Oh boy. I’ve been very preoccupied with this one. I feel like I always talk about this. It’s only because it have adopted the firm belief at this point in my life that in fact the art and the artist cannot be separated. Some may cite, for example, the Nazi affiliations of great thinkers like Ezra Pound or Heidegger. I don’t believe this is cause for isolation of factors: it is cause for deeper, more critical, and more complex examination. Art isn’t complicated, beautiful or meaningful intrinsically. It is so because the people who create it are also that way.
So I’ll put aside the interaction of character and creation. How did Zappa’s personality affect his work and legacy? His workaholic nature was both a blessing and a burden. There is no doubt that we would not have had nearly the same sheer bulk of material to amount to a legacy. The fact that he constantly drank coffee, smoked cigarettes, loved work and music and despised rest and leisure meant he produced dozens upon dozens of unique albums for fans to enjoy. The unavoidable bigotry inherent to the times and his heritage, both patriarchal, meant the messages in his work were convoluted head-scratchers, trying to get at something, an opinion or a solution. His treatment of women in songs like The Illinois Enema Bandit may be unconscionable but at least he’s trying to work through some inner problem with that phenomenon. Songs like that sabotaged the songs where his message was better executed, and his personality itself would be further sabotage. Rather than admit that he wasn’t sure about some things, he preferred to say it was all a joke, something to be laughed at, or that it was stupid, or wasn’t supposed to mean anything.
If I’ve learned anything from studying men like Zappa, it’s that if you don’t have something nice to say, say something anyway. Negative aspects of personality or reality should not be hidden, because they are a part of you. Personal expression in all forms is of ultimate importance.
Friday, April 8, 2011
Zappa the social critic
I just finished writing a research paper this morning that included Tupac Shakur, another musical artist famous for his societal views. As my penchant for literature demands, I included a little quote from Emerson, about how the misunderstanding of what is brute and dark connotes a lack of recognition of that aspect of one’s own personality. General audiences tend to be scared off by people who rap about violence or musicians who sing about incest because they can’t or don’t want to recognize those acts in their own communities. For Tupac it was more about exposing the public to the atrocities being committed in their own backyards, but I think Zappa zeroed in on things to a greater extent: he wanted to get at the reason why middle-class America was so blind to all that was wrong with their society. He occupies a unique social niche which allows him to do this perhaps more accurately than Tupac. He was impoverished, but white; his parents were immigrants, but he was born in America; he was a major rock star, but only to a certain type of fan, and even then he was not always taken seriously as a cultural influence. I believe it was this standpoint which allowed him to offer such searing social commentary.
He doesn’t differ as much from Tupac in his methods, however. It’s the same sort of shock tactics. The only problem is that people act stupidly when they are scared, and so they jump to conclusions. In the same way that many people felt threatened by the images in Tupac’s videos, such as children pointing handguns, they also felt threatened by Zappa’s incorporation of incest or homosexuality into his lyrics. I think when a regular-looking white guy mentions these things, though, it’s more of a fear of infection than an oppositional fear: you mean this could happen to me, or someone like me? Is it possible that someone like me would be ok with this?
Everything that Zappa has created has a sort of echo of cynical laughter. A girl in one of my classes last term said that someone once said laughter is the best way to get people to understand something because your head is tipped back and your mouth is open, allowing everything in. Zappa’s exaggerations might make it more difficult for some to accept certain realities, but I think in these discussions we have to keep in mind that it is not just the Republican bigot we are talking about when we talk about the target audience for Zappa’s music. If someone is already part of the way there, or even just a tiny bit of the way there, seeing or hearing exaggerations of a present problem make it more obvious that their views or actions are wrong. At the time that Zappa was writing tunes there still wasn’t much information out there about homosexuality, sadomasochism, feminism and the like—the amount of information, when you think about it, is even today still somewhat pathetic, lacking. Someone who had watched Amos N’ Andy and seen nothing at fault in it might reconsider that on seeing the grotesque mutations representative of blackface in Thing-fish. A young woman who had been comfortable in her confusion about sex and subservient in relation to men might see herself in the Annie character in Thing-fish screaming “Harry, yer a worm!” She might be encourage to develop her sexual personality when she sees the behavior of women like the GTOs or hears about women performing sexual acts she might have thought were reserved for men. An older woman might see herself in the intonation: “Time to go home, Marge is on the phone, time to meet the Gurneys and a dozen grey attorneys.”
