How did Frank Zappa predict the future on ‘Joe’s Garage’?
Music follows culture and politics like a shadow. Regardless of whether you’re listening to Frank Zappa or Sabrina Carpenter, a commentary on modernity will bleed into their work somehow.
A lot of people tend to get frustrated when they think that the music they’re listening to is trying to be “current”. That’s when you hear boring throwaway lines like “keep politics out of music”, or people criticising bands for being “too political”, but these takes are out of date. Regardless of whether someone wants to write a harrowing societal commentary or a floor-filling dance track, culture, somehow, will seep into it.
It has never been easier for us to engage with what’s happening in the world. The news we consume in the palm of our hands isn’t just domestic, it covers events all around the globe, as people everywhere read up on controversies overseas while digesting commentary about such events and forming opinions of our own.
With social media and the internet being such pivotal parts of our lives, it’s pretty impossible to be apolitical. When you go online, you’re likely going to stumble across some kind of news-adjacent content, whether that’s what you were intending on watching or not. This content and these videos become a part of you regardless of whether or not you consider yourself a modern person. The same goes for your favourite artists, as when you listen to them, these different current affairs will play on their creative mind, whether they intend on that or not.
Of course, while everyone is subconsciously political, you have other artists who intend on making a point with what they write. There are plenty of artists out there who write with a specific theme or point of view in mind, and would like their art to contribute towards a general change in attitude and society. When you look back in time, political commentators have always existed within music, this isn’t a new thing.
However, something which not many artists do, given how difficult it is, is to use their music in a bid to predict the future. Only minds like Frank Zappa can do that kind of thing.
When he released Joe’s Garage, he took what was supposed to be a song and stretched it out over a record. There were various themes covered in the record, but the main one was one of censorship, specifically, the government attempting to censor creativity. Zappa described them as “Stupid little [stories] about how the government is going to do away with music,” however, his writing may have been a little bit more poignant than that.
In 2025, as politics and general commentary on culture seep into everything that we do, so too are there people attempting to censor the way we express our feelings about as such. The band Kneecap were taken to court, Bob Vylan had their visas removed, and Banksy graffiti was removed by the government. Whether you agree with some of the comments being made by these artists is neither here nor there, the fact remains, in a free society, said artists should be allowed to make their voices heard. Zappa, with what he wrote in Joe’s Garage, managed to touch upon these themes decades before they happened.
Granted, Zappa didn’t write Joe’s Garage with the intention of making a statement about the censorship of art in 2025; his argument was one against conformity. He wanted people to make music that was on the edge, and felt that a lot of artists’ failure to do so was essentially akin to government censorship.
While he may not have been directly trying to predict the future, the fact that his chaotic music managed to touch upon such a range of different themes really highlights the true genius of Zappa.
