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.