ZAPPA THE MUSICIAN-PERFORMER: Zappa's musical influence

Many musicians were influenced by new kinds of music that Zappa created and experimented with.  Orgasmic-sounding, nonverbal vocalizations are perhaps the best example of such an element that was copied by others.

Try listening for yourself...

Zappa & MOI: "Help, I'm a Rock!" (June 1966)

Frank Zappa and The Mothers Of Invention - Help, I'm a Rock

The Doors: "The End" (Jan 1967) ... listen at 9:03 ... also includes a hard-to-notice change in meter and tempo, very Zappan

http://hypem.com/#/track/792772/The+Doors+-+The+End

The Beatles: "Lovely Rita" (Feb 1967)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hn03ZBahOMk

All much to Zappa's chagrin - his work being mimicked AND credited by two of his least favourite types: a drug abusing hippie band (The Doors)

and the commercially loved Beatles? No wonder he hated them both.

ZAPPA THE COMPOSER: The Ensemble Modern, and coming full circle

Many believe that Frank Zappa's work was truly complete when he worked with the German orchestra Ensemble Modern, for the Frankfurt Music Festival, in 1991.

Getting to work with a group like Ensemble Modern gave Frank the musical freedom he had been trying rather unsuccessfully to get for decades (the Royal Philharmonic's disgust with Zappa and his "unusual" musical vision had led to a sabotage of his work many times, including his show at Albert Hall in anticipation of the release of 200 Motels).  It was just the group of musicians he had been looking for.

Together, Zappa and The Ensemble Modern produced Zappa's best serious work: The Yellow Shark.  It was released in 1993.  Zappa died soon after its release.

ZAPPA THE MAN: Unorthodox views & lifestyle lead to unorthodox parenting.

Without a doubt, the most interesting stories I have heard about Frank Zappa are his child-rearing habits.  Frank and Gail believed that children were adults too and free to make their own decisions and do their own thing.  Moon Unit once went to school with her underwear on her head.  All the Zappas walked around their home naked.  Dweezil changed his name back to Dweezil of his own volition when he was 5.  The children were never really watched while in the house - both Frank and Gail were too busy (especially Frank, who worked all night and slept all day, and hated being disturbed, even by his own children).  Frank and Gail even allowed their children to watch porn and often watched it with them - Zappa had very strong views on open sexuality, stemming from his sexually restrictive Catholic upbringing.

While such a free environment may sound enlightening and like every kid's dream, it wasn't.  According to Barry Miles, Moon Unit spent her whole childhood wishing that her family was normal.  She never invited friends over because she feared they would see her father walking around naked.  She wished Gail would tuck her into bed.  She often begged to be given a curfew.  This craving for normalcy was something that would plague Moon for a long time.  Not everyone wants freedom - sometimes people, especially children, want boundaries.  Zappa's unorthodox views may have been good in theory, but they were not appreciated by all, and this is a prime example of the negative side of his liberal lifestyle.

ZAPPA THE SOCIAL CRITIC: PMRC debates & congressional hearings

To be honest, I had never even heard of Frank Zappa before watching VH1 one day, and happening upon a program about the PMRC's call to develop a censorship system for music.  I could not tell you one single song he had sung.  But after watching the documentary (the name of it slips my mind, and I have been unable to find it for about 10 years), I had learnt one thing about Frank Zappa - his politics.

Frank held himself well, was extremely articulate and well put-together (sporting a fresh haircut - part of his "infiltration" theory and technique ... a long-haired, moustachio'd Zappa would not be heard by the mainstream).  He was determined to stop government intervention into his beloved music and the lives of the American people - to him, words were words and they had no business being censored according to FCC regulations.

Before the debates were over and most of the media frenzy had died down, America and the world got to hear the other side of the debate from a well-spoken, intelligent man who believed in the freedom of expression.  Frank's infiltration made sure that people heard him, and thus heard Prince, Cyndi Lauper, Metallica, and all the other artists who had been maligned by the PMRC, right-wing demagogues and Republicans.  There may be labelling on your CD's now, but at least you can still buy them.

