Frank Zappa: Classic or Dud?

It feels like so often I try again with an unfamiliar, to me, album and it's like one step forward and two steps back. Like I recently played through all of Just Another Band for the first time ever, I thought "Billy the Mountain" was actually a decent absurdist take on the side-long prog epic and I appreciated where he was going with that one. But then "Magdalena" came on and just, yeah, that's just indefensible smut that doesn't serve any "social commentary" or anything...

xp

I was thinking "surreal", but yeah, absurdist works too. The film's primary idea is that "touring makes you crazy", and it comes off like one big, disassociative episode.

Cmon George Duke saying "I carry a copy of downbeat magazine in my back pocket so cats will think I know what's happening" is funny. Also Keith Moon as a vacuum.

The vacuum story line comes from a piece called "The Pleated Gazelle." Some of that was used for 200 Motels.

SHE HAD A TERRIBLE FIGHT WITH HER OLD BOY FRIEND ONE NIGHT. SHE TOLD HIM TO GO AWAY AND BEAT HIM WITH A PLASTIC FISH. SHE ATE SOME VIENNA SAUSAGES TO CALM DOWN. THEN SHE MET A NEWT RANCHER . . . A YOUNG LAD WHO RAISED NEWTS SO RICH PEOPLE COULD HAVE COATS MADE OUT OF THEM. SHE LOVED HIM A LOT, AND THEY STARTED SHACKING UP ON THE RANCH WHERE HE GREW THE NEWTS. EVERYTHING WAS FINE EXCEPT HE WAS IN LOVE WITH AN INDUSTRIAL VACUUM CLEANER . . .

Absurdist in the extreme, but yeah I guess funny if you're in the right mood.

it certainly has funny elements (if you like that kind of thing), but there's a strong undercurrent of nightmarish paranoia running throughout

honestly the Mad Libs component to his lyrics often pisses me off more than the outright hateful shit

lol I never made the Mad Libs comparison, but now I will never think of his lyrics in the same way again.

Kurt, thanks for that Audioactive mix, it's pretty interesting. It confirms my belief that the sound of his band, especially his guitar, is much less to my tastes by the 80s. I liked the 1984 "reggae" arrangement of "King Kong" though.

PO4:
Willie the pimp
Peaches
Uncle Remus
You’re probably wondering why I’m here

Not really but tell us anyway.

How’d I miss the Mad Libs thing before? That’s right on target.

The (adjective) (noun)

The Pleated Gazelle

HAHAHA I am so hilarious.

You fool! I wasn’t actually trying to be funny, just mocking those morons who think THEY themselves are funny, DO U SEE?

the entire first album by vril (the bob drake surf project, not the nazi vril) has song titles in this format:

https://www.discogs.com/release/2524059-Vril-Effigies-In-Cork

Add an article to the beginning and “The Preening Docent” could also be an Edward Gorey book.

Mark Leyner wrote [writes?] in that Mad Lib style, which I found utterly unbearable at novel length.

Everything, including the vault and FZ's name and likeness, sold to Universal. https://www.billboard.com/pro/frank-zappa-song-publishing-catalogs-universal-music-group-archive/

Also, last year Lady Gaga sold the Laurel Canyon house that included the UMRK. I wonder who owns it now.

Hold on aren't Universal the company that lost shitloads of literally irreplaceable recordings in a fire?

They're going to replace everybody else's lost masters with Zappa guitar solos and hope no-one's the wiser.

xxpost to self, Lizzy Jagger bought the house.

xp LOL

so the entire Zappa family – Moon, Dweezil, Ahmet and Diva – is thrilled to pass the baton to the new forever stewards for all things Frank Zappa

This is the part I was wondering about.

New Zappa releases are much like the Grateful Dead model.

Vaultmeister Joe finds some nice tapes, Ahmet green lights it and they put a cool box out, it's well-considered and lines of communication with the fans' needs are healthy.

But unless someone is planning to reboot all the classic albums (again), I don't see it making much money as opposed to ticking over nicely.

Zappa Night on the next season of American Idol.

Hold on aren't Universal the company that lost shitloads of literally irreplaceable recordings in a fire?

― Eavis Has Left the Building (Tom D.)

oh no i will mourn the priceless loss of thousands of live recordings of "the illinois enema bandit", frank zappa's song about how all college-educated women deserve to be sexually assaulted

thousands because he played it at _every single concert from 1976 on_ even though i have never heard anybody else in the entire world ever have a good thing to say about it

Zappa's catalog is absolutely filled with hateful misogyny and horrifying winks and nots endorsing sexual assault, so I sure as fuck don't want to defend the guy on this count, but that song is written from the POV of an actual, real life criminal.

Which isn't to defend the choice of him playing the awful song all the damn time, but that particular song is really not that much worse than, say, 60% of Slayer's catalog.

Zappa's catalog is absolutely filled with hateful misogyny and horrifying winks and nots endorsing sexual assault, so I sure as fuck don't want to defend the guy on this count

this is not a put-down. this is a serious question. it's not a question i want an answer to - in fact i'd prefer it if you _didn't_ give me an answer to it - but it's a question which i would like you to, if you feel comfortable, ask yourself.

if you didn't want to, why did you? would some great wrong have been committed if you had chosen to remain silent on this point?

I think "writing a song from the POV of an actual criminal" falls into the category of imitative fallacy.

I think "writing a song from the POV of an actual criminal" falls into the category of imitative fallacy.

― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux)

it's certainly worth comparing zappa's account of kenyon's crimes to the account henry threadgill gave to nat hentoff, should one be so interested

truthfully, my interest in this song in particular lies more in the fact that i experience this song very differently now, as a college-educated woman, than i did when i first encountered the song, when i was _not_ a college-educated woman. this isn't necessarily a routine experience listeners have with the song, but i do believe it to be a valuable perspective nevertheless.

