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Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 177 Contents
From Socialist Review, No. 177, July/August 1994.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Zappa: The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play
Ben Watson
Quartet £25
Frank Zappa was one of the most creative and original artists to emerge from the rock explosion on the West Coast of America in the 1960s.
Unlike most of his contemporaries Zappa continued to produce interesting and ambitious work transcending the barriers between rock, jazz and classical music until his tragically early death at the end of last year.
He went far beyond the blues and Hendrix influences of his contemporaries, his music being heavily affected by avant-garde classical composers such as Varese and Stravinsky, the free jazz of Ornette Coleman and Eric Dolphy and the doo-wop sounds of West Coast rhythm and blues. His records and stage performances with his band the Mothers were a heady and chaotic kaleidoscope of all these styles topped off with Zappa’s sardonic humour.
Biting send-ups of middle American values and hilarious satires on the idiocies of flower power were a key part of the Mothers’ repertoire. Satire remained a central part of Zappa’s work into the 1990s. Targets included born-again Christianity, the new right, US militarism and the yuppies.
Zappa fought a running battle with giant record companies such as Warner Brothers on whom he was forced to depend to retain a relationship with a mass audience. He was an active opponent of censorship.
However Zappa’s politics had their dubious side. Many of his songs bordered on the sexist and homophobic. As a small employer of musicians and road crews, he was openly hostile to trade unions.
Ben Watson’s book is an ambitious and complex analysis of Zappa’s work and career. Watson attempts a Marxist analysis of his music citing cultural theorists such as Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin in his support. Watson believes that although Zappa’s explicit political attitudes are typical of the liberal middle class, sandwiched between the big capitalists and the workers, his work was inherently anti-capitalist. He argues that Zappa’s work was ‘anti-ideological’ using shock, satire and the juxtaposition of contrasting musical styles to overcome the artificial divisions in bourgeois culture and undermine the values of capitalist America.
Zappa’s critics argue that he was finished by the early 1970s, along with the hippy counter-culture with which they wrongly identified him.
Watson rejects this, arguing that the anti-ideological thread in Zappa’s music continued unbroken until his death. He argues that even the apparently reactionary message of songs such as the homophobic Bobby Brown are only reflecting values held by many in contemporary US society and not Zappa’s own views. Watson himself admits that this could sound like the typical special pleading of a self-centred pop musician ducking the effect of his actions on a mass audience. Shades of Morrissey’s flirtation with fascism.
Watson’s attempt to apply Marxist theory to a major figure in popular culture certainly made me go back and listen to Zappa’s music with new ears. Watson has an encyclopaedic knowledge of Zappa’s music and influences, but I feel that he is insufficiently critical of Zappa’s work and the attitudes which lie behind it.
Zappa’s vast output includes a fair amount of dross as well as many brilliant moments. While agreeing with Watson that good or bad art cannot be judged by its proximity to the party line, for my money Watson goes too far in his efforts to claim Zappa for our side. He is too ready to see his musical and political faults as all part of the master’s grand plan.
In spite of this, however, anyone interested in Zappa’s music will find this a fascinating, if demanding book, one that does full justice to the range of Zappa’s work, putting it in its social and cultural context.
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