"It's like being a cook. And if you were a really good cook, and you had a lot of money for really excellent ingredients and really good equipment, then you could cook just about anything. But if you don't have all the gear . . . and you don't even own a cookbook, but you still want to eat, and nobody's going to cook it for you, then you better find some other way to improvise that dish. And that's kind of the way the stuff gets put together."
(Quote from Zappa! magazine; interview by editor Don Menn.)
">
Name: Frank Zappa, American composer and musician
|
Artist: Frank Zappa Confronting Bodies: Various Date of Action: 1965+ Specific Location: Los Angeles and other Description of Artwork: Frank Zappa's music and professional career have always suffered as a victim of society's unwillingness to laugh at its own weaknesses. Satire is no fun when nobody is spared the whip of Zappa's tongue and the sting of his fiery, imaginative guitar playing. In 1965, when Zappa and his group, called The Mothers, were about to release their first LP "Freak Out" on MGM Records (featuring the song, "Who Are the Brain Police?"), the label told the group to change its name. "Out of necessity, we became the Mothers of Invention," Zappa writes in his autobiography, "The Real Frank Zappa Book," an indispensable tome for anyone interested in the master's colorful career. Rather than try to describe Frank Zappa's 50-album oeuvre, here's the artist on how he works: "It's like being a cook. And if you were a really good cook, and you had a lot of money for really excellent ingredients and really good equipment, then you could cook just about anything. But if you don't have all the gear . . . and you don't even own a cookbook, but you still want to eat, and nobody's going to cook it for you, then you better find some other way to improvise that dish. And that's kind of the way the stuff gets put together." (Quote from Zappa! magazine; interview by editor Don Menn.)
"If the goal here is total verbal/moral safety, there is only one way to achieve it: watch no TV, read no books, see no movies, listen to only instrumental music or buy no music at all." Ironically, one of Zappa's instrumental albums was stickered by a retail chain, many of which have strict "18 to buy" regulations on albums with "Tipper stickers." Zappa further ridiculed Gore's assertion that certain types of music could promote deviant behavior saying, "I wrote a song about dental floss but did anyone's teeth get cleaner?" There are many, many more censorship cases in Zappa's history, involving record companies, radio stations, TV stations, governments and retail stores.
|