The 1983 Frank Zappa songs that Frank Zappa thought should have been hits
Every artist needs to have total conviction in their work. If they don’t feel like something they’ve written is going to be the best thing they’ve recorded or released, or if they don’t believe in every single song, then what’s the point in wasting an audience’s time on mediocre new music, or their own time, for that matter?
Somebody who never had any troubles with his own convictions, or doubts about the quality of his own music, was Frank Zappa. No matter what any audience or critics thought of his music, and no matter what musical direction his peers and contemporaries were moving in, Zappa was always guided by his own sense of sound and his own unwavering internal belief in himself.
Though he was always more of an album artist with a hardcore and dedicated legion of loyal fans, occasionally, his self-belief and the interests of a wider, more mainstream audience would overlap, like when his 1982 track ‘Valley Girl’, a duet with his daughter Moon Unit, went to a career high number 32 in the charts, or when ‘Dancin’ Fool’ previously had gotten up to number 45.
Perhaps the most famous of all his songs, despite only reaching number 82 on the charts, was ‘Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow’, which for a while was a perennial favourite on American radio and whose catchy chorus could be repeated by both children and former-children alike up and down the States.
But when asked by Gary A Shay for Songwriter Connection in 1984, two years after his best singles chart showing, if he’d ever felt that “one of your songs was a hit?”, Zappa replied in the extremely affirmative.
“I think that everything that I write is a hit. I think that ‘The Radio is Broken’ is a hit. I think that ‘Jazz Discharge Party Hats’ is a hit. That’s how sick I am,” he responded.
Zappa then went on to explain, or complain, that “at least I use my imagination. It was great when you could use your mind to think amazing, fun stuff. Kids don’t do that anymore. They have chemicals that do it for them”.
Embarking on a rant expressing his life-long hatred for mind-altering substances, he added, “Those baffling things that occur to them in their stupor is what they think of as fantasy. And all of their fantasies have been made explicit in terms of motion picture or television special effects. There’s nowhere left to go. The American public has been put into the imagination box.”
Just imagine what he’d have thought if he had been around long enough to witness the harrowing phenomenon of all the overstimulating and brain-rotting, imagination-dulling “content” that the kids these days are being subjected to. Still, any kids who find the phrases such as ‘six-seven’ or ‘skibidi toilet’ side-splittingly funny are in for a treat the first time they hear Serious Artist and Imagination User Frank Zappa singing “Watch out where the huskies go, and don’t you eat that yellow snow”, or whatever it is that you’d call what he was doing on ‘The Radio is Broken’.
