What are your unpopular Stevie opinions

[David]

Originally Posted by Ghost_Tracker

I personally think she has a VERY high I.Q. I've read that the average succesful rock star ( think Steve Perry, Bruce Springstein, Lindsey Buckinham, Jon Bon Jovi ) has an I.Q. of at least 150.

If you indeed ever read such a ridiculous claim, it was probably in a book of practical jokes on readers.

I think that sounds about right - my best guess, like I said above, is that Stevie's I.Q. is about 150 or so.

I'll let that statement just stand as is. It doesn't even require a refutation.

By the way, Mick Fleetwood DOES, for sure, have a diagnosed learning disorder - I believe it's dyslexia, I seem to remember he said that flat-out in his book. And he's also, obviously, highly intelligent.

If Mick fits your concept of "highly intelligent," most of us ledgies are geniuses.

[carrie721]

Originally Posted by David

If you indeed ever read such a ridiculous claim, it was probably in a book of practical jokes on readers.
I'll let that statement just stand as is. It doesn't even require a refutation.
If Mick fits your concept of "highly intelligent," most of us ledgies are geniuses.

thank you for saying what i was too lazy to. i think people grossly misunderstand how the i.q. system works ... 150 isn't 50% above average, it's completely at the end of the bell curve ...

[catinthedark]

^^ thanks to the previous two.

there is no way stevie's IQ is 150. sorry.

[sasja]

Poor Stevie. There is no way her IQ is in the genius range.
She would have written far better things and would have made an impact on Art, and would have been much more of an innovator, creatively.
Thankfully she herSELF never claimed this . At least she has some wisdom!

Unpopular Stevie opinion #6:

Stevie was just a nice enough young girl in the right place at the right time, when flighty rhymery and a lot of arm-waving and a little country vibrato in your voice and a tiny, sexy body and long hair were the assets you needed to make others swoon....
And of course it helped that she was surrounded by people who could help her make the most of her rhymes and her presentation !

~Returns to the federal witness protection program~

Sasja

[BlackWidow]

Originally Posted by David

Here's why I like that moment: On the surface, it's all pudgy childhood & goodness & light & insufferable "whimsy" & Disneyfied emotions. But there is a fly on the ointment. As Elaine is gripped & pulled up onstage, her bare knee is banged painfully against the stage edge, with bits of skin & subcutaneous tissue being scraped off. Blood isn't directly visible, but it happens so quickly that I wouldn't be surprised if blood were seeping through & leaving stains on the pugdy childhood dress & even on the arena seats. The patella & possibly the shin bone are banged & bruised with purplish-blueish welts, indicating bleeding below the surface, & lending an alluring darkness & nihilism to the papier-mache paste & starched milk quality of the incident.

WOW! What a vivid imagination you have. I love that video..none of anything
you just described is evident to me. Elaine apeared to be quite content in the arms of her muse. What you described seemed like an episode of ER..

[BlackWidow]

Originally Posted by DavidMn

Interesting, I've never seen this.

Its on YOUTUBE.

[Jyqm]

Originally Posted by carrie721

thank you for saying what i was too lazy to. i think people grossly misunderstand how the i.q. system works ... 150 isn't 50% above average, it's completely at the end of the bell curve ...

Nor do IQ tests measure the kind ofcreative/artistic intelligence that most musicians have. IQ is all about logic and problem solving and math and recognizing patterns and ****. If anybody seriously thinks the Queen of the Twirling High Kick Faeries Stevie Nicks would score at all highly on such a test, well (WEEELLLLLLLLLLLLLLL!!!!!), then we probably should start talking about your IQ...

(Also, here's another important pattern to recognize in life: People make **** up about rock stars. All the time. When do you think is the last time Stevie Nicks took an IQ test? And where do you think some journalist or music writer would ever get a copy of the results of such a test? And how easy would it be for me to write some article and claim, "Ah, yes, well, you see, Peter Frampton has an IQ of 133"?)

(I just made that Frampton IQ number up,for those of you who are wondering.)

(It amazes me sometimes that so many Stevie fans will never believe a word that comes out of the woman's own mouth, but they'll believe anything that some know-nothing shlub writes about her.)

[SapphireSister]

Originally Posted by BlackWidow

Its on YOUTUBE.

Refresh my memory. What show is this from? I know I've seen it before.

[David]

Originally Posted by SapphireSister

Refresh my memory. What show is this from? I know I've seen it before.

This was taped around January 1984 on Solid Gold, a cheesy old TV show devoted to the Hit Parade which was supposed to compete against Casey Kasem's America's Top 40.

Stevie was drumming up a little further interest in "The Wild Heart" as well as gearing up for a spring '84 tour -- neither of which occurred.

[Ghost_Tracker]

Originally Posted by sasja

Poor Stevie. There is no way her IQ is in the genius range.

