[music] FRANK ZAPPA - Tinseltown Rebellion (Ryko)

[dot_fennel]

The title track misreads punk so badly that it offers some insight into just how Zappa got so far off course when it came to watching his contemporaries. What it doesn't illuminate is where he got his painful aesthetic hypocrisy on the issue from: his line on punk is that it's "dumb". Whereas his own music is "stupid" -- is there so much of a difference?

(These concert recordings also feature multiple examples of a weird Zappa-as-light-unto-the-masses performance tic he had: interjecting "that's right!" after an unkind lyric, as though maybe audience members not otherwise convinced of his sincerity might come around.)

But OTHERWISE, the live Zappa release I've enjoyed most, if memory serves. "The Blue Light" has the feel of an old Mothers track, and isn't afflicted with Zappa's latter-day lyrical smugness (or at least not obviously). Now that I've had a few weeks to breathe I kind of want to go back to some records I know I gave short shrift to, like The Grand Wazoo.

Comments

semantics

[modpixie.livejournal.com]

i always thought dumb = not knowing any better, where stupid = knowing full well and doing it anyway. maybe zappa sees his approach as aware of its shortcomings, where he sees punk as all sound and fury signifying nothing...?

[dot_fennel]

Yeah, I think that Zappa definitely felt like he was superior for "choosing" to write stupid music, even as that music got stupider. BUT one of his criticisms in "Tinseltown Rebellion" is that punks are just "acting dumb" to make money, and on the other hand, elsewhere "dumb" is, like "ugly", a word he uses to express with SOME affection the hopelessness of the human condition. I think in the end it's just a combination of arrogance and projection that keep him from seeing any common ground with punk rock, not any super-precise vocabulary he's using.