Frank Zappa, conservative

[dave from knoxville]

Finally, I am of the opinion that Tom doesn't hate Tom Waits; he has admitted on a couple of podcasts that he doesn't hate all jazz.

And I would be more on board with Moe Tucker's political view if she didn't still rake in royalties from songs that celebrated bacchanalia. It's like the former stripped who doesn't want to show you her boobs anymore. Unless, of course, you slip her a fiver first.

[Tom Scharpling]

Here's what I meant.

While Zappa was not conservative in regard to the national/international political arena, he was aggressively anti-drug  to the point of ridiculousness/insanity - he got SO preachy about any drug use while abusing coffee and cigarettes like a fiend. But the worst for me is how brutally reductive he could be to women in far too many of his lyrics. That is the conservatism that I was talking about - a real judgy all-knowing summation of an entire gender through his overly indulged and myopic rock star worldview.

I came away from the Barry Miles book ZAPPA feeling like the guy was a major creep whose crummy ways only made me hate his terrible music even more.

Tom.

[Dennis]

the thing that's always bummed me out about zappa (and bill maher) is the fact that it's gross to see an unapologetic misogynist heralded as a champion of civil liberties.  and i recognize the potential irony of my letterman avatar.

[heliumsocket]

His wife sees things differently.

Anecdotally, my pal interviewed Gail Zappa for a prominent public radio show a few months back, and she was a psychotic controlling rude weird mean witch in every way from beginning to end of their interview session, as well as during the process of securing rights to air the interview (along with any Zappa songs as bumper music).

For whatever it's worth, in my personal experience, crazy and mean seeks out crazy and mean.

[heliumsocket]

In addition, anyone who hasn't listened to this past Thursday's WTF with Marc Maron should do so. Wayne Coyne talks about seeing Zappa in the late 70s, and how Frank had his security beat the shit out of an audience member who threw a glow stick at him while he was playing.

The incident affected Coyne so much that he recently gave a glow stick to every member of a recent audience of his, and told them to throw them at him all at once.

[buffcoat]

I've spent a lot of time staring at it, and I have to say that that snake doesn't look real.

[cavorting with nudists]

Thank you Tom.  Dave: Reading is fundamental.

It's one thing to have a bad personality and to make music; it's another to write your bad personality into your music.

[Austin From Chicago]

Here's what I meant.

While Zappa was not conservative in regard to the national/international political arena, he was aggressively anti-drug  to the point of ridiculousness/insanity - he got SO preachy about any drug use while abusing coffee and cigarettes like a fiend. But the worst for me is how brutally reductive he could be to women in far too many of his lyrics. That is the conservatism that I was talking about - a real judgy all-knowing summation of an entire gender through his overly indulged and myopic rock star worldview.

I came away from the Barry Miles book ZAPPA feeling like the guy was a major creep whose crummy ways only made me hate his terrible music even more.

Tom.

I just listened to an interview Zappa did a few months before his death, from June 1993. It was to a radio call-in show. The host got him started on politics and Zappa began expressing his disappointment with Bill Clinton because he thought Clinton would raise taxes. Zappa said something to the effect of "we don't need taxes to be any higher for anyone; they're already too high, and raising taxes will drive businesses out of the country." Cutting the size of government, he argued, would be a better solution to easing the debt. Essentially he was promoting the current across-the-board lockstep GOP stance on taxes in 1993. Given how much the GOP has shifted to the right over the last decade or so, I'd say that not only was Zappa a fiscal conservative, he was eerily prescient about where the American right wing would land on economic issues 20 years in the future, where the mantra of "cut taxes" seems to be the solution to every problem.

In fact, in the this same interview, Ted Nugent, of all people, calls in and Frank and Ted begin pallin' it up like the old chums they were.

I gotta say - Frank Zappa sure did not make it easy to be a fan.

[danner]

I don't really understand why people find his drug stance so offensive (aside from him being a smoker). Do people hate Minor Threat for being straight-edge too?

[nec13]

I'm genuinely confused as to how anybody can like that guy. Pompous, pretentious, self-infatuated, contemptuous of everything, and his "humor" is ridiculously sophomoric when not just scatological and gross.

Every point is irrelevant to me; I like the music, and prefer the instrumental work. Does every musical artist you consider need to submit a personality assessment to you before you decide whether you're going to listen? 

People, listen to what you like.

/endthread

[cavorting with nudists]

Given how much the GOP has shifted to the right over the last decade or so, I'd say that not only was Zappa a fiscal conservative, he was eerily prescient about where the American right wing would land on economic issues 20 years in the future, where the mantra of "cut taxes" seems to be the solution to every problem.

So stunningly accurate about how the economy would go during the last six years of Clinton's tenure, too.

I don't think he was all that unusually prescient, though.  He was riding a wave.  The fanatical anti-tax position of the right got its first big burst of juice with Howard Jarvis and the Prop. 13 fight in California in 1978.  Reagan made it his mantra, based on the so-called Laffer Curve, though he didn't always walk the walk. And I think it's generally believed that George H. W. Bush might well have been re-elected if not for anger on the right about his broken pledge not to raise taxes. By 1993, FZ was just another rich guy claiming that taxes on the rich harm everyone.

[dave from knoxville]

You're probably too hip to explain that, but I will offer the opportunity anyway.

