I’ve actually had two musical educations. The first one was your standard Grade 8 ABRSM education. Classical music is very good for teaching you the basics of music, regardless of whether you are a classical music kind of guy (which I am not).
Second one is listening to music. 1991, as you know, was one of the most important years in rock music, because that was when alternative music started getting popular. So it was a very very exciting time to be discovering pop music. It was one of three great eras of pop (the other two being the 60s and around 1977, the punk era), so I was fortunate to be a teenager around that time.
And one of the best things about going into this second education after having had the first is that I could hear just about everything in the song: what the guitars were doing, what the bass, the drums were doing. Everything could then be reverse engineered. So not only is there, “I like this / that”, but I could tell how they did it.
I listened to almost everything in pop music and jazz and found out what I liked and didn’t like - forming your own opinion on music is one of the most important aspects of education. I hung out in bookstores (remember – no internet during those days) and read music reviews, which are very useful for throwing up questions about how and what to think about music. An analogy here is with engineering degrees: in undergraduate they teach you the more practical stuff, and make sure you know how to do things. In postgraduate, you read papers and think about new ideas.
A classical education will not teach you anything about rap, but you have to think about what’s so great about it. It will help you understand jazz, except the swing part. If you can understand jazz drumming, you can definitely appreciate hiphop. Most difficult skill to master: songwriting. You can teach music theory, you can teach playing, but songwriting is a black art. Some songs sound “nice” but they get boring after a while. Some songs sound like a mess on first listen, but they turn out to be masterpieces. Some great songs use only 2 or 3 chords, the less great songs will sound simplistic. The great ones just sound great. Other great songs use plenty of chords, but many songs that use plenty of chords just sound complicated and cluttered and unmeaningful. Mastering songwriting involves thinking through all these issues.
Regarding the issue of Catavina, I don’t play the guitar. I will listen to it and play it on the piano, and it will take me around 1-2 hours to work it all out. Instead of going through the nitty gritties, I will be thinking about why the chords work so well, and how somebody can write a song which actually can introduce new musical ideas every line without ever having to repeat itself. I will think about how economical the melody is: notice, that the first line of Catavina goes through so many chord changes, but the melody has only C, D and E in it. Being able to come up with such interesting features is an indication of good songwriting.
There is also the issue of words in music, but I leave that as a separate issue. Taking an “O” or “A” levels in literature will prepare you for this, even though poetry is not exactly the same as writing lyrics.
What you get from this second sort of education is: you start to understand what composing, producing and arranging is supposed to do. Even if I don’t know how to do production, I would say I have an idea what I want.
When I was young I was told that you had to master an instrument before you did composing. That’s not true. Being merely competent at your instrument is good enough. David Bowie gets people to play for him. James Brown just directs his band. Ian Brown cannot sing, and he cannot play instruments. Neither Paul McCartney nor John Lennon are the master guitarist in the band: George Harrison is. I’ve heard people being called “bedroom musicians” in a derogatory sense. Brian Wilson is the ultimate bedroom musician. He even wrote a song called “In My Room”.
So the second education is in a way actually quite independent of the first. When you go to a music school, typically they will give you the first education. The second one, I don’t know if there are people teaching it, or if you have to learn it yourself. To me it is as important, if not as important as the first. Fortunately once you have a good pair of ears and a good record collection, that's all you need.
Regarding the issue that guitarists are more photogenic: unfortunately this is true. Even when you are playing keyboards, a lot of the time, you just push a button and it plays what you have performed. One extreme example was Orb performing on the “Top of the Pops”. They knew that watching people play keyboards is not very exciting. It’s not rock music where you can strike sexy macho poses. It’s not jazz where you can just sit and watch the drummer all the time. So they just played the music in the background and had two people playing chess. It is still great art all the same because it is a great artistic statement:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Brf4eayySV4
Kraftwerk just adopted this stage persona that they were all robots, so they wouldn't have to do anything. But the issue is the same.
