Tomorrow, February 10th, The Academy of Contemporary Music at the University of Central Oklahoma will present a master class with Flaming Lips multi-instrumentalist and adjunct professor of Badass, Steven Drozd. Open only to enrolled students (awww), the class will consist of an interview and a Q&A session with the indie drum legend and seemingly eight-armed keyboard and guitar mastermind, who will discuss such invaluable topics as musicianship and what life is like for a professional musician (hint: there’s probably a lot of driving involved). “I wish this [school] would have been around when I was a 17- or 18-year-old kid,” Drozd told NPR recently. Although, if it were around, Drozd might have set himself on a different musical path and the spacetime continuum deal would be ALL screwed up, and who KNOWS who’d be president… so, personally, I’m sort of fifth-dimensionally glad that it wasn’t.
But either way, as NPR further reports, it’s actually not all that odd that Drozd is showing up to school with these kids, as he and Lips manager Scott Booker helped start the Academy in the first place just last fall, with the mission of teaching students about both music and the music industry. And actually, he’s not even the first music star to guest-lecture there. Last semester, students got a Master Class from the Who’s Roger Daltrey (mostly about middle-aged male hair care) , as well as a concert from rockabilly legend Wanda Jackson, backed by a some lucky Academy students.
The school, which grants a two-year associate’s degree in music performance and production, is the US branch of Britain’s groundbreaking Academy of Contemporary Music, based in Guildford, England. I guess that’s why crazy old Roger Daltrey showed up and lip-synced a lecture or two?
• The Academy of Contemporary Music (Oklahoma): http://acm-uco.com
