[sliverstorm]

With no technique or skill, your passion means nothing. Passion is the content, and technique and skill is the delivery vector.

As for breaking the "rules", the theory goes you have to master the rules to break them. Expressed in a more technical way, once you know the rules, you know when and were it's ok to break them, and you can also adhere to most of the rules while only breaking one or two.

[_delirium]

In music in particular, I often don't find this to be true, at least for my personal tastes. A good proportion of my favorite musicians are "outsiders" who went directly into doing unconventional things--- Roky Erikson, most punk bands, most grunge bands, etc. There are a handful of folks with formal music training (Bad Brains had jazz training, although it's only recently that's counted as "classical" training), but they're fairly uncommon.