The moment the music industry began to decline, according to Frank Zappa
When musicians are so commonly associated with an era where they were at the peak of their powers, it’s pretty normal to hear them rue the fact that things develop over time and become different to how they might have been used to in years gone by. There are, of course, those who welcome change and are always happy to see up-and-coming artists push things in new directions, with the likes of David Bowie always inviting new trends in with open arms and actively championing acts that have brought about cultural shifts.
Despite that, there will always be those who continue to rally against change and can’t seem to wrap their heads around the sudden declines in genres to make way for newer trends that feel somewhat alien to their stick-in-the-mud ways. As adventurous as Frank Zappa might have been with his approach to rock that incorporated elements of jazz fusion and psychedelia, he was often resistant to seeing the industry around him morph in new ways that saw the styles that he and his peers were working within become less fashionable.
While Zappa was often sceptical of the music business in the first place, he still acknowledged that there were some positives to be taken from how he was even given a platform to release his offbeat deviations to a wide audience and have such an illustrious career. The likes of himself and his close friend and collaborator Captain Beefheart were oddballs, to say the least. The fact that they were still successful is nothing short of miraculous considering how leftfield their approaches to music were. Still, Zappa realised that there was a greater force behind their successes that permitted them to be so free in their approach.
In a 1987 interview, Zappa gave his thoughts on the direction that the music industry had taken over the course of the last 20 years since he had originally broken through with the Mothers of Invention, and he was surprisingly nostalgic for elements of how the music industry used to be in the ‘60s. Despite caveating his claims by saying that the ‘60s “really weren’t that great,” he was quick to say that there were plenty of positives to how things worked in the music business during the era.
“One thing that did happen in the ‘60s,” Zappa confessed, “was some music of an unusual and experimental nature did get recorded, did get released.” Reflecting on the attitudes of the industry bigwigs at the time, he amusingly described them as being “cigar-chomping old guys who looked at the product and said, ‘I don’t know. Who knows what it is? Record it, stick it out. If it sells, alright!’”
While he longed for the return of these moguls who were happy to take risks on a record regardless of what it sounded like, he was equally as scathing in his remarks about the people who had begun to take over the industry during the ‘80s. Referring to the old business figures, Zappa said that “We were better off with those guys, than we are with the supposedly hip, young executives who are making the decisions about what people should see and hear in the marketplace.”
Of course, there was still music of an experimental nature coming out during the ‘80s. Still, it’s easy to see with the increasing commercialisation of music and shift towards a homogenised pop sound where Zappa was coming from in terms of the lack of risk-taking going on among the higher positions in the industry. “The young guys,” Zappa concluded, “are more conservative and more dangerous to the artform than the old guys with the cigars ever were.”
The evils of the music industry haven’t exactly vanished in the years since Zappa made this statement, and have perhaps shifted into different areas of the industry where it is easier to exploit the artists for their money, but contrary to his remarks about experimentalism being a dying artform, it’s clear that it always has had and will continue to have a solid platform to exist on.
