“Product”: The iconic band that was too commercial for Frank Zappa
If you want to be a trailblazing musician, then an internship in advertising isn’t the worst starting point. It worked for David Bowie, and it worked for Frank Zappa, too, not to mention countless others. Zappa emerged from his stint as part of a marketing team, concluding that in the pop culture age, music was now 50% about image.
This was in the early 1960s when the British Invasion was unloading fully formed bands of brothers onto US shores. As the moustachioed guitarist would later muse in The Real Frank Zappa Book: “The success of the British groups forced a change in the way new American groups were put together. They now had to be self-contained because every bar that hired live music wanted its own little US version of the Beatles or The Rolling Stones.”
Mavericks from old, weird America were no longer in season. Something a little more relatable and reliable was required. Zappa wasn’t that. He had to find a way to make his weirdness work—to, in his own way, sell it. But he also wanted to maintain the premium bond of his soul in the process. Could commercial art also be ‘good’ art—that was his conundrum.
His argument is that the British Invasion exacerbated the rise of commercialism owing to the fact that the hit bands hadn’t formed organically within the States; thus, in order for Americans to accurately copy them in some way, they would have to forcibly alter their constitution to be more like them. This was never something that Zappa was prepared to do because he thought it belied the true essence of what rock ‘n’ roll should be.
Therefore, even though he “liked” the Rolling Stones, placed them above The Beatles, and praised Mick Jagger’s visceral “attitude”, he nevertheless added: “Ultimately, though, the music was being done because it was product. It was pop music made because there was a record company waiting for records.”
While the Rolling Stones themselves would argue that working to a deadline for pay is not the enemy of art—it’s what everyone else in the working world has to do, why should creativity be different? Zappa, however, would argue that they were cloistered by commercialism and trends, and he proved that point by extending endless time to the likes of Captain Beefheart on his own label.
In the end, he wound up thinking that the British Invasion had largely eviscerated any remaining true American culture entirely. “We are culturally nothing,” he later argued. “We mean nothing we’re only interested in the bottom line.” The bottom line being profit. In part, this is even truer today, where much of youth culture is about the size and scope of a trend rather than its artistic worth.
Zappa sternly added: “I think that a country that doesn’t do something to sustain its culture, whatever it is, doesn’t invest in it and doesn’t keep it happening, isn’t proud of it, well, maybe they just shouldn’t exist because it’s the culture and the beautiful things that a society produces that should survive for thousands of years, not the designer jeans.”
Needless to say, the moustachioed maestro was not impressed.
