Frank Zappa - nothing to add.

September 4^th – More about Frank Zappa today than me, you’ll no doubt be pleased to hear. Frank Zappa was and is, for me, one of the top songwriters, producers, musicians, lyricists and social commentators of the 20^th century. From songs like Brown Shoes Don’t Make It through gems of album titles (Weasels Ripped My Flesh, Burnt Weenie Sandwich, Ship Arriving Too Late To Save A Drowning Witch…probably the best album cover ever) gathering up en route seminal live albums like the highly entertaining Live at the Filmore East and on into the superb Broadway the Hardway tour (which I was fortunate to catch at the Brum NEC in the late 80’s) he has sometimes not got it quite right but has always and without fail managed to surprise and educate.

Seen as the atypical long-haired dropout that was a threat to the system, a challenge to very heart and soul of corporate America, his arrival on the scene was treated with strident calls for his sidelining, the very thing not to do with someone as articulate and as grounded as Mr. Zappa. In 1963 the self-immolation of Thich Quang Duc had made the front page of the US papers and Mr. Zappa first became a noted performer and social commentator (through his music and lyrics) in 1966… and tell me, oh my pretty, educated ones, what was the USA involved in then? Why the war in Vietnam! Well done, go to the top of the class and give out the pencils.  Mr. Zappa’s stance on freedom of speech, against mainstream education and organised religion and his passionate belief in the abolition of censorship and his take on what government was: I quote;

I believe that people have a right to decide their own destinies; people own themselves. I also believe that, in a democracy, government exists because (and only so long as) individual citizens give it a ‘temporary license to exist’—in exchange for a promise that it will behave itself. In a democracy, you own the government—it doesn’t own you.

That sort of ideology went down like a cup of cold sick with the government (as it would with any government) and various logs were thrown in Mr. Zappa’s way in an effort to derail both message and messenger. Trouble was it struck a chord with the left-field, anti big-government youth of the US as well as many in the Britain; me included. Mr. Zappa never sought popularity, never chased the dollar and never, never compromised the music and the message; this was the main reason he always remained on the sidelines of musical popularity, tackling head on the institutions and individuals who were foolish enough to call him out for a row. I highly recommend you call up YouTube and type in Frank Zappa – Lost Interviews and then watch all seven of them; it’ll answer most of your queries on the American psyche and why I rate this guy so highly, as is the following quote from Mr. Zappa on the iniquitous Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) a musical censoring movement started by Tipper Gore in an effort to strangle the use of politically, sexually, linguistically or socially explicit lyrics; I quote:

The PMRC proposal is an ill-conceived piece of nonsense which fails to deliver any real benefits to children, infringes the civil liberties of people who are not children, and promises to keep the courts busy for years dealing with the interpretational and enforcemental problems inherent in the proposal’s design. It is my understanding that, in law, First Amendment issues are decided with a preference for the least restrictive alternative. In this context, the PMRC’s demands are the equivalent of treating dandruff by decapitation... The establishment of a rating system, voluntary or otherwise, opens the door to an endless parade of moral quality control programs based on things certain Christians do not like. What if the next bunch of Washington wives demands a large yellow ‘J’ on all material written or performed by Jews, in order to save helpless children from exposure to concealed Zionist doctrine?

Mr. Zappa’s one and only hit was a song called, Valley Girl, which his daughter, Moon Unit Zappa, spoke on and which reached number 32 in the Billboard Charts on this day in 1982. It’s a send up of the users of Valspeak the lingo that San Fernando young ladies use, and it harpooned the air-head society and it’s lack of a grasp on reality where the only important things in the day were how best to find a pair of jeans and who is the best pedicurist. (Link below – look up the lyrics, I’m not doin’ everythin’ for y’) The backfire on this send-up was that it only served to increase the use of Valspeak and it became common currency on the conversation of the US arts-cognoscenti; probably safe to say they missed the point.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-LArv-sEQU