Frank Zappa: Classic or Dud?

xpost Sorry, improvising slowly on phone.

the Dan's cynicism is not rooted in contempt - they just have very dark senses of humor. but yeah as ums notes there's a profound sadness that runs through SD's stuff, a wistfulness, a sweetness. Zappa only gets wistful, at all, in the Ruben & the Jets music - and then makes sure the lyrics don't run along the same track

^ He's afraid to let his defenses down and reveal himself a fraud, imo. Or at least less than he makes himself out to be.

Contempt is the key word encapsulating Zappa.

apologies, i try not to say assholish shit like that. anyway the thing that makes zappa, or hicks, or any of the heroes of young white men who believe themselves to be oppressed, particularly tiresome in this day and age is his wholesale adoption of the paranoid style, the constant litany about how everybody is trying to screw him over. he has other bad qualities, but in the present moment this looks like his worst. it's not a quality the dan gave the impression of having much of. this, more than his supposed "contempt", is his most toxic quality- his barely disguised self-pity.

but i think most dan-loving, zappa-hating critics are all about the _literacy_. zappa didn't like books, didn't read books, and made no bones about it. saying zappa was lacking in "chops" or "knowledge", i just don't see that there's the evidence to back it up. there's lots he didn't know, but saying that his songwriting was amateurish compared to steely dan... no, i don't see the evidence for that.

i also don't think zappa was a "playing it safe" soloist. to me "playing it safe" is doing the gilmour thing of writing a solo and playing it every night. zappa's solos were genuinely improvised, and this is why he played so many generic blues licks, why it's so uneven, because of that risk-taking. he stacked the deck in his favor by hiring crack rhythm sections (having a great drummer makes one a better guitar player).

i agree that garcia's playing is wonderful... sometimes.

xp

^ He's afraid to let his defenses down and reveal himself a fraud, imo. Or at least less than he makes himself out to be.

I think the issue's more personal, I don't think Zappa's a "fraud" - I think he's kinda fucked up, for lack of a better way to put it. he's constructed a sort of rationalist shell around himself for whatever reason, and it requires constant shoring-up -- over the course of his life, the maintenance of the shell takes precedence over more & more. I sorta get where a guy interested in music as a process might spend a fair bit of time thinking "look...the role of the emotions in all this has been vastly overstated" but in Zappa's case this position seems to stem from a general unwillingness to concede that *feeling things* is a worthwhile pursuit. and it's fair to hang this on him from a survey of his work, too. he did have some good affirmative values, per his family: of taking care of them, of being present. those aren't small things. but my impression of him -- and I say this as a fan of his good stuff; I think there's a fair bit of it, personally -- is that of a guy who would have preferred to quash any tenderness inside of himself, or to relegate it to occasional 32-bar outbursts during instrumental passages played onstage.

great post Joan. Zappa will always be classic to me for the "flower power sucks" line in "Absolutely Free". "Mom & Dad" also was a nice empathetic track. But these are outliers in his career it seems...

xpost I don't think anyone's being assholey here, actually, especially considering the subject. Zappa love is a bit of an enigma to me, in part because he was so prolific that even many of his fans have huge hunks of his catalog they may despise. He's full of contradictions - beloved for things people hate in other acts, hated for things loved in other acts, that sort of thing. In the end, if his output was mostly instrumental I bet his music would have aged better, vampy or mediocre or not. It's the words that sink the S.S. Zappa.

Speaking of Steely Dan, I could totally imagine "The Fez" as a Zappa song and being sung in his smug speak-sing voice and hating it.

I don't know much about Zappa's upbringing. What were his parents like? Having just read that most recent Van Halen book and learning, at least in a cursory sense, about Mommy and Daddy Van Halen, I've got sins of the father on the mind.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9P2V0_p6vE

it's interesting how much of a conflict Zappa's love of the avant garde (Varese) was his initial impetus, but he approached it with seriousness and got laughs. Not sure how intentional the laughs were, but in some ways Zappa cheapened experimental music, he seems like someone who was very much in conflict with his desires.

sorry that was poorly worded

Do you mean that the way the host treated his ideas like a joke might have had some kind of formative impact, in that FZ might have become self-conscious or reserved about being earnest about experimental music?

