Did Frank Zappa hate everything about the 1970s?
While there are many things that point to Frank Zappa as being one of the greatest contrarians in the history of music, you can make the argument that he simply just didn’t have time for doling out insincere plaudits to things that he didn’t think were artistically engaging and that more than anything, he was a purist that never wavered when it came to sticking by his opinions on such matters. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with being hyper-critical of your peers, but by being a constant naysayer when it comes to critiquing your contemporaries, you’re bound to work up something of a negative reputation.
Of course, Zappa was never obliged to like everything that he ever listened to, and just because he had very specific standards for what tickled his fancy doesn’t automatically earn him the label of being pretentious. However, the ways in which he went about lambasting others who wee releasing what he might have considered to be below the required standard of music he was accustomed to listening to does highlight him as being a self-important snob.
While Zappa rose to prominence in the mid-1960s alongside his band, The Mothers of Invention, he really began to carve a career for himself in the 1970s and continued to work at an accelerated rate of activity up until his death in 1991. During this golden period in the ‘70s, he was restless in his tirade against what he believed to be manufactured and inauthentic pop music, but did that mean he disliked absolutely everything that he heard during the period? No, not exactly.
While his music appeared to be rallying against musical conventions of the time, it would be Zappa’s 1969 album Hot Rats that propelled him into the spotlight more than anything else he had worked on in the past. It was far from a straightforward or commercial record, displaying jazz fusion virtuosity and only featuring one song with vocals contributed by Captain Beefheart, but inexplicably it landed widespread acclaim in the music press, seeing it as an antidote to all other rising musical trends of the time.
However, the problem was that despite Hot Rats’ unconventional approach, it wasn’t in line with Zappa’s usual rule-breaking modus operandi. Hell-bent on defying expectations and constantly aiming to turn everything into a satirical stab at the art that surrounded him, his output in the 1970s did everything within its power to destroy all association with the mainstream by being overtly dismissive of it. Over the course of 23 studio albums in the decade, he did everything he could to dismantle any expectation that he’d be making a Hot Rats sequel, and instead played by his own rules.
This meant that nothing was safe from his acerbic takedowns of everything that surrounded him, whether that was the music itself or the culture that came with it. A constant critic of drug culture: “People think it gives them a licence to be an asshole”. And a known hater of schmaltzy mainstream rock: “I hate love songs, they gag me. It’s difficult to accept they’re the ultimate art form,” Zappa seemingly rarely found time to bestow praise on anything at the time.
However, when he wasn’t busy winding up fans by parodying the Beatles in live performances and driving them to wrestle him into the orchestra pit, he was recruiting Ringo Starr to appear in his catastrophically awful directorial debut, 200 Motels. Did he hire Starr out of irony, or was his hatred of all things popular simply to reinforce the public opinion that he was a contrarian? Also starring in the film was the Who’s Keith Moon; a well-known user of drugs and alcohol, but despite this radical difference in personality and lifestyle between the two, they were reported to have been friends during the period.
It’s difficult to know whether he appreciated anything outside of his own work due to how thickly smothered on the absurdist humour was at all times. This presents the biggest issue with assessing whether Zappa was indeed a fan or hater of anything else that emerged from the ‘70s – if he did indeed admire anything, it wouldn’t remain exempt from his ridicule or scorn. His often contradictory remarks and proclivity for being a wind-up merchant get in the way of establishing any truth behind his public remarks, but if there’s one clear thing Zappa had a love for in the 1970s, it was his desire to confound anyone who came into contact with him or his work.
