i should maybe put this in my own post. the brilliance of zappa is that 75% of his audience never really figured it out. kids today are sorting through his work, and they still don't really get it...
so, what is this? what this actually is is frank going to a doors concert (or something like the doors, in los angeles in the mid 60s), saying "this is the dumbest goddamn thing i've ever seen", realizing he's gotta do something similar if he's going to gig and responding with a tongue-in-cheek parody of it.
it may come off as sort of groundbreaking. and it certainly is, in a certain respect. it's bitingly satirical, in a way that foreshadows punk rock.
but it's not meant to be taken seriously. like, if you want to listen to this and drop acid to it, go ahead. his estate'll take your money - in frank's name. but he's laughing in his grave....
like, if you can imagine being at a zappa show in the mid to late 60s...
it's full of hippies, of course. it's that place and time. but what zappa's doing, the whole show, is making fun of the audience. he's taking their culture, exposing how stupid it is by taking it to the most absurd extremes it can go and then selling it back to them...
...and they're largely just oblivious to it. hey, they're having a good time, right? too stoned to care....
as performance art, it's brilliant.
but it remains very poorly understood.
what i'm getting at is that you're not supposed to listen to this and think about how ahead of it's time and influential it was - despite it being influential and ahead of it's time.
you're supposed to listen to this and laugh at how blatantly idiotic it is, and by extension understand how blatantly idiotic the counter-culture of the time really was.
CommieCotch
What I like about you is you're smarter than everyone else who's ever lived.
deathtokoalas
well, i think i know a touch more than nothing at all. that's a little bit exaggerated.
Kian Stra
well.. It seems to me, that Zappa just like weirdness and absurdity in music. He didn't like the drug culture and he had conservative ideals (but not like any conservative), but I definetely think he liked the spirit of counter-culture of the 60's, as he himself was against alot of mainstream concepts both musically and otherwise.
deathtokoalas
i think what you're picking up is that he was frustrated. he was ready to build a new society, as was promised to him growing up. but, he looked around at what he had to work with and he just laughed. you couldn't build a tree fort with these bozos.
frank wasn't really a conservative, he was more of an anarchist. and, this is the problem that anarchists consistently deal with: if the whole world was like us, we really wouldn't need a government. we could build a wonderful utopia. we would respect each other. we'd clean the fucking toilets, and we wouldn't even bitch about it. we're ready for this.
but, then we look outside our rooms and realize we're in this perpetual three stooges skit and have little choice but to shake our heads and resort to some kind of art.
Kian Stra
Zappa gets asked if he's an anarchist in this interview, and he responds that he's not, he's a conservative. I think it's honest, because they are discussing a serious topic (censorship/freedom of speech). He later gets accussed of being an anarchist, to which he shakes his head disapprovingly. He answers that he prefers legislation based on morality in form of behaviour as opposed to morality in form of theology (but whether this is his personal point of view or just the prefferable point of view in this context isn't clear).
Off course he might had changed his political views over the years, I'm not sure about that :)
also if someone is truly an anarchist, you wouldn't build a new society. You would destroy the structures that make up a controlling society. So a better metaphor would be destroy a new society, haha. Okay now i'm just fucking around. Have a pleasant New Year's Eve!
deathtokoalas
well, actually i think you've stated frank's view fairly succinctly in your second comment - he was all about destroying the "new society", because he realized it was the same as the old one. but, building and destroying are also the same thing.
anarchism is a really broad term, and i should have known i was going to get a reaction like this. but, there is a core streak in anarchism that overlaps with old-fashioned conservative concepts of upholding codes based on behaviour. in order to have a society free of governance, we need a behavioural process of self-governance - a social revolution. frank is denying he's an anarchist, then describing a key tenet of anarchism.
see, i think frank may have thought he was a conservative, and perhaps identified weakly with a concept of old democrat conservatism with strong roots in agrarian concepts of liberal anarchism, however warped they may have been, but he was highly critical of the conservatism of his own period. i know he self-identified. but, you have to interpret what he's saying correctly. and, the truth is that these words become very confusing well before zappa's period, and have remained confusing, in evolving ways, since.
so, i didn't say he was a raving anarchist. i suggested that it makes more sense to categorize his views as more anarchist than conservative, if you're going to throw the words around at all.
at some point, one needs to address a motive for the type of social criticism he engaged in. he's not demonstrating a passivity towards activism, he's demonstrating a sincere sense of disappointment in it's then contemporary form.
Kian Stra
I think you're right. I also think what he describes in the interview is quite anarchism-related, but Zappa isn't only an anarchist - he's more plural ideologically, and that's probably why he doesn't want to get pigeonholed :)
deathtokoalas
yeah. i'll grant you that the idea of defining anarchism is this constantly dangerous contradiction in terms, although i think it's less profound of a problem than a lot of people suggest. i mean, you don't want to go walking around saying "anarchism is this list of principles" - even if that list of principles is fluctuation to change, reaction to empiricism etc. although, at some point, you have to do that.
i think the reason he reacted so badly is because it was used as an epithet, rather than a description. and, that kind of thing resonates and has effects. i also think his decision to claim he was a conservative was more meant in the sense of contrasting him with his opponent. neither his denial nor his self-identification should really be read too far outside of the interview's context.