Unpopular Stevie opinion #6:

Stevie was just a nice enough young girl in the right place at the right time, when flighty rhymery and a lot of arm-waving and a little country vibrato in your voice and a tiny, sexy body and long hair were the assets you needed to make others swoon....
And of course it helped that she was surrounded by people who could help her make the most of her rhymes and her presentation !

~Sasja

Well, I can see this side to it but - what I say is, listen to "the coffee house tapes" sometime - the tapes Stevie and Lindsey made together way back in 1970 or so, maybe '71. Stevie isn't a flighty rhymery with a lot of arm-wayving and a little country vibrato in her voice singer. Never has been, never will be. It's just one of many, many things Stevie and Lindsey tried back when they were trying to break in and make it big. The one people see is just simply the one that happened to work. I agree with the rest of that sentence though!

Really though, I DO agree that other people ( *cough* - LINDSEY! ) - have been of great assistance in Arranging her music, making it more marketable, etc., but still, she has a certain "knack." And I still claim that whatever her I.Q. happens to be, it's higher than most people realize. There's different scales, but on one of them, 150 isn't "at the far end of the bell curve" - I've known plenty of people in that range. And for whatever it's worth I did read that most successful rock stars have an I.Q. of 150 or higher.

There really are different scales by the way - according to one of them, Einstein's I.Q. was "only" 160. But by another scale, it was well over 225.

Mostly though, my personal opinion is that Stevie has what they call "Emotional Intelligence" (in terms of being able to write the types of songs she does). But I could easily picture her not doing as well on the "math" or "logic" parts...

Anyway I think maybe my main point is, yeah, I can see that maybe there was some luck involved - but I seriously doubt that this level of success happened completely by accident. Rumours was the third-highest selling record of all time for decades, and many people have felt that Stevie had a lot to do with that. And right there is where the Lindsey thing comes in, of course, since he Arranged all of her music on it. But overall I feel it's closer to the truth to over-estimate her, rather than under-estimate her. In my opinion, whatever terms you use, this is somebody that's got some marbles somewhere in there.

[JWS]

Originally Posted by Ghost_Tracker

Well, I can see this side to it but - what I say is, listen to "the coffee house tapes" sometime - the tapes Stevie and Lindsey made together way back in 1970 or so, maybe '71. Stevie isn't a flighty rhymery with a lot of arm-wayving and a little country vibrato in her voice singer. Never has been, never will be. It's just one of many, many things Stevie and Lindsey tried back when they were trying to break in and make it big. The one people see is just simply the one that happened to work. I agree with the rest of that sentence though!

Really though, I DO agree that other people ( *cough* - LINDSEY! ) - have been of great assistance in Arranging her music, making it more marketable, etc., but still, she has a certain "knack." And I still claim that whatever her I.Q. happens to be, it's higher than most people realize. There's different scales, but on one of them, 150 isn't "at the far end of the bell curve" - I've known plenty of people in that range. And for whatever it's worth I did read that most successful rock stars have an I.Q. of 150 or higher.

There really are different scales by the way - according to one of them, Einstein's I.Q. was "only" 160. But by another scale, it was well over 225.

Mostly though, my personal opinion is that Stevie has what they call "Emotional Intelligence" (in terms of being able to write the types of songs she does). But I could easily picture her not doing as well on the "math" or "logic" parts...

Anyway I think maybe my main point is, yeah, I can see that maybe there was some luck involved - but I seriously doubt that this level of success happened completely by accident. Rumours was the third-highest selling record of all time for decades, and many people have felt that Stevie had a lot to do with that. And right there is where the Lindsey thing comes in, of course, since he Arranged all of her music on it. But overall I feel it's closer to the truth to over-estimate her, rather than under-estimate her. In my opinion, whatever terms you use, this is somebody that's got some marbles somewhere in there.

All this IQ talk got me to research the distribution. This is from wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ#IQ_score_distribution

I have also read that Stevie has a "high" IQ, but don't it's anywhere near 150. According to the table below, if Stevie's IQ is 150 she is the top .04%

IQ score distribution
IQ score distribution IQ Range Percentile Range
Below 30 0 – 0.0002
30 to 50 0.0002 – 0.04
50 to 60 0.04 – 0.4
60 to 74 0.4 – 4
74 to 89 4 – 23
89 to 100 23 – 50
100 to 111 50 – 77
111 to 120 77 – 91
120 to 125 91 – 95
125 to 132 95 – 98
132 to 137 98 – 99.3
137 to 150 99.3 – 99.96
above 150 99.96 – 100

IQ scores are expressed as a number normalized so that the average IQ in an age group is 100. In other words, an individual scoring 115 is above average when compared to people in the same age group. It is common practice to standardize so that the standard deviation (σ) of scores is 15, although some IQ tests use different scales (for example, the Stanford Binet IQ test uses a standard deviation of 16, and the Cattell IIIB test uses a standard deviation of 24). Tests are designed so that the distribution of IQ scores is Gaussian; that is, it follows a bell curve. A difference has been documented between the IQ score distributions of left-handed and right-handed test subjects; the distribution in left-handed people tends to cluster at the two extremes of the IQ scale.

