And most of the evils of society can, in fact, be cured through information. We have a society that has been disinformed and based on the disinformation has made irrational choices. And that's what I mean by "ignorance." People, who ordinarily might be smart, are deprived of the data by which to make a rational decision, don't have the data to do it.
~~ Frank Zappa to interviewer Bob Marshall

Mommy, What's a Zappa?

A dark, smirking cynic -- Ambrose Bierce's and Mark Twain's moustaches fused, in love, with a pinch of Titties 'N Beer, a guitar and one heavy-duty fetish for Music and scat(ology). Dadaist? Subversive? Reactionary? Anarcho-Capitalist? Rich Bastard? "Practical Conservative"? Composer: this was Frank Vincent Zappa.

Frank Zappa's output as a composer, musician, band-leader, producer, rock 'n roll media subject and writer is a supreme fart in the face of mass-consumptive stupidity. Zappa's vast musical catalog also confronts the consumer with a perplexing admixture of low- and high-brow tastes. Zappa's music is inspired by 1950s West Coast R&B and doo-wop, as well as various streams of modernist composers including Edgard Varese, Igor Stravinsky and Anton Webern. Sprinkle the works in these styles and of these artists with crude scatological and sexual lyrical themes and you have a pretty good idea of what much of Zappa's music sounds like. What sets Zappa apart from rock's high-minded progressive scene and postmodernist composers' pop-minded tokenism was his effortless ability to jarringly swing between "high" and "low" musical concepts, all the while regarding both with equal contempt (or affection, as the situation warranted).

From 1965-1969, Zappa began his professional rock 'n roll career leading The Mothers of Invention, a band of rhythm and blues musicians later augmented with classically-trained players. Of course, this period was a profound change in pop music and teen culture, normally associated with drugs, political protest, Eastern mysticism and sexual freedom. Zappa rode the waves of this temporary slackening of popular culture, but also stood out in the crowd for reasons other than his bushy soulpatch: he always eschewed drugs, especially psychedelics, and he publicly derided what he saw as Life magazine-packaged "rebellion" and marketed mysticism. (Sexual politics, however, had always been at the top of Zappa's shopping list; more on this below.) Still, the contradiction remains: Zappa and The Mothers of Invention never would have gotten the opportunity to record at MGM Studios if record companies, motivated by the lucrative economics of the psychedelic craze, hadn't been hungry to sign new, long-haired acts.

By the end of the 1960s, Zappa was dissatisfied with life on the road as a collective band, and the prospects of the financial success thereof, so he began to hire professional musicians, hand-picking his own band. Many Zappa fans desert Zappa after 1970, charging that his music became too commercial, his lyrics too infantile, and his approach to music-making too capitalistic. More simply, most hippies don't care for much of Zappa's vulgarity on his 1970s recordings and certainly not from the 1980s. Oddly enough, vulgar punks often regard Zappa as nothing more than a hippy.

Despite repelling hordes of consumers with scatology on the one hand and musical complexity on the other, the scope of Zappa's project has never been matched in the music industry: no one else has so forcefully brought such a breadth of musical ideas into the sphere of mass popular culture. Through nearly non-stop touring (until 1988), highly prolific live and studio recording and mass distribution deals, Zappa successfully manipulated the normally impenetrable pop music market for his own purposes. He died of prostate cancer in December 1993.

Watson: Zappographer

'Conceptual Continuity' may well serve as a term for an underlying substratum of associations that anyone uses over the years in order to express themselves -- the network of meanings revealed, say, in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's notebooks, which show irrational attachment to words that appear at key points in his poems -- but what makes Zappa's use of it modernist is that he brings this substratum to consciousness. You cannot approach Zappa as you would Andre Gide or Sting, absorbing their art and imagining some rounded human personality. You must deal with it as you would Finnegan's Wake, actively tracings images and connections as they emerge on the material surface. This is modern art you cannot approach in the old way.
~~ Ben Watson, The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play [1]

Ben Watson's ambitious 600 page literary analysis Frank Zappa's Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play obsessively considers the significance of Zappa's role in the marketplace and his lyrical material  an exercise that perplexed critics and displeased many of Zappa's hardcore fans. The former were clearly unfamiliar with Zappa's Project/Object mega-output (after all, no respectable critic working for a respectable mass publication would actually go through the trouble of seriously researching a subject such as Frank Zappa the rock 'n roll musician). Meanwhile, the latter could relate to neither Watson's Cambridge intellectual obfuscation nor to his Britishness. (In a letter to Watson, Society Pages [a Zappa 'zine] editor Den Simms argues that Watson's Britishness might hamper his ability to excavate Zappa's lyrical material because the American popular culture references are so layered that only an "insider" American cultural education could even begin to digest it all. [2])

A member of the Socialist Workers' Party, Watson argues that Zappa's role as a successful capitalist constitutes a response to the Situationist International's total rejection of mass consumption and to Frankfurt School pontificator Theodor Adorno's argument that art cannot retain meaning once it enters the marketplace. For Watson, to lament Zappa's commercialism is:

To ignore the special dialectical relationship with commerce that makes Zappa's music so interesting, the value of having someone with a Frankfurt School aesthetic (someone who understands the fascistic tendencies of the culture industry) operating within the system. To wish that Zappa would stick to 'straight' music assumes that high-art music is unideological, unvitiated by its role in guaranteeing a 'higher realm' for hierarchical society, in providing a mirror for middle-class self-esteem. [3]