The 1982 pop album Frank Zappa said was killing music taste: “No weird things to discover”
Frank Zappa was never without an opinion on the state of music, or any other subject, for that matter.
But naturally, pop would find itself square in his targets. Not that he was above the mainstream. Despite being a creature of the counterculture and tethered to the avant-garde his entire career, the old Mothers of Invention captain could just as easily heap praise on Eddie Van Halen’s “reinventing” the guitar or speak fondly of The Monkees’ pop jamboree as extoling the virtues of Edgard Varèse’s radical compositions.
However, his standards were high and somewhat mercurial. Bolstered by a well-known elitist air that lurks in all the Zappaverse run of LPs, the man was deathly opposed to whatever he sensed was formula and commodified. Much of pop then, but also huge swathes of the rockist soundtrack surrounding the Woodstock era that he avoided like the plague.
He liked Van Halen because he felt the guitar maestro was breaking conventions through his tapping technique. The Monkees sat in the Mothers man’s soft spot for precisely embracing the music industry’s manufactured conveyor belt to the charts with just the right amount of subversive cheer.
But if, for a moment, Zappa spied convention in sound or spirit, he was out. Such sonic checkboxes, in his estimation, played out in much of the records gunked over the charts. Remarking on the perceived lack of depth or spontaneity peppered throughout the Hot 100 propped up for passive pop consumption, Zappa highlighted one Billboard behemoth as guilty of such tame, by-the-numbers production for encapsulating an industry-wide problem of ‘playing it safe’.
“What’s to discover?” Zappa lamented to Guitar for the Practicing Musician in 1986. “You hear the song and that’s it. You either like the song or you don’t like the song. There’s really nothing tucked away. The record companies are not going to sign people who do things other than that because 30 million people buy a Michael Jackson album.”
“The album had nice songs and nice arrangements, but no weird things to discover,” he added. “Obviously, from the record company’s point of view, that’s the right way to make records. So everything is patterned after that. For my taste that’s a loss.”
It’s possible Zappa just grabbed the nearest pop monster at hand, being Jackson’s Thriller heavyweight, and, as we all know, to this day stands tall as the biggest-selling album of all time. But were the King of Pop and Quincy Jones lacking finesse in the studio? There’s certainly little in the way of improvised jam in an effort to bottle that livewire urgency Zappa so venerated, every beat, bassline, and brass jab manicured to within an inch of its life.
Well, the Thriller team came from a different school of thought: How should a great pop song sound the 100th time you hear it? Flawless production and immaculate sonic sculpt were perhaps too sanitising for Zappa, who was no less diligent in the studio, playing the role of editor and bricolage assembler of his own copious material over any regard for accessible sheen for hours on end.
But that was the Zappa way. The Mothers man set his unwieldy Zappaverse for a sleeves-rolled-up grapple from the intrepid; Jackson was gunning for pop immortality, which he won in spades.
