entry eight (hypocrisy)

You had mentioned in one class that some students were finding issues with Barry Miles' maybe too aggressively unbiased account of Zappa. I'm actually enjoying it a lot. For example, his account of Zappa's initial dealings with producer Tom Wilson on pages 103 - 104. Miles responds to Zappa's claim that Tom Wilson was unfamiliar with the music of the Mothers: "This scenario is both extremely unlikely and an insult to Wilson's intelligence." This example might have less of the aggressiveness that I was talking about than some other episodes in the book, but it struck me because I felt it really exposed between the image Zappa carried of himself in his head and how his actions appeared to others. I think Miles can be credited for his exploitation of that throughout the book.

The interesting thing about it is though Zappa was something of a hypocritical character and that's not what we like to see in our artists and social critics, in a way he was just mirroring the hypocrisy he saw putting a stranglehold on America. His mission of blowing apart conformity had become so associated with a certain "look" that people began to associate Zappa with activities (namely drug-taking) that he was not only not involved with, but to which he was vehemently opposed. We see it all the time: something truly groundbreaking gets developed and slowly gets all these meaningful connections attributed to it, has all these reasons behind its invention--and then we see all these disparate, meaningful attributes homogenized into a lumped-together, two-dimensional copy. I reminded of the "Flaming Moe's" episode of The Simpsons: Homer invents a new drink, Moe pretends he invented it, all the cool New Yorkers come and flip out over it, and then at the end everyone learns Moe's secret and before you know it Springfield is overrun with bars advertising "Flaming Meaux" and the like. I wanted to find a clip of it or a link to the episode, but the Simpsons people must be taking some action at the moment because all the links are currently dead.

I just wanted to bring up the notion of hypocrisy, have been considering the personal implications of Zappa's mission/personality, mostly in relation to Tank C. John Milton was similarly questionable in his artistic motives - he was also a man with politically volatile opinions and it could be argued that much of his writing and indeed his sympathetic take on Satan in Paradise Lost was a reaction to having to go into hiding (simply for speaking his mind). So when Zappa gave the finger to that stewardess on page 132, I wonder whether he truly wanted to personify the ugliness all around him, or whether it was nothing more than a moment in time when he was unable to control his pent-up rage.