Frank Zappa: Classic or Dud?

I'm a sort of dabbler in different Zappa eras. For me, he peaked with Hot Rats and I like him way more when he sticks to the instrumental work, but I've grown to appreciate more of his catalog as I've gotten older. I used to hate him completely and I still kinda hate 60% of what I hear, but that other 40% is pretty damn good.

Grateful Dead is just inoffensive Californian hippy music, I find it neither very bad or very good, not in any way comparable to the awfulness of Zappa at his worst.

i love that every once in a while this thread gets revived for no particular reason but to talk about how vile and hateful so much of zappa's music is

and yeah i'd say zappa and the dead are completely unrelated, he made fun of the hippies once, but that was more like LA-SF rivalry than anything else. if there's a point of comparison to zappa i'd almost say prince. like, if prince thoroughly _hated_ women, held them in complete contempt, rather than the, uh, complex relationship he had with women and womanhood, then he might be similar to zappa in some ways. controlling, workaholic, using everyone around him as tools to accomplish his Creative Vision. oh and prince was also a way better songwriter than zappa, like, if he couldn't write songs but had taken a semester of composition at community college, decided that it was all bullshit and that he knew _way_ more about composition than any of those squares, got a letter from, i don't know, pierre boulez when he was 12 or something, and decided he was one of the greatest living composers without having actually heard any other living composers. then he might be kind of like zappa.

god, that comes of as pretty harsh, doesn't it? like i'm not actually trying to put zappa down here. he's just so fucking easy to hate!

Seems like the obsessive anality of their fans is the point of contact. I've never known a Grateful Dead fan though. I did know a Zappa fan once and at least I've known people who have some of his records.

I do think there's something cool about the sheer volume of material he produced, the way it all kind of relates to each other (like a long running sitcom), how his live shows recontextualized stuff from all over his catalogue and often featured new material and improvs, it often makes me wish I liked his music more. But I'm not gonna pretend he doesn't have some killer material in there, I mean even the stuff that sucks often has something cool in it - the middle section of "Jumbo Go Away" is pretty interesting but I hate the song so much that I can't even pay attention to it. Which I guess makes me the exact kind of square he was trying to piss off.

come to think of it I never really made it further than the first 15 minutes of Thing-Fish, maybe I should listen to it just to torture myself

Seems like the obsessive anality of their fans is the point of contact. I've never known a Grateful Dead fan though. I did know a Zappa fan once and at least I've known people who have some of his records.

― The Prime of the Ancient Minister (Tom D.)

seeee that's a _little_ more complicated for me given that i spent the entirety of my 20s and much of my 30s as an absolutely _obsessive_ zappa fan. and i mean ok, sure, i was annoying and autistic in the same way that, like, libertarian rush fans used to be (although in my defense, i will say that i was _never_ a libertarian). like yeah i had the "privilege" of being profoundly ignorant of, like. love? i mean i used to think it was cool that zappa had never written a love song. i thought of myself as being basically unloveable and awful and to me zappa was like, hey, who cares if you're ugly and repellent? love is STUPID! let's all be smart together and make fun of how stupid people who experience love are. and then when i was 33 i, like, actually got into a relationship for the first time in my life and zappa didn't seem so smart all of a sudden. i'm kind of starting to come around to the possibility that i'm not actually ugly and repellent, which is kind of funny really considering how hard some people go on the idea that trans women are ugly and repellent. mmmm-hmmm whatever you say there friendo.

i haven't actually heard "jumbo go away", or if i do i can't remember it. being fat myself i didn't exactly relish the idea of zappa going, like... you know who's had it too easy for too long, _fat people_, somebody needs to put _them_ in their place. like no sorry. like even in my most hardcore zappa days i had my limits. i tried listening to thing-fish once, basically because i figured it was so awful it had to be good, and it wasn't. i had sheik yerbouti on CD and good god i tried to like that one but i decided that "jewish princess" was not a song i ever needed to hear. those kazoos would kick in and within five seconds my brain would just say "NOPE" and i'd hit the "skip track" button.

the main reason i'm particularly down on "the illinois enema bandit" is, i think, because of the way it made me confront my own basic ignorance. like for whatever reason i was _really_ into the '88 band, i was absolutely convinced that the '88 band was, like, the best thing ever. zappa fandom at the time was all about that band. he released like five CDs of that band and honestly i, uh. don't know why i thought the '88 band was better than, like, the '82 band. but i did, and so i had dozens of bootlegs, and he basically _always_ played "the illinois enema bandit" as the last song. and it was just, like, an awful song. an awful song with a bad guitar solo and i never understood, still don't really understand, why he ended all his concerts with _that_ song. it wasn't a fan favorite. nobody really liked it but him. it was like if bob dylan made his final encore "silvio" for 20 years. i mean ok?