I suppose the comparison maybe interesting (?), but Zappa really has nothing worthwhile to say on this subject.

also "Illinois" is 3rd person, not from the POV of the bandit? like literally that is not what that song is.

I suppose the comparison maybe interesting (?), but Zappa really has nothing worthwhile to say on this subject.

― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux)

oh god i'm not saying _zappa's_ perspective is worthwhile i'm talking about _my_ perspective lol

Yeah, my post was totally unnecessary and pointless, sorry rushomancy. I also very much incorrectly recalled the POV of the lyrics, hadn't heard the song for many, many years.

fwiw I get it, I mean I remember "Jumbo Go Away" putting me off Zappa for a while and then coming back and thinking "ok, I probably just missed the joke, or misread the tone or something" then listening to it again and realizing it was even worse than I remembered

its frustrating because Zappa is (IMO) a smart & articulate person in general, and arguably a musical genius, which I think is why he got off so much on writing stuff like he's Andrew Dice Clay. I can see the appeal in something like that. But what gets me is there's just so little cleverness to it, it all feels so unsubtle and beneath him that I have to believe he's every bit the pig he tried to convince people he was. He tries to play both sides in a way that's so transparent that it kind of ruins everything about him. He was in his mid-30s when he wrote "Enema Bandit"!! and (as rush mentioned) he played it over and over and over again!

oh god i'm not saying _zappa's_ perspective is worthwhile i'm talking about _my_ perspective lol

No, I got that, but you were talking about comparing his take to Threadgill/Hentoff's.

The often indefensible, casual misogyny still remains a huge stumbling block for me so I find myself mostly returning to stuff like Hot Rats or the instrumental stuff most often.

So here's something I just thought about: Now that Frank Zappa's...everything (music released and otherwise, videos, *likeness*)...has been sold to Universal by the family, will there be an attempt to kind of integrate him into "classic rock" and scrub away his decades of fringe weirdo status?

Probably, and some attempt to solidify his image as the rock musician who "really understood" jazz fusion and classical.

one of the things that bugs me a lot about zappa these days is how _proud_ he was of being uneducated. bragged about having one semester of college and never having learned anything else about composition since then. i mean, i'm not putting him down for what he was, but compare that to, say, dirk campbell of egg and national health, who decided to really study composition in-depth when aaron copland criticized "long piece no. 3" for its lack of thematic development, resulting in works like "enneagram" and "zabaglione". (unfortunately the final version of "zabaglione", which is utterly brilliant, was never professionally recorded and exists only on a shitty-quality bootleg tape of campbell's last gig with the band)

I've always been curious what people who really study music think of Zappa. he does a lot of things that I consider interesting - having multiple guys play in different time signatures, writing these crazy horn charts and then using them for the vocal lines, all those sudden pitch-ups and double speed sections, etc. - the problem is most of the time this stuff just doesn't *sound* all that good. to me it does not sound all that different than the Weird Al parody "Genius in France", which IMO is a fair bit more listenable than 80% of the Zappa catalogue. are there musicologists out there willing to go on and on about Zappa's genius?

If I see the word genius and Frank Zappa in the same sentence again I think I'll scream.

I don't think he was proud of being uneducated. I think he was proud of being self-educated.

“Drop out of school before your mind rots from exposure to our mediocre educational system. Forget about the Senior Prom and go to the library and educate yourself if you've got any guts. Some of you like Pep rallies and plastic robots who tell you what to read.” and "“If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library.”

I spent three years at university and didn't get laid once. THANKS A LOT FRANK

It's a tiny, tiny footnote to the dialectics of poodle play, but I'm still intrigued by the fact that Zappa was a massive fan of 'Supernaut' by Black Sabbath - I wonder why that one in particular struck a chord? I mean, of course it's great, it's Sabbath at some kind of peak, but this was at a time when Sabbath were far from being critical darlings, and far from fitting in with the muso fusion world that Zappa semi-inhabitated. So I think he could be a good or interesting listener, when he wanted to be; at any rate, I would much rather read a book of his thoughts on music than his thoughts on politics, or society, or human relationships, or

Yeah he is good at curating. Likes Varese etc. I think it would be maddening if he tried to structure arguments for that stuff on paper though.

in Rome last year and some theater of regard had posters out of the classic composers: Beethoven, Bernstein, Zappa.

“Drop out of school before your mind rots from exposure to our mediocre educational system. Forget about the Senior Prom and go to the library and educate yourself if you've got any guts. Some of you like Pep rallies and plastic robots who tell you what to read.” and "“If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library.”

I mean I don't even know what to say about that quote. I love libraries, I love reading, and I'm something of an autodidact, but you know what else helps me learn? _Being taught_. I think it's pretty fucked up that he's got this exaggerated hostility towards being taught something he doesn't know by somebody else.

It strikes me that Zappa _especially_ could have stood to learn how to treat other people with kindness and respect.

Yeah him and Beefheart both treated some people like crap. That's why FZ eventually just had hired guns in his band, but even doing that kind of vibe even led his own bands to turn upon themselves. I think he was just an OCD autodidact that really had little time for anything or anyone except his muse.

I listened to Halloween '73 yesterday, the Roxy & Elsewhere band doing the standard setlist from that era, which a few fun throwbacks like "The Dog Breath Variations" and "Uncle Meat." Pretty good overall, but he introduces Ruth "Smelling Good Between The Legs" Underwood, and I'm just like... why? I guess if she was able to tolerate being in the band with him it shouldn't bother me, but... WHY?

i hate that shit sooooo much

props to underwood for being a good sport and not cracking his skull with one of her mallets but jesus christ