FRANK ZAPPA,

HIS MUSIC,

AND THE LEGACY WITH POSTMODERNISM

Paper presented at the Graduate Forum, 16 December 2010

OSVALDO GLIECA

Rightocopy

Abstract

The aim of this presentation is to analyze the content and forms of music by Frank

Zappa and his band “The Mothers of Invention” to demonstrate between the years of

1966 to 1970 their musical affinity with certain aspect of postmodern practices.

This presentation is not an analysis of single song or album, but more an introduc-

tion of Zappa musical directions already clear from the very beginning. The presentation

is divided in a first part to unwrap some musicological aspects, and, after playing some

short musical examples, I will present the second part to describe more practical way his

music. The conclusions will to establish the aspects that may or may not position Frank

Zappa within a postmodern condition.

Zappa has been often misunderstood, playing any of his record will lead to an ar-

gument, his music has been often described a pastiche, his lyrics outrageous, his music

had no sense of beauty; it was above all a provocation and a smack in the face for public

taste. If Postmodern practice are mirrored in Zappa’s music because of the unusual wide

range of musical sources, and techniques incorporated into his recordings, at this stage

of his career, raises a spontaneous question: how then did these albums figure into the

cultural dialogue between Rock musical language and the changing experience of mod-

ernity especially in America in the 1960s?

The quickest and probably easiest answer is that by juxtaposing different musical

genres, Zappa, who considered himself a composer, was attacking the academic estab-

lishments, whose members distinguished categorically between art and popular music,

particularly as regards structural and tonal complexity, and philosophical approaches;

part of his line of thinking was directed against the sort of highbrow quality of art.

He was against the repetitiveness and standardization of “consumer music” but

for the careful listening instead, and in this meet Adorno’s view on cultural industries, in

which popular music is intended for thoughtless audience for mere commodity consump-

tion. Zappa welcomed the "modernist" music of composers of the European avant-garde,

but his philosophy was more directed towards the maverick American tradition of com-

posers like Charles Ives or John Cage.

His music was by that time a crossover to reconciliate not only different forms and

styles, but more importantly redefine the musical meaning of heterogeneous nature in one

platform to cancel the imposing differences created by music business. This characteris-

tic is relevant to me as include some issues in the postmodern agenda, as these days we

have to come to appreciate that the distinctions between high art and low art exist as

much as in popular music as serious music. In other words, there is only good or bad

music, whether serious or popular.

He balanced instrumental music with Pop songs, the lyrics of which mostly sati-

rized the manufactured trends and fashions of contemporary America, parodies on popu-

lar critiques of the mass media advertising, and the consumer capitalist culture that sus-

tained them all.

However, placing this output in theoretical discourse, it should be obvious that his

musical borrowings, uses of collages, and quick-cut recording techniques were never

ambivalent they always had a point. This could be classified into the tradition of

twentieth-century musical modernism; his early works do not anticipates characteristic of

postmodernist quotations, that had resembled a typical restless irony that all too often

lapsed into mere cynicism in its short-sighted rejection of high modernism. Much of his

goal at this stage was to deal with recordings of music about music.

Before examining this hypothesis in a more deep sense, Zappa's early works

needs to be put into the larger context of sixties and seventies Rock, and its connections

with modernism, for the reason that popular genres closely associated with postmodern

intertextuality, had already emerged. Particular emphasis need to be addressed on the

tendency of late 1960 Rock on borrowing melodies, harmonies, and instrumentation from

"classical" music, as later successfully happened in Progressive Rock, of the 1970s,

especially by British bands like Pink Floyd, Yes, King Crimson, and Emerson, Lake & Pal-

mer. Zappa in his career used borrowed material in the best way, not taking straight refer-

enced quotations, but using technique and compositional procedure to identify uncon-

ventionally genres like Jazz, Rhythm & Blues, Folk, Doo-Woop, Punk, Disco, Reggae,

Heavy Metal, as well as the Classical music.

These intertextual combinations were reflections of social realities, intellectual

claims, generated also as a part of the modern condition that was shifting between tradi-

tions and new ideas. Zappa wanted to make listeners aware of their confined and limited

conceptual cultural spaces they were occupying, astutely transforming his music as an

artistic statement to re-define new modes of sensibility. There was not only satire and

parodical sarcasm, but new concept of lifestyle were questioned, message of injustice,

chaos, and idiocies of contemporary American society. This should be considered as an

unifying sociological theme: the American West-Coast particularly Los Angeles of late

1960s, with its freak counterculture and racial tensions between Latinos and Afro-

Americans. Lyrics were intended to puncture what Zappa saw as shallow experimental

genre like psychedelia targeting the hippie life-style, and drug culture associated that he

had publicly rejected.

