Frank Zappa: America’s last rebel

Doubtless the fake nonconformist is an American type that goes back centuries, but we surely reached an apex of fraudulence in the early 2020s. How passionately the rioters of Antifa demanded the same things as Fortune 500 CEOs, how righteously millionaire celebrity “activists” raged for the machine. And there was something mournful too, about Bruce Springsteen and Barack Obama’s coffee table book Renegades, heavy as a tombstone marking the spot where Rock n’ Roll was finally laid to rest. The counterculture had gone full Weekend at Bernie’s.

Of course, it had been green around the gills for a long time. Confronted with the hyper-commercialization of radicalism in the early Nineties, the political historian Thomas Frank doubted that even its Golden Age amounted to much: “The Sixties was the age of postmodern fantasy and retailers’ dream, for each identity, each new phase of rebellion, necessitated a comprehensive shopping expedition.” The rejection of tradition, Frank argued, was simply the outcome of a desire to be free to flit between images: “They would be rebels, poets, perky-girls, English, hippies, and playboys in quick succession.”

But while there is much truth to Frank’s critique, the counterculture was not entirely bogus. Some hippies really did turn on, tune in and drop out. Hunter S. Thompson may have ended his days writing for Esquire, but all those drugs and guns weren’t going to pay for themselves. The cartoonist Robert Crumb really was a weirdo. And then there was Frank Zappa, guitarist, satirist, avant-garde composer, and writer of “Why Does It Hurt When I Pee?”

It’s difficult, now, to appreciate how famous Zappa was during his lifetime. Yet between the release of his debut LP Freak Out!in 1966 and his death in 1993 at the age of 52, his was a name you knew even if you had never heard his music — and you probably hadn’t, because it was never played on the radio. The one Zappa factoid everybody knew was that his children had strange names, Moon Unit and Dweezil being the strangest. These are tame by the standards of Musk’s X Æ A-Xii, but in 1969 the nurses were so scandalized by “Dweezil” (Zappa’s term for one of his wife’s “funny looking” toes) that they refused to put it on his birth certificate, and he was legally “Ian” until the age of five, when it was changed for good.

I first heard Zappa’s music after taping his concert film Does Humor Belong in Music? which was broadcast deep in the night when I was 16. I was amused by the dirty jokes, but it was also obvious that Zappa’s band had incredible chops. The small Scottish town where I lived turned out to be an outpost of Zappa fandom, and it was easy to get tapes and records. But you never knew what you were getting: Apostrophe was great and Hot Rats was sublime but The Man from Utopia was total crap and Jazz from Hell was unlistenable. Zappa always made sure there was something to annoy or offend everyone.

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