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COPYRIGHT 2001 University of Washington
Record industry executives need to find out what it is they're selling because, see, they don't know how important pop music is today. All they know is that that's what's making money this month. They really don't know what a revolution it is in terms of music history because there are a lot of people working in pop music today who are doing things that are artistic, and actually mean 'em that way!... I think it's living serious music!
--Frank Zappa, The Prank Zappa Companion: Pour Decades of Commentary
THE IMMEDIATE AIM of this essay is to analyze the content and form of three early albums by Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention--Lumpy Gravy, Uncle Meat, and Burnt Weeny Sandwich--and demonstrate their affinity with certain works by Igor Stravinsky. It also seeks to advance a critical approach that views rock as a recorded art, and rock recordings as aural artifacts. Such analysis, according to a leading proponent, Paul Clarke, is based "on the complex of created relationships between sounds as they act on us through time." (1) The unusually wide range of musical sources and techniques Zappa incorporated into his recordings at this stage of his career raises a prior question: how did these albums figure into the cultural dialogue between rock and the changing experience of modernity in America in the 1960s? Let us address this question before turning to the analysis to place it into proper historical context.
The short answer is that by juxtaposing different musical genres, Zappa, who considered himself a composer foremost, was attacking the entrenched critical and academic establishments whose members distinguished categorically between art and popular music, particularly as regards structural and tonal complexity. (2) To paraphrase Carl Dahihaus, Zappa's was a music directed against the esoteric quality of art. (3) Popular music intended not for thoughtless consumption but careful listening also strained against the repetitiveness and standardization of Theodor Adorno's "consumer music." (4) By contrasting broadly different approaches to composition, moreover, Zappa was implicitly rejecting the kind of hairsplitting that set the "modernist" music of composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez apart from more accessible "avant-garde" works by John Cage and other so-called experimentalists. (5)
Zappa was not alone in striving for this kind of pluralistic synthesis. Indeed a number of self-styled modernists were welcoming the eclecticism of contemporary art in sixties popular media. Susan Sontag, for example, waxed enthusiastic about the lowering of barriers that had formerly separated high from low, past from present in an essay first published in Mademoiselle. (6) Although Zappa probably held a similar opinion, he could not help giving it a satirical twist, drawing upon sources disparate and sometimes vulgar enough to exceed the bounds of even the most broad-minded critic's good taste.
Unlike Sontag, Zappa's intent was hardly theoretical. Neither did he seek to create a truly unpopular music with "no commercial potential," a label a Columbia Records executive once hung on his work to which he often referred. (7) Rather, as he repeatedly stated, his albums were market products designed to appeal to record buyers searching for the newest sound, the latest protest music, the most outrageous novelty. So he balanced his instrumental music with songs, the lyrics of which mostly satirized the manufactured fads and fashions of contemporary America. Never mind Zappa's serious and well-known involvement in all phases of record production, marketing, and promotion, or professed willingness to reap whatever profits came along--We're Only In It For The Money is the title of one of Zappa's early albums. That was part of the put-on. Zappa's early recordings were indeed "music about music," (8) but they were also parodic popular critiques of the mass media, advertising, and the consumer culture that sustai ned them all, designed to sell in volume.(9)
With respect to the place of Zappa's early recorded output in theoretical discourse, it should be obvious that his musical borrowings and uses of collage and quick-cut techniques were never ambivalent--they always had a point. Thus since Zappa's early work in no way anticipates the ahistoricity, ironic detachment, and playful depthlessness characteristic of postmodernist quotation, it could be classed as modernist. (10) There is more to support this label than mere wordplay, as I shall argue below. Indeed, careful listening reveals an attention to form--the organization of recorded sound in time--that places the three albums discussed in this essay uneasily (and perhaps consciously so) into the tradition of twentieth-century musical modernism. Before examining this hypothesis, Zappa's early work needs to be put into the larger context of sixties rock and its connections with modernism.