Music to play

I have tried hard to enclose all this extraordinary musical range in the shortest time possi-

ble, hope it gives you a clear idea. However, I selected the more musical material in the

strict sense rather the pure experimentalism, like concrete music, tape effects, and comi-

cal dialogues.

Playlist:

• “Hungry Freaks Daddy” (social protest in Rock) from the album Freak Out (1966)

• Various extracts from the album We’re only in it for money (1968)

(a parody of Beatles and criticism toward excessive commercialism in pop music)

• “Igor Boogie” (Stravinsky typical language imitated by Zappa in a more eclectical way) from the album

Uncle Meat (1969)

• “Little House I Used Live In” (Zappa virtuoso-writing and conducting) Live from the album Burnt Eee-

nie Sandwiches (1970)

Is Frank Zappa a postmodern pioneer or a maverick high Modernist musician?

July 1966 is the official recording launch of Zappa career, here the albums within

1966-1970 are varied, but mainly focused to the clear intent of fusing Rock and Modern

Classical music. Various styles are connected one to another, such as large group im-

provisation, experimentalism, electronic music, Psychedelia, vocal techniques as

sprechstimme, and cabaret-like recitative, tonal and atonal expressions, instrumental

chamber music, blues-oriented guitar solos over two-chord ostinatos contemporary Jazz

and Rock all taking the direction of a sort of electric chamber music; much of his musical

grammar take place in symmetrical meter and the poly-rhythms played against a steady

rock beat, and poly-metric bar arrangements.

The unconventional forms, harmonization and chord changes, vocal harmonies,

and timbres of Doo-Wop, Rhythm & Blues ballads, and Folk melodies are mocked as they

can be perceived as a sort of new Rock clichés. In addition, the unpredictable shifts

among musical styles and text meaning, involves changes in instrumentation, and ar-

rangement as well. Strings, Brass wood-winds, marimba, drum Kit, distorted electric gui-

tar, electric pianos, and timpani, complete the effervescent sound-scape, and constant

musical motion.

Avant-garde, Neoclassicism and Rock intersect with modernist eclecticism. But

this is the problem.

How then this music should not be analyzed? if, with the tools created for concert music,

it would lead away from its "authentic" roots, and also might lead us to question that this

search for "classical" inspiration were not for Zappa intention.

It is, I believe, significant that one key to assessing Zappa's place as an American com-

poser and record producer, represent high modernist aspirations, they expanded listeners

consciousness beyond a limited appreciation of eclecticism possibilities, and to present a

far broader range of music to rock audiences than otherwise offered from record compa-

nies. However, the listeners today can judge for themselves the value of his early works,

and trace his evolving path through his career and confront his unconventional genuine

output to the huge pile of works that has been located in postmodern music history. This

early production is a controversial commercial rejection within a commercial product. Al-

though many of Zappa procedures such as collage, fragmentation, parody, humor, docu-

mentary, and political directions, which all became requisites in postmodern music

academies, Zappa’s formal writing was still seen as too arrogant, insolent and bold for

contemporary classical recognition. The real problem with Zappa was his personal refuse

to measure his art and compare it with any external and accepted standards. He was

wrongly seen mainly as a rebellious musical anarchist that produced musical recordings

for pure self-indulgence, to subvert the popular music taste, and contrast the classical

academia as well, disintegrating the standard of the concert orchestra.

Frank Zappa was a musical pioneer, his works ranged from Acid Rock to Classical

concert music, the barriers that once kept different style and tradition of music firmly

apart were at that time, and now more then ever crumbling. Zappa music is much about

thinking about music as it is about music, and also is about the social and institutional

structures that condition and govern thinking about music.

Finally in my conclusion the last thought: is Zappa modern or postmodern then?

Postmodernism is best understood as an assembly of discourses that is notonly internally

diverse, but also contradictory in its relationship to modernism. Postmodernism is both a

rejection of modernism, because of the modernist fascination with rigorous systems and

forms, and a transformation, that reveals aspects of modernism that werepreviously de-

nied and undervalued. Given that, the range of influences which contributed to the career

of Frank Zappa, are twisted as the diverse currentsthat feed postmodernism, it is not dif-

ficult at this point find analogies between Zappa’s aesthetics and the postmodernist prin-

ciples. In addition to this Zappa’s enthusiasm for unresolved paradoxes, makes no diffi-

culties to position him as postmodernist. However, the difficulties presented by trying to

decide whether Zappa is modernist or postmodernist, demonstrate just how hard it is to

draw a rigid line between thetwo philosophical discourses.