Frank Zappa, David Bowie and the “nasty little Mozart” of the modern world
For many, Frank Zappa appears to be something of the great unknown. His mystique largely derived from his deliberate refusal to reveal too much about himself or his work, his unique ability to cloak his thoughts in layers of complexity making even his most straightforward statements seem to hint at deeper, more profound meanings.
The notion that Frank Zappa was one of the most complex and enigmatic figures in music history is widely acknowledged. Many found his contemplative ideas just as challenging to grasp during his lifetime as they do today, with his intellectual and sophisticated musings often rooted in niche and abstract territories. However, much of Zappa’s intrigue wasn’t about being deliberately mysterious but rather a carefully cultivated part of his artistic identity.
Being a complicated player often meant even Zappa’s less dignified, childlike moments also beckoned mystery. For instance, Zappa wasn’t the biggest fan of David Bowie, as evidenced by a number of sources and incidences, but even something as callow as uttering the remark, “Fuck you, Captain Tom,” seems laced with deep-rooted contemplation. Maybe it was nothing of the sort, but Zappa’s intricate and elitist existence makes you wonder.
This was also, of course, because of Zappa’s music itself. As the very definition of defying easy categorisation, the musician’s repertoire has been connected to various genres, like rock, jazz, classical, and avant-garde, but his unusual time signatures and unexpected shifts in style seemed to exist outside even the blurred lines of various blends, a place where the welcoming and the jarring intertwined, culminating in a layered and often sharp-witted experience.
Due to his unorthodox creativity, Zappa’s approach often drew comparisons to classical virtuosos. His complex musical structures and themes parallel some of the most defining aspects of classical music. Despite primarily being regarded as a rock figure, Zappa has been compared to many classical composers, including Johann Sebastian Bach and Igor Stravinsky.
One of the best examples of this similarity is The Yellow Shark, Zappa’s orchestral album that includes live recordings from the Ensemble Modern’s 1992 Zappa covers. This showcased his ability to understand the dynamic capabilities of a range of instruments, placing him in a tradition similar to classical composers who wrote symphonies, concertos, and operas.
Zappa regarded his music as serious art, much like classical composers did with their own work. He drew direct inspiration from these composers, admiring their brevity, precision, and the ways in which they used sound as a fundamental force—an approach similar to that of his influences, such as Bach and Stravinsky.
However, when discussing the possibility of contemporary composers in Zappa’s book Them or Us, the musician wasn’t entirely convinced of their modern necessity. In fact, he openly dismissed it while subtly criticising Bowie once again, using the ‘Starman’ as the nucleus for the modern day’s shortcomings. He explained: “The people of your century no longer require the service of composers. A composer is as useful to a person in a jogging suit as a dinosaur turd in the middle of his runway.”
If attempting to understand his abstract metaphor wasn’t enough of a challenge, he then went on to say the modern landscape is “ugly and loveless” and that the implied Mozart contemporary, Bowie, is a “nasty little ‘Mozart'” who is “a simulation of a lip-synced version of the troubled life of a white boy with special hair who achieves musical greatness through abnormally large sales figures.”
Though cynical in tone, Zappa’s scathing critique of his perceived nemesis in the music industry underscores a deeper truth: the industry has long lost its appreciation for classical composers. While it continues to benefit from the structures, timbres, and rhythms that classical music introduced, the genre itself has been marginalised in the contemporary landscape, recognised now more as a niche or isolated genre rather than the timeless influence it actually represents across the entire industry.
