In a way, Zappa's career represents a Dadaist revival on a mass scale. The Dadas' emphasis on PLAY over SERIOUS expression is evident in every aspect of Zappa's creations. He not only "played with" music, audiences and critics, but with the music economy, music technology and the power itself wielded through mass communications. After the Mothers of Invention signed with MGM in 1965, Zappa soon obtained control of the Mothers' advertising account, recognizing the importance of the intricate construction of an image and a folklore of the band; this was a job far too important to leave to some ignorant marketing weasel. Apart from buying billboard space, utilizing densely stylized graphic art (by Cal Schenkel), writing press releases and organizing special publicity photo-shoots, Zappa carefully cultivated the Mothers' "freak" image from the idiosyncratic coupling of Absurdist stage antics with "high art" musical performance. Zappa and the Mothers also lured a large following of musicians to the freak scene with musical chops and the latest musical technical innovations. Concerts regularly included an "enforced recreation" segment wherein Zappa would instruct the audience members to perform dumb gesticulations to musical accompaniment. And they would obey!

Most BIG musical acts use their power over their fanbase as a way to persuade the latter to adopt some sort of lifestyle, all the while mystifying the process by which this occurs. (read: Grateful Dead hippies, Green Day spunkers, Rage Against the Machine humorless activists, Prince clubbers, etc. . .) Zappa embraced celebrity without homogenizing his audience, all the while drawing attention to the ridiculous power bestowed upon pop musicians. Pulling the curtain back to expose the Wizard's machinations, Zappa's Dada exposes the social-psychological manipulations built into mass popular culture (MTV wants you to sit up and beg! Arf! Arf!).

Crypto-Psychosemantic Manipulations of the Masses

Hence, fans of Zappa's music rarely relate to the music in any way typical of other rock 'n roll fans. Zappa's Project/Object -- a dense array of recurring concepts, themes, words, images, and tunes throughout his recordings, performances, videos, writings and interviews -- embeds these normally mundane references with a mysterious significance for the suggestible, observant listener. Tweezers, sofas, poodles, leather, blowjobs, (etc., etc.) all appear regularly throughout Zappa's works and hence all carry special significance to a Zappa fan encountering these objects/events in everyday life. At such a moment, the Zappa fan is overcome with a type of PARANOIA about regular, observable reality: the words and objects take on meanings other than those ascribed to them by secularized consumer culture.

Surely, Zappa the Rationalist would baulk at the idea, as would Watson the Materialist, but Zappa's Project/Object Conceptual Continuity can be considered some heavy magick. That is, it seriously scrambles long-time listeners' reality tunnels: a sort of Dreamtime for us capital-entrenched drones. Zappa tells us in his autobiography The Real Frank Zappa Book (New York: Poseidon Press, 1989) that every interview, album, album cover, musical snippet, every word -- had a meaning, a place in his musical master plan. (Side note to consider: should we take him at his word, or is such a claim, in part, or in whole, just a put-on?) Musical themes pop up again and again, sometimes years and years later, only to vanish again. Through careful repetition such seemingly mundane things as pigs, ponies, poodles and even former sidemen (bassist and master falsetto-ist Roy Estrada, for one) become archetypes. But what does it all mean? The quest for an answer places the Zappa fan under his spell. Die-hard fans may spend years trying to figure it all out, and meanwhile their interpretations, and their aural perceptions, shift endlessly. For the Zappa Adept, a simple bowl of lumpy gravy carries cosmic currency.

In Zappa's film 200 Motels (1971), part of his script consisted of members of his band decrying his autocratic ways, his heartlessness, etc. Years later, former sidemen really do malign him, practically reading from Zappa's script. Is the Zappa fan to believe its all sincere, or might it just be another piece of his Great Work? Magician? Maybe Demiurge is more accurate. Had the bastard thought of everything? Or is it just accident masquerading as design?

Without getting "mystical" about it, Watson describes the relationship between the Project/Object and the listener in Freudian-Materialist terms:

Zappa releases in the Zappologist what has been repressed in Western culture since the advent of rationalism . . . [The Zappologist experiences] a surrealist coup, a reading-off of the hidden dreams of everyday life. Despite his professional involvement in music and the music business, with all its temptations to special status and art-ideology flatulence, Zappa always directs his attention to the mind of the average person. [4]

Whether by intentional manipulation laid out in "master plan" or by transcendental coincidence, Zappa's music creeps into the listener's everyday consciousness in a way that overtly "political" or "spiritual" music fails to do.

Wilhelm Reich Forms a Band

Since sound cannot exist in a vacuum, neither can music (John Zorn's view that "music has nothing to do with sound" notwithstanding). Zappa's music acknowledges this physical and social law by usually grounding lyrical themes (and often composed sound) in undignified and essential aspects of humanity: sex and excretion.