ZAPPA'S GENERAL DEFINITION OF MUSICAL COMPOSITION

"A person with a feel for rhythm can walk into a factory and hear the machine noise as a composition. If we expand that concept to include light, behavior, weather factors, moon phases, anything (whether it's a rhythm that can be HEARD or a rhythm that is PERCEIVED, i.e., a color change OVER TIME -- or a SEASON), it can be CONSUMED as music. If it can be CONCEIVED AS MUSIC, it can be EXECUTED AS MUSIC and PRESENTED TO AN AUDIENCE IN SUCH A WAY THAT THEY WILL PERCEIVE IT AS MUSIC.
     ...Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance space is SCULPTED INTO SOMETHING. This "molecule-sculpture-over-time" is then "looked at" by the ears of the listeners -- or a microphone. ...A composer is a guy who goes around forcing his will on unsuspecting air molecules, often with the aid of unsuspecting musicians."

- Frank Zappa

(source: Zappology: The Closest Look at the Music and Lyrics of Frank Zappa http://www.mindmined.com/public_library/nonfiction/chris_federico_zappology.html#freak)

ZAPPA THE COMPOSER: Mixing musical meters and styles

Frank Zappa always seemed determined to push boundaries, and musical boundaries are less than exception - to him, it seemed that music was only good as far as it could be experimented with.

Zappa often changed meter within a song, a technique that he used on quite a few tracks; for example "Oh! No", from the Ahead of Their Time album.  "Igor's Boogie, Phase 1" from Burnt Weeny Sandwich is also an example of odd meter/polyrhythm - it moves from 4/4/ to 3/8 to 7/8, and keeps changing meter until the piece ends.

Zappa was also not a genre musician. He believed that music was music, and thus could be found anywhere.  He loved so many genres of music: for example, he had a particular soft spot for the R&B of his teenage days, and that 'shuffle' style of meter (1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3 - almost like a waltz) that was the basis of doo-wop and 1950's, 1960's R&B.  He loved combining it with rock n roll, jazz, musique concrete, all the while maintaining classical progressions - he was a composer, after all.

ZAPPA THE COMPOSER: Zappa messes with musical expectations.

Zappa's great dream was to become a truly revolutionary composer, like his idols Varese and Stravinsky.  His primary interest was really pushing the boundaries of music, specifically what instruments could do (including "non-instruments", like his bicycle on The Steve Allen Show) and the way they sounded together.  He wanted to prove, among other things, that disharmony could sound beautiful, that things needn't sound melodious to be musically satisfying.  Musical satisfaction for him, seemed based on experimenting with music (in quite the same way the young Zappa liked to experiment with homemade explosives).  The process of experimentation means testing the potentials of different combinations of things, in order to prove a point.  Zappa wanted to prove that music didn't need to only sound pleasant.

ZAPPA THE MUSICIAN-PERFORMER: Zappa as a Multimedia Musician

Zappa, more than anything else, was a showman.  While he loved music and loved to compose, to a large extent he was actually a multimedia performer, more than anything else.  It is his showmanship that he will perhaps be the most greatly remembered for, rather than his actual compositions over the years.

For Zappa to truly elucidate his views and his visions, he had to employ and did employ almost everything he touched.  Methods of expression were no exception.  Zappa's second-best mode of expression (barring, of course, the interviews that he granted over the extent of his career) was the visual: specifically, his shows and his films.

With a strong and well-applied use of satire (except of course, maybe the misinterpreted "Valley Girl"), the Mothers of Invention appealed to the television generation's affinity for the visual by employing physical antics such as interacting with props and made-up characters.  With 200 Motels, Zappa used the opportunity to create characters, or rather CARICATURES, highly-symbolic personality types and figures that were about as good as their expressed views or their politics.  This is one of the ways in which he critiqued society, by simply making caricatures of popular figures or at least popular notions, usually those that he highly disapproved of, and made jokes of them as a way of exposing their faults.

Effective indeed.