Thank you Tom.  Dave: Reading is fundamental.

It's one thing to have a bad personality and to make music; it's another to write your bad personality into your music.

[not that clay]

In addition, anyone who hasn't listened to this past Thursday's WTF with Marc Maron should do so. Wayne Coyne talks about seeing Zappa in the late 70s, and how Frank had his security beat the shit out of an audience member who threw a glow stick at him while he was playing.

Might have had something to do with this:

In December 1971, there were two serious setbacks. While performing at Casino de Montreux in Switzerland, The Mothers' equipment was destroyed when a flare set off by an audience member started a fire that burned down the casino. Immortalized in Deep Purple's song "Smoke on the Water", the event and immediate aftermath can be heard on the bootleg album Swiss Cheese/Fire, released legally as part of Zappa's Beat the Boots II compilation. After a week's break, The Mothers played at the Rainbow Theatre, London, with rented gear. During the encore, an audience member pushed Zappa off the stage and into the concrete-floored orchestra pit. The band thought Zappa had been killed—he had suffered serious fractures, head trauma and injuries to his back, leg, and neck, as well as a crushed larynx, which ultimately caused his voice to drop a third after healing. This accident resulted in him using a wheelchair for an extended period, forcing him off the road for over half a year.  Upon his return to the stage in September 1972, he was still wearing a leg brace, had a noticeable limp and could not stand for very long while on stage. Zappa noted that one leg healed "shorter than the other" (a reference later found in the lyrics of songs "Zomby Woof" and "Dancin' Fool"), resulting in chronic back pain.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Zappa#Accident.2C_attack_and_their_aftermath_.281971.E2.80.931972.29

[cavorting with nudists]

You're probably too hip to explain that, but I will offer the opportunity anyway.

It's pretty self-explanatory I thought, coming as it did in response to a comparison with James Brown, Miles Davis, Captain Beefheart and other musicians who were reportedly not nice people in their private lives.  Do their personalities make it impossible for me to enjoy their music?  No, because their music is for the most part uncontaminated by the specifics of their unlovely traits.  Apart from the instrumentals, which I have said I can often enjoy, Zappa seemed pretty determined that you never get very far into one of his records without being reminded of what a sneering, contemptuous, audience-hating, sexist, homophobic, scat-obsessed creep he was. I love Chuck Berry's music, but if he rarely got through an album side without bringing his sexual inclinations into it, I'd start having a problem.  So no, artists don't have to fill out a personality-assessment form for my sake. Make creepy records, though, and I reserve the right to be creeped out by them.

[Austin From Chicago]

You're probably too hip to explain that, but I will offer the opportunity anyway.

It's pretty self-explanatory I thought, coming as it did in response to a comparison with James Brown, Miles Davis, Captain Beefheart and other musicians who were reportedly not nice people in their private lives.  Do their personalities make it impossible for me to enjoy their music?  No, because their music is for the most part uncontaminated by the specifics of their unlovely traits.  Apart from the instrumentals, which I have said I can often enjoy, Zappa seemed pretty determined that you never get very far into one of his records without being reminded of what a sneering, contemptuous, audience-hating, sexist, homophobic, scat-obsessed creep he was. I love Chuck Berry's music, but if he rarely got through an album side without bringing his sexual inclinations into it, I'd start having a problem.  So no, artists don't have to fill out a personality-assessment form for my sake. Make creepy records, though, and I reserve the right to be creeped out by them.

If you read Ben Watson's book The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play, you'll find that the theory behind Zappa's vaunted "Conceptual Continuity" was the creation of a gigantic, genre-spanning, lowbrow-meets-highbrow body of art with not merely an absent, but a malignant, moral center - it was sort of kind of well maybe the point of Zappa's whole career. Watson describes Zappa as providing what he calls "a travesty of power," and throwing up intentionally unresolvable contradictions (social liberal/fiscal conservative; anti-consumerist/petit-bourgeois; the aforementioned lowbrow/highbrow, etc.) as the primary means of creating a massive art project that cannot be comfortably absorbed into any canon. I think there may be something to that - Zappa doesn't really fit into the classic rock canon, nor does he fit into the punk canon, nor the jazz canon, nor the avant-garde canon, nor the classical canon, without some major reservations about the questionable morality undergirding both his work and his person. I think he wanted to make something big and undigestible, something that stood outside of every extant tradition.

Watson's contention about Zappa's motives is that the lyrical content of much of his work - the sexist, scatological, homophobic stuff - was not meant to represent the actual feelings of its creator; he was primarily a satirist and a social documentarian, not an artist expressing his feelings. I dunno about that. I've read enough about the guy to get the impression that he was a homophobic, sexist jerk in real life too. He had little use for friends, defining a friend as "someone who thinks they can borrow money from you." Most of his inner circle described him as getting progressively even more cynical and bitter and isolated from the real world as he got older. However, I think his misanthropic persona was somewhat created from whole cloth, at least in part, as he knew his "weirdness" as a person helped sell records (to an ever-dwindling cult, sure, but they sold enough to keep his family comfortable).

Honestly, I think Zappa was psychologically scarred by the incident in his youth when he was arrested for making a "pornographic" audio tape, and he used his ENTIRE career as a vehicle for getting back at the cop who busted him.

Like I said, he sure made it difficult to be a fan.....(maybe that was the point....I give up.)