Zappa was more than a brilliant and prolific composer. He was a new kind of composer, one who knew no stylistic bareer: he bridged rock and pop and rhythm'n'blues and jazz and classical music. And one who knew no rules of harmony: he would play anything that made sense to him, not to a certain tradition. Zappa co-invented the concept album (he even released a double album when most rock musicians were barely beginning to make LPs), the rock opera, progressive-rock.
He made no distinction between tv commercials, doo-wop, music-hall, classical ballets, jazz improvisation or dissonant music. A living musical encyclopedia, Zappa managed to excel in all of these genres. He could have been a giant in any of them.
However, a stylistic quotation is a form of representational art because it relates directly to an aspect of society that the listener is familiar with. Zappa saw that, in order to make a statement about society, a musician can use the sounds that are stereotypical within that society, from commercial jingles to nursery rhymes to the silly voices of cartoons to any mainstream genre of music.
For better and for worse, his musical persona includes an odd aspect: a passion for satirical lyrics.
He always seemed to think of satire as his first and main art, and music as a sort of soundtrack to it. His satirical tone ranged from the childish joke to bitter sarcasm, and his favorite victim was hypocrisy, regardless of how it appears in society. His natural targets were televangelists, corporations, politicians, but also ordinary people, whether "dancing fools", "catholic girls" or "jewish princesses".
He showed no mercy for the human species, and relentlessly exposed its vices and perversion. He made fun of virtually every race, people, profession, hobby, habit, job, ideology, religion, etc. on this planet. Most of his repertory is "political", but without actually being militant: Zappa was not a protester or an activist. He was merely a man who used his brain.
It turned out that, in one of nature's most bizarre accidents, Zappa the satirical genius shared the same brain with Zappa the musical genius!!!
Zappa debuted with three masterpieces that were eclectic cut-ups of popular styles turned upside down: the concept album Freak Out (march 1966), the rock operetta Absolutely Free (november 1966) and the experimental collage of We're Only In It For The Money (august and september 1967). Zappa turned orchestral with Lumpy Gravy (october 1967) and then fine-tuned that idea with the six King Kong variations on Uncle Meat (february 1968) and with the 19-minute Music For Electric Violin And Low Budget Orchestra, off Jean-Luc Ponty's King Kong (october 1969). Zappa proved to be equally at easy playing melodic themes with a jazz band, on Hot Rats (august 1969) and especially on Burnt Weeny Sandwich (1969), that included the 22-minute Little House I Used to Live In, and deconstructing spastic free-jazz on the dadaistic masterpiece Weasels Ripped My Flesh (1969). His self-indulgence knew no limit, but at least Waka/Jawaka (may 1972), Grand Wazoo (may 1972) and Orchestral Favourites (september 1975) found a magical balance between his pop, jazz and classical propensities. His lighter vein, perhaps best summarized on Roxy And Elsewhere (1974), always coexisted with his classical ambitions, as demonstrated on the Kent Nagano-conducted Zappa (january 1983) and on the Pierre Boulez-conducted Perfect Stranger (1984), and with his fluent jazz idiom, as immortalized on Jazz From Hell (1986).
In the truth Zappa invented a bit 'of everything from new wave (We're Only In It) rock operetta (Absolutely Free), from progressive-rock (Uncle Meat) to concept (Freak Out) to punk-rock (Absolutely Free). Many of his insights (Lumpy Gravy, Weasels) have a name yet, because is not yet born a rock musician that knows how to continue.
The function of Zappa is a mix of: the composer, the director of 'conductor and producer.
Freak Out - SECOND DOUBLE ALBUM OF THE HISTORY OF MUSIC (after "Blonde on Blonde" by Dylan) - is dedicated to "buzz", the process (according to the composer) by which the individual is free of an old-fashioned way of thinking, dress and behave, and express creatively his relationship with the community.
