Frank Zappa: Classic or Dud?

all I can say rush is don't listen to "Jumbo Go Away" it's actually somehow worse than all the songs you mentioned

― frogbs

heard it. for me the all-time nadir is going to be the "illinois enema bandit", in which he makes the argument that college educated women need to be sexually assaulted.

and he then went on to play this song, which unlike "wild love" is musically uninteresting, as an encore at damn near every concert of his between 1976, when he wrote it, and his death. nobody asked for that. there were no frank zappa fans out there yelling for "ILLINOIS ENEMA BANDIT!" even among his deeply misogynist fanbase, the people who _really really really_ wanted to hear "titties and beer".

as openly as he disdained his audience he didn't ever seem to understand that... he _earned_ that audience. he catered to them, and actively opposed people who challenged their misogyny. to me the key moment of this is in boston in the fall of 1976... he was making another attempt to have a woman in his band, the supremely talented lady bianca. as she started into her bravura rendition of "you didn't try to call me", an audience member shouted for her to take her clothes of. she responded, quite sensibly, that he should tell his mama to take her clothes off, and then tell her to suck a rat's dick.

zappa made a big joke out of it during the concert, but you can hear how unnerved he is in his voice. he upbraided her after the concert for being _unprofessional_. fucking excuse me? _unprofessional_? to me, this demonstrates quite well to what extent his sleazy-game-show-host act was a mask for his own uncertainty and insecurity. He pulled the same shit on SNL in '78. y'all know how _that_ went, i'm sure.

anyway. lady bianca didn't finish out the tour. he made a couple attempts, like with lisa popeil, ron popeil's daughter, but to the best of my knowledge, was never able to keep a woman in his touring band aside from ruth underwood.

actually what it kind of reminds me of is the work of Tim Follin, the VGM composer famous for making some pretty insane soundtracks to shitty video games. to the point where even Nintendo's hardware guys famously couldn't figure out how he was getting certain sounds out of their chips. when interviewed he talks about how a lot of his technique is just feeding crazy sequences of notes into the dev kit, stuff that makes sense mathematically but couldn't really be played organically, and lo and behold a lot of that shit sounded very cool. Zappa did a lot of stuff like that, except people really did have to play it, though he'd speed the tape up or edit it together to give it that impossible sound he was looking for. I guess there's something endearing about that, as Frank himself clearly didn't like very much, but in those moments you can figure he's at least trying to make something a guy like him *would* like, and in doing so was going quite a bit further out than any of his peers.

― frogbs

interesting comparison! i think it's a good one... even moreso with his earlier ZX Spectrum work than with his NES work. something like "agent x in the brain drain caper", you're dealing with something that's insanely technically sophisticated as well as highly compositionally sophisticated (yeah his stuff was pretty damn prog). follin himself said of the results: "The only drawback was that it sounded like a vacuum cleaner with nails stuck in it." if you can get past how timbrally awful it is, it's fucking great, you know?

unlike follin, though, that's what zappa _wanted_ the effect of his music to be. the thing that strikes me about zappa's synclavier work was how fundamentally _uncreative_ his use of timbre was. he was always talking about the advanced possibilities the synclavier had in those regards, but when i listen to civilization phase iii it doesn't differ significantly from analog timbres. there was _so much_ interesting stuff being done with synthesized music in this era and zappa was doing none of it. he completely failed to take advantage of the possibilities of the medium in any meaningful way.

Zappa's "Hot Rats" is like Springsteen's "Nebraska," the album always brought up to convince the haters.

― Josh in Chicago

well i'm not going to try and convince anybody zappa is good by telling them to listen to fucking _thing-fish_!

also, i think i deserve _some_ hater cred for describing zappa as "totally repellent".

for me it's pretty easy, it's cuts off after 1970 for the most part, i can do without most of the stuff after that

but then you would cut off "i'm the slime"

there was a twitter prompt going around that said something like "this artist has one (1) great album of music scattered throughout their discography" and that's how i feel about post hot rats zappa

also, i think i deserve _some_ hater cred for describing zappa as "totally repellent".