With these kinds of artists, it’s all about walking the walk. These things exist and it’s time to talk about them. It’s time to become the cultural minister of something, time to get into politics or call on politicians to take action. In another book I was reading for my research paper, Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Black Swan, he recounts an episode of his youth where he was arrested during a riot and from then on felt he no longer had any need of teenage rebellion, because he had actually done something. I view this the same way. These artists are not trying to rebel and don’t need to. It is only when these issues finally manage to speak for themselves that musicians like Zappa will be obsolete.
He doesn’t differ as much from Tupac in his methods, however. It’s the same sort of shock tactics. The only problem is that people act stupidly when they are scared, and so they jump to conclusions. In the same way that many people felt threatened by the images in Tupac’s videos, such as children pointing handguns, they also felt threatened by Zappa’s incorporation of incest or homosexuality into his lyrics. I think when a regular-looking white guy mentions these things, though, it’s more of a fear of infection than an oppositional fear: you mean this could happen to me, or someone like me? Is it possible that someone like me would be ok with this?
Everything that Zappa has created has a sort of echo of cynical laughter. A girl in one of my classes last term said that someone once said laughter is the best way to get people to understand something because your head is tipped back and your mouth is open, allowing everything in. Zappa’s exaggerations might make it more difficult for some to accept certain realities, but I think in these discussions we have to keep in mind that it is not just the Republican bigot we are talking about when we talk about the target audience for Zappa’s music. If someone is already part of the way there, or even just a tiny bit of the way there, seeing or hearing exaggerations of a present problem make it more obvious that their views or actions are wrong. At the time that Zappa was writing tunes there still wasn’t much information out there about homosexuality, sadomasochism, feminism and the like—the amount of information, when you think about it, is even today still somewhat pathetic, lacking. Someone who had watched Amos N’ Andy and seen nothing at fault in it might reconsider that on seeing the grotesque mutations representative of blackface in Thing-fish. A young woman who had been comfortable in her confusion about sex and subservient in relation to men might see herself in the Annie character in Thing-fish screaming “Harry, yer a worm!” She might be encourage to develop her sexual personality when she sees the behavior of women like the GTOs or hears about women performing sexual acts she might have thought were reserved for men. An older woman might see herself in the intonation: “Time to go home, Marge is on the phone, time to meet the Gurneys and a dozen grey attorneys.”
With these kinds of artists, it’s all about walking the walk. These things exist and it’s time to talk about them. It’s time to become the cultural minister of something, time to get into politics or call on politicians to take action. In another book I was reading for my research paper, Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Black Swan, he recounts an episode of his youth where he was arrested during a riot and from then on felt he no longer had any need of teenage rebellion, because he had actually done something. I view this the same way. These artists are not trying to rebel and don’t need to. It is only when these issues finally manage to speak for themselves that musicians like Zappa will be obsolete.
Sunday, April 3, 2011
more literary criticism
Samuel Coleridge said this about Wordsworth, and I think it applies to Zappa:
"Had Mr. Wordsworth's poems been the silly, the childish things, which they were for a long time described as being: had they been really distinguished from the compositions of other poets merely by meanness of language and inanity of thought; had they indeed contained nothing more than what is found in the parodies and pretended imitations of them; they must have sunk at once, a dead weight, into the slough of oblivion, and dragged the preface along with them."
- The Great Critics: An Anthology of Literary Criticism, pg. 528 (ed. Smith & Parks)
"Had Mr. Wordsworth's poems been the silly, the childish things, which they were for a long time described as being: had they been really distinguished from the compositions of other poets merely by meanness of language and inanity of thought; had they indeed contained nothing more than what is found in the parodies and pretended imitations of them; they must have sunk at once, a dead weight, into the slough of oblivion, and dragged the preface along with them."
- The Great Critics: An Anthology of Literary Criticism, pg. 528 (ed. Smith & Parks)
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