Don't think necessarily that the host affected Frank's drive for experimental music going forward, just that Frank always had this unusual pull between serious music/jokes and I wonder where the contradictions began. Frank genuinely loved the avant-garde but I wonder what the audiences response made him feel - and whether it flared up his contempt of them. It's difficult to tell whether Frank expected audiences to get the experimental impulses, but I doubt he cared - he seemed to have a thing of being above others intellectually.

Kind of interesting to compare it to this Cage TV appearance from three years earlier. Obv Cage is more generous/instructive (and openly 'welcomes laughter') but I feel like this is also facilitated by a much more respectful attitude from the host, even though he also finds the ideas strange. I wonder how Cage would have handled the Steve Allen show.

great post Sund4r. I feel like Zappa set himself up to be misunderstood - it was a self fulfilling prophecy, it's hard to imagine a world in which he was uniformly accepted.

anyways that Cage youtube is great evidence that it took time for people to accept more ambiguous ways of expression (the laughter)

these videos are insane

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTdTvK_d9lQ

anyways that Cage youtube is great evidence that it took time for people to accept more ambiguous ways of expression (the laughter)

... and here's John Cale on the same show.

It is just a rock n' roll myth that Zappa spent some of his last years crying while listening to doowop records?

Him and Lou Reed used to get together and have all day blubbing sessions.

in some ways Zappa cheapened experimental music

lol sure

statements like this make me extra glad we had a Zappa

I don't know much about Zappa's upbringing. What were his parents like? Having just read that most recent Van Halen book and learning, at least in a cursory sense, about Mommy and Daddy Van Halen, I've got sins of the father on the mind.

― Josh in Chicago

there's one picture of him with his parents, taken by life magazine circa 1970. beyond that zappa didn't have much to say about his parents.

if we're going to play armchair psychoanalysis - a pretty strong temptation with zappa - i'd point to the incident in '64 or '65 where he was entrapped by some asshole cop and thrown in jail for ten days on "obscenity" charges, in the process losing his recording studio. i can't imagine something like that _not_ leaving a major mark on one's psyche, and it's hard for me not to view his subsequent strong advocacy of "offensive" speech in that light.

in some ways Zappa cheapened experimental music

― Week of Wonders (Ross)

hey now, experimental jazz was already free!

Ha, yeah, tbf, I don't even really know what it would mean to 'cheapen' experimental music.

(Also, a lot of people still have trouble accepting it!)

not to be that guy, but which things exactly are being called "experimental" here? cage's definition is something like: composition or creation deploying indeterminacy to reach endpoints that couldn't be predicted in detail from the outset -- and one-offs aside, i'm not sure anything zappa routinely does really falls into this category, he was always an intensely controlling* composer, albeit one at an unusual number of different levels (if that make sense)

(obviously fz's audience interraction games produced material that does -- all live performance has elements of unpredictability -- but as soon as he's in a studio quilting elements of it into concrète collages the "experimental" dimension is stripped straight back out)

*cage was also highly controlling in person but very much in service of the genuinely unpredicted

no idea what i was talking about there with that statement, my apologies.

mark, for what it's worth varese rejected the notion that his music was "experimental", saying something like "I experiment before writing my music!"

Unless I'm in an academic setting, I tend to assume that no one is using Cage's definition and "experimental" just means "avant-garde" or "unconventional".

^ yeah

ah ok, fair enough -- it was more a question than a gotcha: on one hand (very proofing-editor voice) it seems a pity to blur away a usefully precise word; on the other, literally nothing is more boring than arguing abt definitions

i actually quite like the idea of compare-contrasting cage's affable demeanour as composerly major domo with zappa's -- as a device in line with or at odds with the larger project -- but that's partly bcz i think their projects only line up to a small degree, and this quasi-similarity is a handy way to pin down the nature of the overlap and the difference

those Nightmatch videos are something else. 10 years ago I would've proclaimed Zappa a hero for knocking down a church lady like that, especially one with such an encyclopedic knowledge of dirty Prince lyrics, what's going on in HER mind, har har har??? but that's a dumb opinion. Zappa comes off as affable and well-spoken but he's grandstanding about an argument that isn't actually happening. mentions too many times that he isn't a fan of the music in question, like we care what you think about Prince. at one point reads a supposedly "humorous" disclaimer off the back of one of his albums to dead silence. occasionally says something profound. he's right about a lot of things but the isn't the question less about censorship and more about Parental Advisory stickers? parents *should* know what their kids are listening to or watching. so what.