I popped real hard when you said that tbh because it's really the problem -- if at any point zappa's shit got its hooks in you, then you see its virtues, and if you're a person who wants to be on the side of non-gross thinking about the world & people, then you're especially repulsed by how he can be both a guy interested in making interesting, distinctive and good stuff and still being THAT GUY ~in the same stuff~. for me there's a real look-in-the-mirror thing with this because I was super into Zappa as a kid, thanks to his reliable presence on the Dr. Demento Top 10. I was utterly ripe for a guy whose schtick was "if you like this, then you're one of the smart ones"; at 12, I had Zappa in NY, Sleep Dirt, and Joe's Garage. My peers in 6th grade were fellow Titties n Beer fans, we could recite that shit, but by 7th grade I was a loner, listening to "Joe's Garage" on headphone, laughing my ass off at the Central Scrutinizer, loving the title track SO MUCH, fuck all the squares, right...and then as an adult to revisit these tunes, whose workings are embedded in my pleasure centers, and hear just how much contempt there is in it, how really humorless the humor is. and yet! watermelon in easter hay!

The time when I was deepest into Zappa was also the period in my life when I was most involved with Catholicism, going on youth retreats and joining the CYO and all that stuff. Perhaps the "us vs them/we know something they don't" thing was a common factor, I don't know.

Zappa paired with Dr. Demento pretty much sums it up, though I'm a "Weird" Al man myself. Which perhaps ties it all together, because as I understand it his band are a bunch of big Zappa heads.

you'd have to be a super fan to satirize zappa this effectively

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwFf9vGRqcs

Not going to link to the story of the time Weird Al’s bassist auditioned for Zappa again, or am I?

JCLC I have the same sort of story, in 9th grade I used to think "Broken Hearts are for Assholes" and "Stick it Out" were the funniest things just because of how unnecessarily inappropriate they were. like they weren't funny, exactly, but the thought of springing them on unsuspecting people who knew of Zappa as a respectable jazz guy or whatever was pretty amusing. I justified it by going "no no, this is satire", though looking back the 'satire' of something like "Brown Shoes Don't Make It" comes off a bit differently knowing what some of the Mothers would later get involved with.

indeed as I get older its harder to see much outside of the contempt, it reminds me of a part of myself that I don't really like. the part of me that at age 12 was mocking the Backstreet Boys by singing their songs off key and remarking about how phony they were. the part of me that took pride in not falling for pop music or advertisements or romantic comedies and would look down upon those who did, which at the end of the day just came from an inability to drop my guard for even a second.

yea "Genius in France" is really unbelievable, there's probably like 100+ distinct Zappa references in there. his style parodies have always been insanely otm but this one is particularly impressive, especially since it manages to capture Frank's essence so well without delving into any of the real odious stuff about him

there was _so much_ interesting stuff being done with synthesized music in this era and zappa was doing none of it. he completely failed to take advantage of the possibilities of the medium in any meaningful way.

I think Jazz From Hell is plenty interesting, though maybe it's not intentionally so - a lot of vaporwave artists have actually tried to capture that exact sound but somehow JFH resonates more with me because I don't think it's necessarily supposed to sound so dead and lifeless. I remember Vektroid saying it was one of her favorite albums despite having zero interest in Zappa otherwise.

"unsuspecting people who knew of Zappa as a respectable jazz guy"

this is not a large group of ppl in my estimation

the part of me that at age 12 was mocking the Backstreet Boys by singing their songs off key and remarking about how phony they were. the part of me that took pride in not falling for pop music or advertisements or romantic comedies and would look down upon those who did, which at the end of the day just came from an inability to drop my guard for even a second.

Here's the question, though: When your attitude shifted, did it shift to "Oh, this is Good, Actually," or did it shift to "I can respect the craft that goes into this work, without actually liking the resulting product"? The latter is where I've landed — pop music is hard to make, especially on the recording/engineering side, so I will nod respectfully in the direction of people who are able to do that thing, but I cannot make the leap to actually enjoying pop songs. They don't work on me.

b.) being a Zappa fan meant that you were superior to not only other lumpen rock fans, but to everyone else in society extant.

