Frank Zappa: Classic or Dud?

shame on a nuh!

― Οὖτις, Friday, September 29, 2017 1:32 PM (seventeen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol, I remember that.

I'm told Steve Albini was really into politically incorrect humour, but how far did it go?

is this an actual question

dude had a band called RAPEMAN

Just realized I'm now older than Tipper Gore was when this all went down.

My wife grew up in an ultraconservative fundie church and has a few stories about the testimony of traveling evangelists, people who would give the guest sermon for the week. They'd spend 57 minutes describing their debauched former lives in as much detail as they could get away with (the pews being full of children) and then 3 minutes wrapping up with "and then I was washed with the blood of the lamb" and all that. Those PMRC ladies were very much in the tradition.

I remember late nights where we'd tune in to the bizarre Christian shows that would be very much in this vein. I remember the line "I was ready to hop in the sack with anyone who looked my way" and one guy saying he'd done his own body weight in cocaine, which, even as a know-nothing 12-year old, kinda raised an eyebrow

dude had a band called RAPEMAN

― Οὖτις, Friday, 29 September 2017 18:52

But there was other stuff too.

do you want a list or something

Pretty please

https://i.imgur.com/TbKAF1l.gif

lol

"Let me Google that for you" didn't come up with anything about Albini.

What are you planning to do, sue him?

"Steve Albini racism" works a charm

who would have guessed

People in the New Statesmen Great White Male thread, but they were often wrong. Sometimes it's really hard to find this stuff.

this is worth reading

http://www.listenlistenlisten.org/stevealbini/

Thankyou.

Wal-Mart was the big one

― Universal LULU Nation (upper mississippi sh@kedown)

Waif Me

My dad was a huge Frank Zappa fan, including his weird ass noise experiments. This dude's music is carved into my brain.

So I feel like this says something about FZ: I always hope that Google Play Music or Pandora will make some slightly more lateral connections. For example, if I start a Van Halen station, I hope they will maybe throw in a fusion guitar virtuoso or at least some catchy guitar pop from the same time period like the Cars or another 80s rock band with wailing solos like Dinosaur Jr alongside the Ratt and Journey but, nope, I only ever seem to get the latter. When I started a Zappa station (from Overnite Sensation) on Google Play Music this morning, though, it was the first time I've seen them actually come up with something that was eclectic but still made sense: after "I'm the Slime", they went to Mahavishnu Orchestra, Jethro Tull, and Captain Beefheart (none of which was too crazy) but then to Talking Heads' "Cities" (which I actually enjoyed in this context) and Al diMeola's flamenco-inspired "Lady of Rome, Sister of Brazil". Along with a lot of stuff like Genesis and Camel, I also got Jeff Beck and a doo-wop thing by Ruben and the Jets (I know of the FZ connection there). Interestingly, the one non-Zappa song that sounded most like him to me was ELP's "Living Sin".

One Zappa song really made Pandora want to listen to some good music huh

I never bought any censored music as far as I know (a few albums, like Fear of a Black Planet, bleep out words once in a while as I think an affectation), but I was once prevented from buying an album thanks to the parental advisory sticker. It was Fishbone's "The Reality of My Surroundings," which means I was ... 16? Old enough to buy a fucking Fishbone CD. But the person working at the mall record store (weirdly, I think I was in the mall food court that day for lunch during a school field trip, possibly in DC) wouldn't do it. So I went somewhere else and bought it.

I bet Fishbone was into Frank Zappa.

I bet Fishbone was into Frank Zappa.

In Joe Carducci's book Rock and the Pop Narcotic, he says he never listened to Fishbone because someone described them to him as "like a band with seven Zappas in it."

That's funny. Though obviously the band was really just an updated P-Funk. Certainly George Clinton was just as scatological and sexual as Zappa.

"... P-Funk were basically an arty retro band, mixing 1965 James Brown revivalism with 1967 Frank Zappa stupidity." - Chuck Eddy, The Accidental Evolution of Rock 'n' Roll

I guess I don't hear that much P Funk in Fishbone

Patton feels like he was influenced by Zappa but he doesn't really come out and say it...

I hate to disappoint everyone, but this thread inspired me to get on spotify and check out the various vault releases from the past 15 years or so, and there's a lot of great stuff on there

which ones specifically

never bothered with the posthumous releases because there are just so many of them and I'm still like 20 discs short of having everything he did while he was alive, but I'm sure there are some gems in there

The Audio documentary series are great if you like the idea of extrapolated versions of Lumpy Gravy, Uncle Meat etc:

Yeah, was enjoying the uncle meat one last night

Also caught some good tracks on the Carnegie hall one and Chicago 78. You are definitely going to encounter the usual obnoxious songs on these, but there are also lots of great performances, sound quality is excellent, and there's also plenty of unusual versions of familiar songs. I've only just started digging in to these, but was pretty happy with what I heard. I do have a high tolerance for a lot of this stuff, so keep that in mind.

and there's also plenty of unusual versions of familiar songs.

that's great, this is definitely one of my favorite things that Zappa does

Listening to a cool live version of "The Grand Wazoo" from Zappa Wazoo. Pretty faithful to album version, but I've never heard any other performances of this song.