(The following numbers apply to IQ scales standard deviation σ = 15.) Roughly 68% of the population has an IQ between 85 and 115. The "normal" range, or range between −2 and +2 standard deviations from the mean, is between 70 and 130, and contains about 95% of the population. An accurate score below 70 may indicate mental retardation, and a score above 130 may indicate intellectual giftedness. Retardation may result from normal variation or from a genetic or developmental malady; analogously, some otherwise normal people are very short, and others have dwarfism. Giftedness appears to be normal variation; autistic savants have often astonishing cognitive powers but below-average IQ's.

It has been observed that scores outside the range 55 to 145 must be cautiously interpreted because there are smaller numbers of respondents with which to make comparisons in those ranges. Moreover, at such extreme values, the normal distribution is a less accurate estimate of the true IQ distribution.

In actuality there is a higher percentage of the population measured at 3 or more standard deviation levels on the test than the probabilities of the normal distribution would predict (Lewis Terman, Genetic Studies of Genius, 1959). Some IQ scoring procedures may attempt to integrate such clusters of statistical outliers into the curve by adjusting the scores so that they better represent actual probabilities (according to Silverman) and in these cases, scores around 145 and above may actually have been notably higher, were they not so adjusted.

Most IQ tests in the United States tend to use a SD-15 or SD-16 scale, meaning that one standard deviation corresponds to +/- 16 points on the IQ scale. However, European IQ tests tend to use a SD-24 or SD-25 scale, resulting in discrepancies. Therefore, an IQ of 130 (+2 standard deviations) in the U.S. might correspond to an IQ of 148-150 in Europe. Due to these differences, percentiles are more accurate measurements than IQ numbers.

[Ghost_Tracker]

Originally Posted by David

If Mick fits your concept of "highly intelligent," most of us ledgies are geniuses.

right! I'm glad we're in such close agreement.

[DavidMn]

Originally Posted by Ghost_Tracker

right! I'm glad we're in such close agreement.

Someone told me once my IQ was like 115, I guess that's good?

[Ghost_Tracker]

Originally Posted by cliffdweller

I Also, where, besides not being able to read music, is the evidence?

I don't consider this to be evidence - just something I thought was interesting - in an interview which is available on youtube, Sandra Bernhardt was interviewing Stevie and she gave her a greeting card with something she had written. Stevie looked at it for a moment and got this embarrassed look on her face, and Sandra Bernhardt asked her if she should read it for her and Stevie said yes and acted kind of awkward and a little embarrassed and quickly dropped some sort of flimsy line about "my glasses, you know.!"
And I could be totally wrong but it seemed like Bernhardt realized what was going on and covered for her. I'm not saying that Stevie can't read, as a matter of fact she mentioned on "Ask Stevie" on Nicksfix that she had been reading Wheel of Fortune, which is a very long and pretty complex novel, I believe. But there may be some difficulties with how she perceives words on the written page, or something.
I could be totally wrong, of course, but it's my belief that Mr. Nicks, Stevie, and Lindsey all dropped hints about this "in between the lines." Mr. Nicks, for example, mentioned something in an interview about how Stevie has perservered despite the challenges she's been faced with, and he became very emotional while describing this. This was before he was even aware of what was going on in her "rock star" life - he was apparently totally oblivious to all that at that point. I could be totally wrong, of course, but my honest belief is that one of those difficulties was some kind of learning problem. Not one that was so severe that she couldn't do well in school, but one which gave her some challenges to overcome and caused her to process information a little differently. Which doesn't mean she's not highly intelligent or even a genius, in certain ways.

Another piece of admittedly flimsy evidence is her difficulties with basic tense changes and her stubborness about changing them to the correct form. I said the opposite in another post, I admit, that it's "just the poet that she is," but these mistakes, in my opinion, aren't intentional - she has difficulty knowing what the correct form is. And yes, as another person said, she DID GO to high school and several years of college - and yet these things cause her great difficulty (i.m.o.). Also, before sararhiannon.com went down, some of her original writing was on there - she has (or had back then) extreme difficulties spelling simple words correctly. I don't think these were isolated incidents due to not paying attention, being lazy, "it's only a first draft," etc. - this was what they would call a "repeated pattern" - something that went beyond simple mistakes which happen when anyone's writing a first draft of something. Anyway that's the best I can answer - I consider her to be a highly intelligent person who has had some learning challenges to overcome, and I think she's done so wonderfully.

[Ghost_Tracker]

Originally Posted by DavidMn

Someone told me once my IQ was like 115, I guess that's good?

For whatever it's worth (very little, many would feel), on paper a 115 I.Q. means that a person should be able to do, for example, schoolwork that a 12 year old could do without extreme difficulty, when they are 10 years old. It's certainly not "low." But I'm sure many, many people would feel that the whole thing is just buschwa anyway. By the way, for whatever it's worth, George Bush's is 140. So uhhh...