― veronica moser

so setting some boundaries here: and my having at one point been a fucking huge zappa fan, of having even been an apologist for his misogynist bullshit, doesn't make me any less of a woman. these are facts and they are not open to question.

with those as the boundaries, yeah, veronica, i do tend to agree with you

i didn't fit in. i didn't know how to relate to other people. i thought of myself as weird and ugly. "weird" i guess stuck. "ugly", in retrospect, was mostly the gender dysphoria.

so in late '93 or early '94, shortly after frank zappa dies, the school janitor loans my youngest sibling his copy of "apostrophe"

i mean i've never heard anything like this shit. it's... i think it's the marimba lick at the beginning of "st. alphonzo's pancake breakfast". at this point what i know about music is like, led zeppelin, the dead kennedys, and devo. "classic rock" music with guitars and maybe a synthesizer or two.

i mean looking back it's a schtick, and it's a schtick that wears on me pretty quickly. back then, i see this guy and i buy into the myth, this is a guy who does things his own way and doesn't conform to the expectations society places on him and is proud of it.

could i have bought into that myth if i _wasn't_ someone everyone saw as a cis white man? nope. was being able to buy into that myth a privilege? i don't know. i guess i can see how somebody could argue that. i'm not sure spending my 20s believing that frank zappa was The Greatest Composer of the 20th Century did me any favors. particularly after realizing that oh, wait, we don't actually have anything in common at all. honestly that's probably for the best. being like frank zappa isn't necessarily something to aspire to. trying to be like frank zappa is alienating me from a lot of people who... people i could really learn something from.

for a while it was easier to say that they just didn't understand his _genius_.

i don't know. i kind of hate the man as a human being and a lot of his music is... the word that comes to mind is "offensive". he was proud of being offensive! i'm proud of... offending a lot of the same people zappa was, fundamentalist christians who think that who i am is evil and bad. in 1993, hating reagan and the PMRC seemed kind of important. in 2023, his political songs seem really puerile and stupid. even when he's _right_, it's often for the wrong reasons.

i didn't know anybody who was right for the _right_ reasons, back then.

what's left? a man who's been dead for 30 years and left behind a bunch of aging fans who think he's the Best Thing Ever and a bunch of gross bullshit songs and some music, way more than an album's worth, that i think is still pretty good and enjoyable to listen to. most of them from before 1975, but scattered all over the place, really. you know what's a good song? "phyniox" - he had a really good band with novi novog in it that rehearsed, never toured, they did that one. that's another one of those really sweet fanfares. "amnerika". really good melody to that one. "what's new in baltimore". "outrage at valdez". that's just the ones from '75 and later. they're all instrumentals. his lyrics were beyond redemption at that point. he had a _lot_ of instrumentals, though. and before '75, even a lot of the ones with lyrics are tolerable. "cheepnis", for instance, it's not a patch on "thriller" but it's got a certain charm to it. or else they have versions without lyrics. take out the words to "penis dimension" and it's actually a lovely ballad, for instance.

good stuff from before then? leaving out the hot rats tracks, there's plenty. "groupie bang bang", i like that one actually. "cruising for burgers". "excentrifugal forz". "the little house i used to live in". "montana". "eat that question". "imaginary disease". "wonderful wino" (the 1973 version). "andy". "village of the sun", the august '73 arrangement with george duke on vocals. "cucamonga". "music for violin and low-budget orchestra". "interlude". "remington electric razor".

and that's leaving off the improvised stuff and live versions of the songs that transcend the original (the '88 version of "cruising for burgers" is very different from the "uncle meat" version and beautiful in its own way, majestic even).

is it the greatest stuff ever? is frank zappa the greatest composer to ever live? no. hell no. not even close. dammit, it's _likable_, though. if you can't separate the artist from the art, fair enough. me personally? he's dead. i have a lot fewer problems listening to people's work once i know they're not actively out there doing harm.

i mean i guess josh is right, i'm not very good at being a hater. at the same time, a lot of this stuff... yeah, i like it. maybe one day i'll stop liking it. i haven't yet.

