20 years after his death, Frank Zappa has gone from cult figure to a giant of modern music. We review his career and find out how the hell that happened
Many years ago, when I was no more than a slip of a lad and the internet was powered by teams of draught horses wired in parallel, I used to spend a lot of time on a newsgroup called alt.angst. (I was very young.) It was populated largely by people older than me who had attained seriously WTF levels of formal education, typically in a combination of humanities and hard science. One of them maintained the group's reading list, which consisted of a list of books, movies and albums that you were encouraged to read, watch or listen to if you wanted to feel more 'angsty'.
Although I liked a lot of stuff on the list, I couldn't grasp the point of drawing it up. I was no more than normally pissed-off with things, but some of the people on alt.angst were struggling with severe depression – one of the most charismatic members would spend weeks at a time away from the group, recovering from her latest suicide attempt – and what I couldn't understand was why anyone would want to read, see or listen to anything as part of a conscious attempt to make worse how they felt about the world. I had this wacky idea that the purpose of art was not to depress you further, but in some way to lift you up and, perhaps by means of unflinchingly staring down the crapness of life, to make you feel, on some level or another, better. However, when I made the mistake of voicing my opinion that the list was a bit stupid, I was myself accused of being stupid, because – or so my accuser said – by criticising the purpose of the list, I was merely demonstrating that I didn't understand the art. You don't get it, man, my accuser told me: you obviously haven't suffered enough to understand what real angst is.
Frank Zappa, who died 20 years ago last month, had a name for the kind of behaviour that this particular individual was displaying. Zappa called it 'featuring your hurt', and he associated it with the rise of daytime talk shows in which people extravagantly broadcast their own suffering for the purposes of low-grade entertainment. Zappa regarded the bulk of popular music as just another way of featuring your hurt, which is why he had very little time for it. Why he thought so is tied up with the basic contention of this article, which is this: of a generation of American musicians working in popular music that came of age during the 60s, Zappa was by a very long way the smartest, the most imaginative, the most gifted and the most worth listening to.
That's a big claim for a man whose catalogue includes such titles as 'He's So Gay', 'The Illinois Enema Bandit' and, a personal favourite of mine, a shimmering etude for rock brand and brass instruments called 'I Promise Not To Come In Your Mouth'. Even Nigel Tufnel might have blue-pencilled that one. How can such a claim be supported?
First, a qualification. I'm not sure who you think of when you think of 'Zappa's generation', but typical candidates might be Lou Reed, Captain Beefheart, Iggy Pop, The Doors, even Neil Young(Canadian, but still) and other such quirky icons of Classic Rock, the ones whose careers are endlessly rehashed in magazines that keep middle-aged dads occupied on medium-haul flights. I'd argue that, fine as these musicians are, they aren't quite the real guys. The real guys were mostly black musicians: Ray Charles, James Brown, Otis Redding, Marvin Gaye and, bestriding several genres like a soft-spoken Colossus, Jimi Hendrix. If you feel like including jazz-rock, then Miles Davis is up there too. And so is Zappa.
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