then i read ben watson's book, which, i'd never really read any leftist academic lit before so i found it extremely funny. leftist academic lit _is_ really funny and i agree with a lot of it, i'm really inspired by a lot of it. i feel like that's kind of cringe of me but you know, there are a lot more cringe things about me, like me having spent my entire 20s and the first half of my 30s as a die-hard frank zappa fan. anyway watson comes down really hard on "the illinois enema bandit" and i was just like, huh, i guess i'd never really thought about it that way, like maybe that's not just "misanthropic" but is actually kind of specifically misogynist.

you have to understand at that point i was too shy to, like, actually talk to women. and here's this guy who's just died and people are like wow total iconoclast, great composer, really smart, doesn't even _try_ to be "normal", truly, a man going his own way lol. like there was this whole culture where being a zappa fan was, like, the ultimate form of "weirdness". plus i'm super autistic and he's got like 70 albums and i'm like "oh boy! look at all the fun facts i could learn! pink floyd only have, like, 10 albums".

so he's doing this song about how all college educated women need to be sexually assaulted and i'm just like hmmmm i'm not so sure about that one frank, like i wished i could be college-educated and i wished i could be a woman but i didn't particularly wish i could be sexually assaulted. well i mean i kind of did but not in the same way i wished i could be college-educated and wished i could be a woman.

ANYWAY i wound up with the trifecta and look, i'll be honest with you. i do strongly recommend being college educated and being a woman, they're both great things, really difficult and challenging things for me, both of them, but totally worth it. sexual assault not so much. i don't really feel like that was something i "needed". anyway at some point i go "hey wait i'm a college-educated woman" and i'm kind of... kind of deeply ashamed of not having realized how utterly awful and repellent the song was before. and like so many things in my life frank zappa is someone who i really liked a lot for a long time and who i still really like in a lot of ways but is also awful and fucked up. i mean that's kind of the story of my life, to be honest.

idk how much that has to do with zappa but we start talking about the guy enough and i start talking about my personal trauma just because, fuck it, it's better than talking about zappa. talking about frank zappa is so depressing.

-

deadheads are cool. when i was a kid they were fucked up burnout junkies desperately chasing highs that stopped being actually enjoyable decades ago. a lot of my friends these days are fucked up burnouts so i'm a lot more ok with the dead. dead fans now are basically weird nerds who like jazz and are fascinated by the idea of "what if a bunch of fucked up stoners got so high they sort of accidentally started playing jazz sometimes"

which is the complete opposite of zappa who knew perfectly well how to play jazz, but hated jazz as much as he hated everything except '50s r&b

come to think of it I never really made it further than the first 15 minutes of Thing-Fish, maybe I should listen to it just to torture myself

― frogbs

i mean it's not actually interestingly bad. there are a lot of albums that are bad in interesting ways and this is, like. about as interesting as "summer in paradise".

search: FZ the composer, the guitarist, the bandleader who wrote/arranged for players' strengths; destroy: FZ the lyricist, the impresario, the bandleader who discarded players like kleenex, the workaholic

Great albums for enjoying FZ music because FZ was dead and couldn't stick his honker in: Ensemble Ambrosius, The Zappa Album; Omnibus Wind Ensemble, Music by Frank Zappa; Le Concert Impromptu, Prophetic Attitude; Ensemble Modern Plays Frank Zappa (2003); some Ed Palermo and Meridian Arts Ensemble stuff.

And side two of Roxy and Elsewhere.

The awfulness of Thing-fish is only fully appreciated on physical media, because the booklet with all the pictures, stage directions etc. is a big part of it.

i mean it's not actually interestingly bad. there are a lot of albums that are bad in interesting ways and this is, like. about as interesting as "summer in paradise".

― Kate (rushomancy), Monday, April 1, 2024 10:34 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

yeah I'm finding this out now. always assumed this album would at least be somewhat entertaining or subversive or even "so bad it's good" in a way but it's not any of those things. it just sounds like really bad satire. it's like the worst episodes of South Park but four times as long. most of it comes off like it was written by an 11-year old. like its hard to believe that this was written by someone who's actually had sex before.

theres only one level on which this could work, if it was a deliberately awful album designed specifically to get out of a record contract. there are a few examples of that happening and you can't really hold them against the artist, it's just business. I mean with nearly all the music being shitty retreads of past work that's always what I assumed this was! But it's not...Zappa wanted people to hear this!

The storyline was enough to make me steer clear. I’ve never heard it.