so setting some boundaries here: and my having at one point been a fucking huge zappa fan, of having even been an apologist for his misogynist bullshit, doesn't make me any less of a woman. these are facts and they are not open to question.

first bit of that got lost in an edit... s/b "here: i'm a trans woman, and my having been..."

this is not a large group of ppl in my estimation

well for me I only knew of Zappa from seeing him namedropped all the time and the impression I got was that he was some kind of serious guitar nerd like Robert Fripp. so when Pandora suggested a song by him called "Titties and Beer" I was like....uhh hold up

Here's the question, though: When your attitude shifted, did it shift to "Oh, this is Good, Actually," or did it shift to "I can respect the craft that goes into this work, without actually liking the resulting product"?

part of it is the way you just become a different person over time and can understand what it's like to enjoy something you thought was beneath you before, or conversely how something that meant a lot to you back in the day may come off totally unappealing now. and part the realization that I wasn't giving people enough credit, there's an element of escapism when it comes to boy bands that I wasn't really getting at the age of 12. I was just taking everything too literally. but yeah I mean in addition to that they're just damn fine pop songs really.

yea "Genius in France" is really unbelievable, there's probably like 100+ distinct Zappa references in there. his style parodies have always been insanely otm but this one is particularly impressive, especially since it manages to capture Frank's essence so well without delving into any of the real odious stuff about him

― frogbs

the zappa parody i always think of is "frankie's in town". it is absolutely _vicious_ - nails every aspect of his '80s schtick while tearing that schtick to absolute _shreds_.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJPK35hChAk

Thanks, was about to go looking for that.

dweezil plays on "genius in france," no?

hah yeah this is great as well, I do wonder what Zappa thought of that one since the subtext here is "whatever, you're not a singular genius, anyone can do this if they wanted to" (obviously both this band and Weird Al's are quite talented but I'm pretty sure Zappa took a lot of pride in doing stuff he thought nobody else could)

We’ve been doing the Mothers vs. Velvets for about a thousand years now but have we done Zappa vs. Steely Dan yet? For me their Jazz and R&B borrowings are a lot more satisfying and, um, logical.

evidently he strongly disliked the above cox thing…

Of course he did.

Because…it wasn’t…funny?

Never stopped him before when he did it.

Thinking now of how supposedly Elvis said his favorite of his imitators was Andy Kaufman.

Weird Al's has some love in it -- he was a new Dr. Demento guy at the exact time when "Titties and Beer" was winning the top 10 what seemed like every week. "Frankie's in Town" is incredibly vicious, and beautiful. "To hear him sing about the stuff that he hates"

Somehow with FZ it's like there is in fact not a thin line between love and hate.

indeed as I get older its harder to see much outside of the contempt, it reminds me of a part of myself that I don't really like. the part of me that at age 12 was mocking the Backstreet Boys by singing their songs off key and remarking about how phony they were. the part of me that took pride in not falling for pop music or advertisements or romantic comedies and would look down upon those who did, which at the end of the day just came from an inability to drop my guard for even a second.

yes, this. the me who loved Zappa's records as a kid is an insecure guy who sees, in Zappa, a possible blueprint for an effective lifelong defense mechanism. and who holds himself in pretty deep contempt, and wants to be sure he can say, when he's grown up, "It's you who are the assholes, actually." I was in junior high at the time, I should be gentle with my junior high self, but it's still embarrassing.

Any Zappa albums I ever bought I bought for the drummers. That was a very short-lived phase, because whether you're buying it for the drummer, the bassist, the percussionist, the guitarist, you're still mostly getting a whole lot of Zappa.

Shit, I'm still working to hate myself less. I'm not ashamed of myself for hating myself as much as I did. It was what I was taught. Building your life around Frank Zappa or being an incel or whatever is one possible way of dealing with that. It's not how I do things now, and I'm glad that's not how I do things now.

To me the Zappa-like figures I got over shortly after starting high school were guys like Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein.

What is "Jelly Roll Gum Drop" though? It's not doo wop, more like bubblegum soul (I like it btw).