Overall, I'm just surprised that there's so much quality material still out there, especially from certain band configurations that hadn't had much exposure in the past. I had kind of assumed that the YCDTOSA series basically captured all the good stuff, and anything left would be sub-par.

"... P-Funk were basically an arty retro band, mixing 1965 James Brown revivalism with 1967 Frank Zappa stupidity." - Chuck Eddy, The Accidental Evolution of Rock 'n' Roll

iirc Chuck always went hard on this connection (esp re: "Jimmy's Got a Little Bit of Bitch in Him") but idk, Clinton has never copped to it and he's usually pretty open about his antecedents.

I think there's definitely some overlap between Parliament and Apostrophe-era Zappa. Don't know if it is a case of influences or 2 groups of talented musicians landing in a similar spot around the same time.

The 1966 mix of Freak Out is very different from what I'm used to.

I'm sure I read somewhere about Zappa wanting to work with P-Funk musicians. I hope the 1966 mix of "Freak Out" is better than the one I'm familiar with, it's always sounded pretty shit to me.

not hating on Chuck but that seems a misunderstanding of Parliament/Funkadelic's range and a vast underestimation of their talents.

Yeah i figured that was obvious

Yeah, totally, I just thought it was funny.

In 1967 Zappa wasn't even that stupid yet, for a start.

The Suzy Creamcheese thing was a little stupid.

I really like what I know from the 60s, though, to be clear!

I love the overall sound of Overnite Sensation/Apostrophe (')/One Size Fits All ... really warm and bassy.

I love Chuck's writing but he never let the facts get in the way of a good line

I love the overall sound of Overnite Sensation/Apostrophe (')/One Size Fits All ... really warm and bassy.

Still need to hear a number of those 2012 remasters. I´m not an audiophile but for someone as perfectionist as Zappa I´m surprised the cd masters were never that good (even the Ryko ones that said "Zappa approved" which was just a marketing thing). The only editions of Overnite Sensation + Apostrophe(') I know where the Zappa Records version and it didn´t sound very good. Rave reviews about the 2012 edition of 'Burnt Weeny Sandwich' too.

I only bought "Shut Up..." and "Sleep Dirt" and yes they do sound great (+ the 2012 version of "Sleep Dirt" does away with the vocals).

The Suzy Creamcheese thing was a little stupid.

― No purposes. Sounds. (Sund4r)

i'm listening to detlev glanert's "requiem for jheronimus bosch". every track starts with somebody gravely intoning "jheronimus bosch", and every time i wait for the speaker to follow up with "what's got into you?"

it never happens. probably because the piece is in dutch or something. good piece, though. kind of reminds me of the vocal bits on "200 motels".

This AV Club piece is actually pretty good. The writer starts off saying he appreciates Frank Zappa the iconoclast and smart guy, but has never clicked with the music. So he picks three albums - We're Only In It For The Money, Hot Rats, and the whole Joe's Garage trilogy - and dives in. And SPOILER he does not come away converted.

From what I can tell, most of We’re Only In It For The Money’s reputation as cutting, hippie-mocking satire seems to be tied up in a handful of songs—“Who Needs The Peace Corps?,” “Absolutely Free,” and “Flower Punk”—all of them calling out fakers dressed in beads and bells, making pilgrimages to San Francisco to “play my bongos in the dirt,” with no political opinions nor any greater aspirations than just getting stoned and becoming the road manager for a psychedelic rock band (or worse, playing in one).

...

Still, as far as comedy goes, “Peace Corps” and “Flower Punk” are basically New Yorker cartoons; any square in America could have written these same gibes about long-haired, barefoot freaks catching crabs at their love-ins. “Peace Corps” does have a pretty good line about loving everyone, even “the police as they kick the shit out of me in the street.” But mostly they’re just a taunting rundown of ’60s stereotypes that today feel as novelty-song-dated as Zappa’s similar ’80s pop screed “Valley Girl.” A lot of the “satire” seems to be just describing things.

...

But to me, today, as someone with zero investment in hearing hippies and Peter Paul And Mary taken down a peg, what I’m mostly left with is a batch of songs that largely seem designed to be irritating, a sneer directed at a culture that mostly stopped existing a year after its release. While there’s an impressive jumble of unconventional instrumentation here beneath all the dialogue snippets and backmasked squalls, with the sole exception of the silly doo-wop earworm “What’s The Ugliest Part Of Your Body?,” it almost completely eschews memorable melodies—and, you know, enjoyable songs. I just can’t imagine revisiting We’re Only In It For The Money for any sort of listening pleasure; it seems to scoff at the very idea. So... the joke is on me?

I don't think FZ needs to be defended but this guy's take on We're only in it... is wrong on all levels IMHO. One of the few (only) FZ albums with a bunch of catchy melodies. "Lonely Little Girl" for instance is a classic, music and lyric wise.