimented she dropped out after a year and pursued a musical career. Nevertheless, her interest in art and craft continued. When not touring or recording, Mitchell practised calligraphy, illustrated her poems, wove and made jewellery. Some of her songs refer to modern artists and many of her record sleeves feature her paintings and drawings. In the autumn of 1985 an exhibition of her large, abstract, improvised paintings was held in Los Angeles.

Chris Stein played guitar for the New Wave band Blondie, which was hugely successful in the late 1970s. Previously, he studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York. An accomplished photographer, Stein documented the progress of the group and its lead singer— his girlfriend— Debbie Harry.

Laurie Anderson studied art history at Barnard College, New York, in the late 1960s and then sculpture at Columbia University.

David Byrne is the lead singer of the group Talking Heads. Formed in New York in 1975, by the mid-1980s it had achieved international fame for its off-beat, intriguing music and lyrics such as Psycho-killer (1977) and Road to nowhere (1985). The founder members— Byrne, Chris Frantz and [Tina Weymouth]— met originally at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, where they were students in the early 1970s. (Their first band was called, appropriately, “the Artistics”.) They were then joined by Jerry Harrison, an architectural student from Harvard University. Byrne, legend has it, was dismissed from the course at Rhode Island because of his commitment to Conceptual art. From the beginning Talking Heads had an “arty”, intellectual image. Their performances were highly self-conscious and stylized, while their music was an eclectic mix of Pop, funk, avant garde and African tribal sounds. Their visual arts background revealed itself in the band’s strange stage routines, in the wit and sophistication of their promotional videos and films, and in their willingness to adapt the nonsense poetry of the Dadaist Hugo Ball in their 1979 number I Zimbra.

In New York, from the mid-1970s onwards, cross-overs between the realms of fine art and Pop music became increasingly common. Assuming this trend continues, we can expect American art colleges to play more of a role in the development of Pop music in the future.

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