I might be interested in an interview with Ike Willis talking about the album. But I still wouldn't be interested in listening to it.

I know two of my Mom's friends, women in their seventies and eighties, who like Zappa. One was a flower child, the other an eighth grade teacher, both seemed to like the satire in a Lenny Bruce/Marx Brothers anarchy sort of way that maybe doesn't resonate later on because so many subsequent rock artists have eclipsed it. Maybe knowing Zappa as part of the pop landscape rather than a cult artist changes something. There was an era when he was much more a character in the pop landscape with a couple of different approaches going on, like a Clapton of Neil Young.

now I've nearly gotten to the end of this thing I'm thinking Zappa wasn't just dismissive and hateful towards women, he might've been actively terrified of them as well. as though one of them really let him have it over some transgression a long time ago and its just something he never forgot.

Never planning to listen to this, I suspect the skeleton key to the meaning of the record is when you realize Thing-Fish is a pun on "Kingfish".

the gender (and racial) politics of robert crumb with none of the self loathing

omg

the gender (and racial) politics of robert crumb with none of the self loathing

― your original display name is still visible (Left)

imagine being frank zappa and not hating yourself

I think he was riven by insecurity if not self-loathing.

Ya think? Endlessly lashing out humorlessly at simplistic targets and acting like everyone else is stupid. Hmm.

Sorry, wrong thread.

https://media.tenor.com/1jI6hMtarW4AAAAM/marvel-is-it-though.gif

Ha, not really, but it might have been.

a thing people in this thread are not grasping (understandably) is that zappa shows were really really fun and a "happening" and seeing those bands play that complex music live were really cool to see. i think that's where he got a lotttt of his fans and your moms friends who are hold hippies.

* like your mom's old hippie friends.

(i kno cuz my parents and their friends talk about going to see him a lot and how OUTRAGEOUS it was but own 0-just a few of his records)

I saw him on what turned out to be his final tour in 1988 and yeah, it was a good show. He had a twelve-piece band that included a five-piece horn section; the thing that stuck out the most at the time was their cover of "Stairway to Heaven," on which the horn section played the original guitar solo, as a lead-in to Zappa's solo.

I only had the Broadway the Hard Way CD but parts of that performance are amazing. could be his best ever live band.

I had never listened to it before just now. All the dated political references get a bit wearing, but at least they outnumber the misogynistic ones, I guess. Band is super tight, but I don’t think I’ll be relistening.

Try Make A Jazz Noise Here. Same band but almost entirely instrumental.

That one I have heard. It’s good in places, I like him revisiting some oldies, but then there’s a lengthy track of endless sampled snork noises.

I think every double disc album he released could be trimmed 50%, except Uncle Meat.

What would I get out of this that I wouldn’t get out of listening to an actual jazz band. Or going to see some classical thing, the symphony, the opera etc.

Probably already asked this one before, rhetorical question, don’t really want to know the answer that much, pvmic etc.

What would I get out of this that I wouldn’t get out of listening to an actual jazz band. Or going to see some classical thing, the symphony, the opera etc.

Party atmosphere, rock and roll gymnastics, cultural commentary and audience participation.

Oh wow, thanks!

I hate all that stuff, so I think I'll pass, thanks

Well, not quite, but mostly

No, I think you were right the first time.

🥸

yeah go listen to an actual jazz band tbh

zappa is dead _and_ he smells funny

What would I get out of this that I wouldn’t get out of listening to an actual jazz band.

you'd get something you won't get from, say, a bop combo, but George Duke's solo records of the 70s deliver basically all the same thrills you can get from Zappa stuff with only a fraction of the DO NOT WANT factor. however it should also be remembered that late in his life he released this, that this album's title and cover were a choice he made.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a0/George_Duke-Dukey_Treats.jpg

Stockholm Syndrome!

Lol!

Try Make A Jazz Noise Here. Same band but almost entirely instrumental.

― Tahuti Watches L&O:SVU Reruns Without His Ape (unperson), Tuesday, April 2, 2024 2:14 PM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

IMO I think this is the best thing he released from the best tour he did. Incredibly jealous you saw them on that tour, unperson.

As a hater, I guess I might say the same

Virtuosi on recordings sometimes ill-used but live is a different story

The other '88 tour albums (Bway the Hard Way and Best Band You've Never Heard) are filled w/ gorgeous stuff, too, but there's still a lot of Zappa schtick to wade through. Make a Jazz Noise has always struck me as his his most straight-faced (aside from all orchestral stuff) – minimal silly stuff, minimal caustic songs, just a really, really tight band doing a lot of Zappa's best live material.