According to the previous post –the one about PSYCHEDELIC MUSIC- let’s see Zappa’s album of 1968:
This was the first version of Frank Zappa´s "We´re only in it for the money", 1968, before it got HEAVILY CENSORED for many reasons: for example a child-embracing Jimi Hendrix on the right side of the picture, for the spoken line "I will love the police as they kick the shit out of me" was cut out; the spoken word lines "I don't do publicity balling for you any more" and remark "Flower power sucks!" were removed; several lines of the song "Let's Make The Water Turn Black" are removed, most notably the line about booger-smearing teenage friends Ronnie and Kenny Williams' mother ("and I still remember Mama with her Apron and her pad, feeding all the boys at Ed's Cafe"). Zappa believed that the line was cut because a record company executive thought the line referred to a sanitary pad.
In 1967, Zappa conceived an album, Our Man in Nirvana, which would combine the music of his band The Mothers of Invention with comedy routines by Lenny Bruce, however, when Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was released and hugely touted as the first CONCEPT ALBUM, Zappa, who already had released two (which Paul McCartney later stated had influenced Sgt. Pepper) felt compelled to respond.
Consequently, he decided to produce instead a SATIRICAL ALBUM that parodied every cynical aspect of the fad, Sgt. Pepper, and 1960s AMERICAN society (culture, lampooning the hippies, the establishment, and everything in between… There is anger at the police, real insight into the gaps between parents and kids, and Zappa's ever-present love of plain absurdity. With the "Chrome-Plated Megaphone of Destiny," he reveals his orchestral sense and his willingness).
So Zappa's mocking attack of the "summer of love" isn't really the point, there’s something deeper about society.
The only vestige of the original album idea in We're Only in It... is the phrase "Don't come in me, in me..." in the song "Harry, You're A Beast", a reference to a Lenny Bruce routine about ejaculation.
So, the 1968 release was Zappa's answer to the Beatles' "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," which he lampoons on the cover. The Beatles' work had in turn been inspired by the Mothers' "Freak Out." Whatever the difference between "Money" and the Lennon and McCartney's work, though, the two albums share one similarity: they both surprise with sound. Zappa's work includes patches of melody played backward, spoken words, doo-wop, surf music, hard-edged guitar, and a note held at the end of the tone poem "The Chrome-Plated Megaphone of Destiny," which ends the album and provides Zappa's final comment to the closer of "Sergeant Pepper's," the then-spooky "Day in the Life."
The album is definitely psychedelic, but in reality Zappa has little or nothing with psychedelia: while in San Francisco became orgies of LSD, Zappa before entering the study, was lucid and sober when composing this material. Zappa was not a hippie drug addict, but a sociologist who watched from the hippie phenomenon and sensed the positive effect on the `artistic creativity.
His work is like a train of the absurd. Zappa is affixed to approach one another grotesquely incompatible elements, for example in shades hour hour epic drama, now languid hour pressing, now petulant hours impressive, but systematically misplaced. It is a true theater of the absurd, with all that voice and those big voice around the stage in funny costumes hail ranting on the public who filled the room.
This mixture of genius and brilliant idiocy will remain is the calling card of Zappa: Zappa's music will always be essentially a disguise.
This double-disc debut has the stated aim of putting to shame all the music before. It is in fact a revolutionary manifesto, but not programmatically direct sabotage. The work is cut into pieces of the duration of a couple of minutes, welded seamless: the listener is assaulted by a horde of tiny units that pursue smart with subtle ferocity plot precise… the 'representation of a squalid and inhumane society, inevitably lost in the labyrinths of the hypocrisy of `stupidity, insensitivity'.
PANORAMA OF THE NATION MORAL are Atrocious frescoes in a series of surreal episodes.
The grand finale of The Chrome Plated Megaphone Of Destiny, a piece that blends avant-garde cacophonous Varese, Cage and Zappa and culminating in a period of treatment in the study of laughter is a horrible premonition of future technology on society .
Impressive, abnormal, enormous, the quantities of citations. We're Only In It For The Money is the culmination of mounting Zappa, worthy of Soviet filmmakers of the '20s and worthy of Brecht in the opposing side as cultured hip movement to Sgt Pepper that same year had shown side-naive.
Pop-song, chaos to Varese, riffs of all sorts, white noise, sections of speech, electronics borbogliante, nonsense-nonsense, classic passages, psychedelia, pop-scripted horror: the arsenal is in full force.
We're Only In It For The Money is the third part of the great psychedelic trilogy as a whole artistic monument which is hard to find equals in the twentieth century world.
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