Frank Zappa: Classic or Dud?

Maybe I shouldn’t go there but perhaps FZ is not all bad if disdain for or at least indifference to or suspicion of him can unite such disparate posters as unperson, sinkah, Tom D, veronica m, to name but four.

I consider Packard Goose into Watermelon Hay the highlights. “Only salvageable” is a stretch although there are embarrassing lyrics you have to be willing to overlook/compartmentalize. Catholic Girls is a brilliant pop song if you like Ariel Pink imo

Zappa is just dated. There’s nothing all that special about the suspicion of or unwillingness to embrace that..

Music streaming sites are great for exploring artists like Zappa who have way too many albums. Imagine being a die hard fan in the 70s like “aw fuck now I gotta go buy Joe’s Garage vol 2 and 3?”... I meant before the album is coming out and your the type who buys everything.

Does it need to be imagined? Wasn't that life for music fans at any point before the mid-00s?

I guess before the early 00s if you roll p2p into there.

Trying to remember in which epoch the sun turned cold and I would stop dutifully buying every new album by favored artists but yeah.

Zappa is just dated.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ts9-4jbFWGg

Given how few cds me and most people I knew could afford to purchase when I was in high school and college the uniquely high volume cult artist who releases at least one album a year who on some level tells their audience “you have to buy everything to understand me” seems pretty bad in retrospect

Which artists told their audiences that?

With some artists it was just implicit.

this is silly there were plenty of ways of getting an album you didn't buy, people taped things all the time for each other, and anyway "one album a year" hardly makes for a glut, that used to be the norm

Every artist that releases lots of stuff under their name is doing that unless they explicitly say something like “please don’t feel obligated to buy everything” imo

r u serious

I like Zappa a lot more than mark s does btw!

I don't doubt it, I believe you like the early stuff. I was pretty sure that post would cause some narcissism of small differences to bubble up.

Resisting screenname change impulse right now, will stockpile.

Every artist that releases lots of stuff under their name is doing that unless they explicitly say something like “please don’t feel obligated to buy everything” imo

― “Big” Don Abernathy, Sunday, 3 January 2021 bookmarkflaglink

Lol

Good thing I only got into Tito Puente at the very end.

Every artist... never in the history of art...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZc7E9yx3Ao

there's a lot of good stuff on joe's garage, it's really the lyrics/story that sink the thing

like i think i would love the robot sex track if anything else were happening over the top of it

I have to admit to liking the lyric "Fuck me, you ugly son of a bitch"

Relistened to Uncle Meat the other day - man, there is so much stuff going on in "Dog Breath". Great production all over (although I oculd do w/o the King Kong stuff).

Zappa is just dated.

― “Big” Don Abernathy, Sunday, January 3, 2021 1:29 PM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

so is Bitches Brew. So what?

I didn’t mean that datedness was an inherently bad thing. But also Zappa often thought of himself as a cultural commentator wrt his lyrics so there’s obviously gonna be content issues and a POV people find alienating there.

if only people still made poo poo and pee pee

Loool!

Bitches Brew doesn't have some dickhead doing silly comedy voices over the top of it so dated or not it's a lot more listenable

the datedness of Zappa I think has a lot to do with the expectation that listeners approach his music as if he's saying something more profound than whatever he's parodying or pastiching was supposed to have been saying, something that exposes those things in some way- and not only that but he's saying something more profound than he seems to be saying on his own terms when he's being (apparently) wilfully gross/annoying/reactionary- and that it's self evident that this is how his work deserves to be appreciated, if at all. he was always going to be a minority taste but whatever combination of factors created that kind of cult around him doesn't really exist anymore for a lot of complicated reasons

Idk if I see datedness as the issue. Christgau was p much making the same criticisms that are being made on this thread in the early 70s: https://www.robertchristgau.com/get_artist.php?name=Frank+Zappa. And lots of people still listen to Zappa - he has 1.1M monthly listeners on Spotify, more than King Crimson, a little under Primus, about 10x what Mahavishnu have, almost 3x Captain Beefheart's.

*Mahavishnu Orchestra

tbh I mostly dislike Zappa bc he's not PC enough, everything else is secondary. claims about datedness in that respect are probably wishful thinking. how many supporters does Trump still have?

jfc why primus though

Actually, this works better than the other Christgau link: https://www.robertchristgau.com/get_artist2.php?id=4155

Zappa isn't "dated," per se, any more than anything else is. It's just dumb. If any of his his "some dickhead doing silly comedy voices over the top of it" shtick was actually smart or funny it wouldn't matter. You put that "some dickhead doing silly comedy voices over the top of it" on literally any music of the era, from the Beatles to the Band to, sure, "Bitches Brew," it would be just as bad. At least Les Claypool sort of mutters his bullshit low enough that you can often ignore it. If Zappa's bullshit weren't so foregrounded you could maybe ignore it, too, and then all the nerds would be, like, "if you listen closely you can hear Zappa subverting the sophisticated paradigm of modern composition by orchestrating pitched belches and fart sounds." But Zappa, being contemptuous of any and all things except his own abilities, has no use for subtlety.

was surprised to come across this randomly the other day, The Sonics covering Zappa in 1967

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thHAy4jmtdU

I played through a lot of the playlist upthread of the better instrumental-ish material, and I can now conclude that I just don't like FZ. Can't knock the talent involved in making it, but his compositional style just gets on my nerves and I think other people took some of his ideas to more interesting places (Faust, Henry Cow etc). However, huge thanks to whoever it was that put the playlist together so I could reach this conclusion without trawling through 75 albums of penis jokes to get to the relevant tracks.

(xp) Great find!

trawling through 75 albums of penis jokes to get to the relevant tracks.

You are such a square, you just don't get it, maaaaaaaan.

I did eventually finish the doc. The only time you see him happy is when he's being hailed a hero in Czechoslovakia (Prague Rock!) and later when he's dying and doing iirc The Yellow Shark. The remainder of what I missed was him complaining about the record industry, how no one gets him, and how his free speech views got him blacklisted from ... what, 75 more albums of penis jokes?

that was my playlist matt and i'm glad it helped!

i do not really think about zappa's compositional style i just really love jazz fusion

well i guess he forces me to think about it during the mathier sections of roxy

Probably spoken of upthread somewhere but what are the key recordings of his orchestral music? I'm willing to give it a try!

London Symphony Orchestra
The Yellow Shark
200 Motels

I like Orchestral Favorites, or did when I listened to more Zappa. It's a smaller chamber orchestra meets rock band configuration, so there's bits of synth and electric violin. Contains a version of "Duke of Prunes" and several themes from 200 Motels.

lmao nailed it

Heidecker Does Zappa (from Office Hours After Hours 12/3) @timheidecker @douggpound @VicBergerIV @OfficeHrsLive pic.twitter.com/wY1rJg6v3Z

— Dan Cupps (@DanielCupps) February 1, 2021

hahaha

can't hold a candle to this

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

Which iirc really pissed Frank off, which just proves that like most bullies he can dish it out but can't take it

That’s amazing, thanks

damn that's a bit too on the nose