Frank Zappa: Classic or Dud?

oh "blessed relief" was on there too, just felt like too much wazoo with "eat the question" as well

right on. solid primer

The Village > Arf > Wash triptych is sorta like Frank's Help > Slip > Franklin huh?

― Paul Ponzi, Friday, December 25, 2020 12:19 PM (five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

also, good call, no wonder they're my favorite zappa and dead things respectively

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqzA1VOiC-M

Sorry, I can’t even look at the titles.

(my life in BradNelson neatly pointing me an unexpected way into 60s colossi i have kinda given up on getting and lazily hate out of habit as much as anything)

A hard habit to break though.

NO SINGING is a very important factor

starting the playlist off with a brief fusion jam called "i promise not to come in your mouth" is me acknowledging there's no such thing as an accessible zappa primer

he really is the guy who dug an entirely different tunnel out of the 50s -- via stan freberg lol -- that paid no fair mind to just about anything that came afterwards (except maybe some TV themetunes and cokerock production techniques)

(i even feel like he got to "fusion" via his own route tbh)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDowitqL1Rc

https://wiki.killuglyradio.com/wiki/Jeff_Beck

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H84WlVbCCdo

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?”. It broth to mine how much it really sucks that very little of Zorn’s stuff isn on the streaming services because it would be even more ideal for gettting into his work. .

*brought to mind

I really don’t see how you can hold your head up high as a Zappa fan without an appreciation of Joe’s Garage Volumes 2 and 3.

The only salvageable track from the whole trilogy is on Vol. 3!

I agree! I meant before the album is coming out and your the type who buys everything. There are probably better examples.

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?