In some ways Zappa cheapened experimental music

― Week of Wonders (Ross)

I suppose you could make the argument that Zappa cheapened experimental music by associating it with dumb puerile misogyny, deliberately or otherwise. Not that I think he did.

great discussion, one that made me resolve to get through Joe's Garage and let me tell you it is hilarious to read very interesting debate about Zappa's in relation to Cage and the definition of experimental music while listening to "Why Does it Hurt When I Pee" doing some bullshit x rated cod Kansas song

yeah i revoke that statement - i mean i LOVE early appearances of the Mothers on TV shows, just pure madness. Also Uncle Meat/Lumpy Gravy rule. I find his Serious artist vs. audience shtick pretty interesting overall, where it comes from etc

I could totally imagine "The Fez" as a Zappa song and being sung in his smug speak-sing voice and hating it.

Oh great, now I can hear this too. Way to ruin my morning.

Lumpy Gravy is shite, whereas I quite like Why Does It Hurt When I Pee.

Cage hostile to improvisation, and always felt that Zappa was in some way too. I enjoy his jazz fusiony recs like Grand Wazoo - no singing! - but even the solos on them seem more like composition than spontaneous expression.

Waka/Jawaka and Grand Wazoo aren't necessarily my favorites to listen to on a regular basis but they are probably the most *impressive* thing he did, there are moments on those that are genuinely jaw dropping to me, just this hyper complex anal retentive modern classical/fusion jams (but not really jams at all). like i do get that thing you get from some prog or math rock where it's like "how did humans do this?"

so I don't know exactly why you would need five full shows from the Baby Snakes concerts, they seem to have roughly the same set lists from show to show, but I do find the costume and add ins for this box set to be pretty funny.

http://www.zappa.com/news/halloween-77-box-set-celebrates-historic-concert-runs-40th-anniversary-october-20

Those albums bored the tits off me, tbh.(xp)

yeah i dunno maybe zappa just sucks

honestly, he feels much less benign these days, because I really do feel like his whole worldview is pretty foundational to the whole angry nerd/Reddit atheist/gamergate/shitlord mindset that led to the alt right

More by accident than intent but there's a thread there. Though if anything, as a couple of friends have noted, the line of descent to libertarian techbro might be even clearer.

^this. I dislike Zappa for the toxic self pity, but more than that, I dislike 20's me for thinking this stuff was good.

I've always thought Zappa was mostly worthless so I guess I dislike 30s me for looking a bit like him

Oddly enough, last year I did kick down for the first/only time for anything Zappa related, namely that documentary they're doing with all the archives. Honestly I was most interested in it precisely because I'm interested in any archival project in general, given my library work. I figure that might be all I need.

That said, my girlfriend has long had a framed poster of this photo in the kitchen -- namely due to the oven mitt:

http://www.afka.net/images/Articles/1984-16.gif

More by accident than intent but there's a thread there. Though if anything, as a couple of friends have noted, the line of descent to libertarian techbro might be even clearer.

― Ned Raggett, Tuesday, September 26, 2017 10:40 AM (five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah what else? Obviously Bill Hicks, Dennis Miller (so then maybe Chevy Chase on Weekend Update as a precursor?), Dennis Leary...

oh well, I'll have plenty of time to ponder this while listening to "Sy Borg" which feels as though it will go on for the remainder of my life on Earth answering the unasked musical question "What if Spyro Gyra did a dirty sci fi comedy reggae album?"

though i guess zappa is expanding his range from misogyny to include homophobia on this one

though i guess zappa is expanding his range from misogyny to include homophobia on this one

Ah, you've never heard "Bobby Brown," I see.