The ultimate beginner’s guide to being a Frank Zappa-hating contrarian
Frank Zappa is overrated. There, I said it.
Feels good to get that off my chest. I know full well such an admission will yield breathless accusations of insufferable contrarianism, or that I just haven’t stumbled upon the right patch of the unwieldy Zappaverse’s wildly disparate musical offerings, but for the past several years, I’ve been dogged with that nagging, gnawing feeling that the old Mothers of Invention captain enjoys a lauded stature that just seems blind to his many, many pitfalls.
Like most kids who first start their intrepid exploration of popular music’s weighty heritage beyond the charts, Zappa was a figure of tantalising experimentalism I had to wait a couple of years to actually hear. No broadband internet in the house, streaming wasn’t a concept, and I couldn’t expect that thick moustache and soul patch on MTV2 anytime soon. So for two years, there he was in my Book of Rock 2002 Christmas present-come-foundational educational resource, occupying one page of the coffee table tome with all the air of the last word in artistic radicalism.
I needed to investigate. Once I had a little pocket money in the bin, a perusal at Yeovil’s Acorn Record store of the Zappa on display presented a colourful litany of eye-popping comix covers, prompting a purchase with my very finite funds based on which image zapped my senses the hardest. Naturally, Weasels Ripped My Flesh winked at me the most, grabbing my 16-year-old fancy off its surrealist title and zingy Schick electric shaver commercial pastiche on its artwork, a grinning ad man showing off his weasel trimmer, leaving a trail of blood across his cheek.
Any Zappa connoisseur will know this is certainly a sideways entry into his oeuvre. Weasels Ripped My Flesh largely comprises studio offcuts and live recordings, only boasting ‘My Guitar Wants to Kill Your Mama’ as the relative ‘hit‘. Over the years, about ten-odd Zappa albums would join my CD collection, along the way spelling the sinking feeling that perhaps his body of work isn’t quite all it’s cracked up to be, a disconnect between what I saw as evident creativity, but leaving me thoroughly cold.
Let’s be clear, there are great albums. We’re Only in It for the Money still glares with bizarre snarl nearly 60 years later, Lumpy Gravy’s a fascinating trip of sliced and spliced bricolage collage, and Over-Nite Sensation packs a walloping cartoon blast of freak rock that bristles with colourful arrest. The further I waded into the Zappaverse, the more I became fatigued with his hectic compositional style that clogs up most of his records, let alone the voluminous amount of live documents. There were plenty of good songs scattered around his extensive discography, even great ones, but all too often lost in the bog of his chaotic bluster masquerading as restless genius.
It didn’t matter what he tried his hand at. Orchestral works, guitar shredding, Synclavier synth explorations, it was all just the same overcomplicated, inaccessible tangles and knots convinced of its own maverick cachet. It’s perfectly in keeping with the man behind such self-satisfied noodles. While his aversion to hippy deadends throughout the counterculture offers some scabrous merit, the freak anti-establishmentism would all too often curdle into sneering elitism and a palpable superiority complex, the sarcasm and snark surrounding his supposedly subversive worldview growing coldly impregnable and stricken with a repellent streak.
Society’s just made up of dull conformists in the Zappaverse, a herd of low-brow, unthinking masses gobbling up “the slime oozin’ out from your TV set” too stupid to break out of the system that oppresses them. Not that Zappa cared to relieve those shackles. A staunch libertarian, Zappa routinely dismissed government spending of any kind, despite riding the wave of the US post-war consensus along with every other hippy he looked down on, and harboured a well-known contempt for unions in the music industry and beyond, Sheik Yerbouti’s ‘Flakes’ just one giant moan about California’s blue-collar labourers and their union protections.
Now, 20 years on from that first nab of Weasels Ripped My Flesh, the Zappaverse glows with a very different aura. Amid his queasy sexism, juvenile lyrics, conceptual bloats, and disorienting meticulousness in place of even the faintest emotional depth, much of Zappa’s work now triggers tedium over the fascination my teenage budding muso felt when pulled in by his towering presence in the world of challenging rock, a chore of overrated, substanceless bamboozle sporting a permanent smirk on its face, because, clearly, you’re just not smart enough to get it.
