The songs that made Frank Zappa physically sick: “They gag me”
It didn’t take much to get up Frank Zappa’s nose.
He was many things, but derivative wasn’t one of them. From Freak Out! to Yellow Shark, the Zappaverse sits as a teeming monolith of wildly inventive LPs that all orbit each other in its cartoonish cosmos, hopping between rock opera, jazz expanses, orchestral works, and detours into electronic Synclavier experiments, all under the former Mothers of Invention captain’s uniquely absurdist direction.
Such evident vision was countered by a palpable superiority complex. The Zappaverse, in all its intermingling whole, radiates a potent, cynical snark which can veer into sneering elitism. It’s a quality that leaves his detractors the coldest. Alongside his hectic compositional style and the clashing ‘Xenochrony’ editing techniques, a fierce libertarian streak that met anything from union workforces to ‘plastic people’ consumers was deemed as members of the unthinking horde, all operating within the dreaded establishment.
Naturally, he had plenty to say about the music industry. Zappa was a freak, never a hippy. Such principles meant a deep cynicism over much of the counterculture he came to figurehead, a perception that the 1960s’ revolutionary air had been commercially co-opted by the major label Man all the decade’s leading stars feigned kicking against.
Then there was the mythos. Whether mocking The Velvet Underground’s avant-garde chic or lambasting the ‘Lizard King’ branding nurtured by the corporate string-pullers around Jim Morrison, many of Zappa’s supposed peers would find themselves centred in his excoriating sights.
“The rock scene is absurd,” Zappa sounded off to Go Magazine in 1969. “I hate love songs – they gag me. It’s very difficult for me to accept the love song as the ultimate art form. And a lot of these soul groups who talk about how much soul they have – like they’re out there sweating – and looking at their watches.”
Inauthenticity is what wound Zappa up the most. Whether fair or not, his “embarrassing” impression of white guys playing the Black man’s blues or businessmen “making the peace sign” all dwelled in the realms of hypocrisy he found unforgivable. “Love songs” proved to rub the Mothers man the wrong way with equal irk. While he never mentioned any names and seems to arbitrarily fuse love songs with soul groups, it was well known that Zappa thought little of the likes of Sly & The Family Stone and harboured a fatigue with the Motown assembly line of soul hits.
He loved the love songs of his youth, the doo-wop that scored his 1950s high-school years. But, once he was navigating the rock industry, perhaps his arch-cynicism blinded him to the power that lay behind much of the Hot 100 “love songs” his sharp misanthropy could never hope to embrace. In the Zappaverse, everyone was a phoney in the peace and love generation.
“The majority of Americans still like to drink beer and watch baseball games on TV with their stomachs hanging out, or watch a good fight and see somebody win,” Zappa remarked, concluding, “People don’t believe that peace is really good. At best, if they want peace, it’s because it’s fashionable.”