― The First Time Ever I Saw Gervais (Tom D.), Monday, November 20, 2023 6:46 AM (five hours ago)

I've never known what it is either. Probably recorded in 1967, so that's pretty early for "bubblegum" proper. It's also very fast. Idk, somehow it sounds more '60s than '50s to me.

all I can say rush is don't listen to "Jumbo Go Away" it's actually somehow worse than all the songs you mentioned

― frogbs, Monday, November 20, 2023 10:21 AM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

jesus what a terrible fucking song

I guess the commonality between Zappa and the other two guys I mentioned is crepeyness combined with I-know-better arrogance topped off with superhuman Vielschreiber Sitzfleisch.

from the vantage point of late 2023, I think it can be hard to remember that for many years before the punk rock fissure of 1977, almost no one else's posture was "mainstream society/ culture is false, saccharine, anodyne, it just fuckin' sucks!!" (...) he was almost alone in that attitude, at least at the prominent level at which he operated, from his debut until 1977.

Sorry to back up so far (this is a busy thread!) – but isn't this just, like, the "counterculture"? I mean punks didn't invent that attitude, you can find it on Jefferson Airplane albums or whatever (and I know Zappa hated hippies, but...)

norman mailer was using "plastic" as an insult back in the 50s

Yeah I was gonna say, how is Zappa different from any random beatnik who thought that he and his friends were on The Real Shit...

there is also a kind of double ratchet tho: on one hand ppl kept coming along to declare that earlier critics (or just other critics) weren't the actual real thing, on the other hand there just being more and more and more ppl making this declaration

there wasn't many beatniks, there were lots of punks

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biW3llPf8Mw

I mean punks didn't invent that attitude, you can find it on Jefferson Airplane albums or whatever (and I know Zappa hated hippies, but...)

― This field is required (morrisp)

he actually collaborated with at least grace slick! on "would you like a snack?" (no relation to the _200 motels_ song of the same name). it's good! very feminist. that bit is slick, not zappa :)

anyway best i can tell the real reason he hated hippies is because he was from LA and he hated the SF scene. simple crosstown rivalry.

"punk" is an interesting one... there's that song "flower punk"... it's about hippies, but in the song he refers to them as "punks". i think it's in the "punk kid" sense and not in the "homosexual bottom" sense.

very feminist. that bit is slick, not zappa :)

― Kate (rushomancy)

actually that's an assumption on my part. for all i know the lyrics, a surreal joycean riff on menstruation, sex, and eating disorders, were in fact contributed by zappa and slick did the music, emulating zappa's compositional style flawlessly :)

norman mailer was using "plastic" as an insult back in the 50s

I think plenty of the beatnik criticisms of the straight world are fair enough and come from a place of wanting a gentler world, but of course there's a lot of it that comes from a place of condescension / insecurity / hatred too. Zappa hated hippies but was similar to them in his blanket "all you normies are morons" position; but landing on Mailer or whoever and saddling the 60s counterculture with that seems pretty selective. the Black Panthers didn't think much of mainstream culture either, and for better reasons.

xp also he didn't do drugs and hippies were very into drugs. Zappa thought they were for dumbs shits.

Also worth noting that Mailer's anger at society could well be filed under "embittered WWII veteran" (see also: the Hell's Angels) rather than beatnik or proto-hippie.

yeah, Paul Kantner, CSN and other hideously insufferable hippies position was "the straight milieu is false, and our version of society will be the perfected one, drugs and free love are what await you in the new world"; whereas Zappa had no great vision along those lines, other than "my composition oriented music is the heir to the post-modern tradition, my more popular rock shit is better for you than conventional pop music because it shows that conventional music for the tripe it is (and is played with hotter licks), and as an unusually articulate cultural figure, I'm going to tell you the truth that no one else will, that everything (other than my shit) sucks." again, I can easily see that this would be bracing in a post 1967 landscape in which that viewpoint was nowhere near as widespread as it would be from 1977 on. It's the sneer, I guess, that he had that was not commonplace.

This reminds that as a NYC-based VU fan I felt I was honor and duty-bound to hate both Zappa and The Jefferson Airplane only now I really dig the latter but still don't really care about the former DO U SEE?

Sorry, feel a bit like Sam I Am trying to think of new ways to turn down green eggs and ham