Perhaps because genres closely associated with postmodern intertextuality, like punk, rap, and new wave, had already emerged by the time of their writing, some rock critics--most notably John Rockwell (11)--have placed particular emphasis on the tendency of late sixties rock to borrow melodies, harmonies, and instrumentation from "classical" music. This is nowhere as prevalent as in discussions of progressive rock, exemplified by British bands like Pink Floyd, Yes, King Crimson, and Emerson, Lake & Palmer. Critical discussions during and shortly after the peak of progressive rock's popularity, however, focused not on any indebtedness to the classics per se, but on its eclecticism. (12)The best uses of borrowed genres--jazz, blues, folk, non-Western music, as well as the classics--were not then viewed as reflections of artists' social or intellectual pretensions, as Rockwell would have it. Rather they were part and parcel of the modern condition that Sontag described: a shifting between traditions and ideas th at made listeners aware of the confined conceptual spaces they occupied. "Art today is a new kind of instrument, an instrument for modifying consciousness and organizing new modes of sensibility," she wrote. (13) With modernist notions like this spilling off the pages of Mademoiselle, it is easy to understand how the quest for an expanded consciousness could be transformed into a consumer item, like a rock album.
Complexity was another trait of rock that listeners identified at the time. This was not so much the complexity of contemporary art music- indeed many quoted works are "chestnuts" (14)--or the extended chords and forms of jazz, or the almost competitive virtuosity of the performers. Rather, I would argue, it had primarily to do with recording techniques. The aesthetic of modernism, with its promise of art-science synthesis, thus reached into the very mode of the music's production.
The roots of this aesthetic reach back at least as far as producer Phil Spector's "Wall of Sound" recordings of the early 1960s. (15) In these one readily detects the expertly crafted, multi-layered, though hardly classical-sounding arrangements that would have been impossible to recreate outside a recording studio. Spector's hit singles also involved what were, by the then-prevailing standards of rock'n'roll, exotic orchestral instruments like the timpani and castanets, along with more familiar-sounding strings, woodwinds, and brass. With these he sought to create what he called "little symphonies for the kids," (16) though he seldom scored them in a "classical" manner. String ensembles, for example, were typically heard in short bursts within multi-textured accompaniments. Tracing the classical orientation of progressive rock to the recording industry and Spector, rather than to qualities inherent in the classics themselves, makes sense given the esteem in which later producers and rock musicians held his w ork. (17) Thus qualities of eclecticism, complexity, and technical sophistication figured prominently in rock from the early sixties on.
Yet rock of the mid-sixties through early seventies differs from earlier work in that it sometimes drew heavily upon the experimental orientation of the European avant-garde. The list of groups and artists whose recordings are noteworthy for introducing electronic sounds and tape techniques to a broad audience is short, but includes some important names. The Beatles and their producer George Martin incorporated reverse or accelerated playback, multi-tracking, and musique concrete into albums released between 1965 and 1968. (18) Jimi Hendrix was experimenting with feedback effects around the same time. (19) The Velvet Underground incorporated electronic noise into its stage performances and recordings, due in part to Andy Warhol's influence. (20) Brian Wilson, leader of the Beach Boys, used tape manipulation on "She's Goin' Bald" (1967) released on Smiley Smile, part of a more ambitious though abortive experimental album set, Smile; (21) before that he had added the Theremin to the instrumentation for "I Just Wasn't Made for these Times" (May 1966) and "Good Vibrations" (October 1966). (22) Keith Emerson brought sophisticated music synthesis to a rock audience.
Topping the list of artists inspired by experimental trends in the European avant-garde is Frank Zappa, who led the founding members of The Mothers of Invention from 1964 through 1969. (23) The group's appearances at the Whiskey A Go-Go and The Trip in West Hollywood and at the Garrick Theatre in New York anticipated performance art by decades. (24) Their first record, the double LP Freak Out! (July 1966), (25) includes the large group improvisation "Help, I'm a Rock," which was conceived live at an L.A. nightclub called The Trip. (26) Other nods in the direction of experimenralism include "Who Are the Brain Police?" which involves extensive tape manipulation, and "The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet," a twelve-minute, free-form electronic and voice piece. "It Can't Happen Here" alternates between Sprechstimme, instrumental chamber music, contemporary jazz, and tape effects.
Freak Out! was not only an avant-rock album but a satire on the relatively new concept of "life-style"--"straight" and "hip" alike. In delivering their message of the injustice, chaos, and stupidity of contemporary American society, The Mothers were not beyond ridiculing their listeners in feigned Mexican- or African-American accents. But the satirical weapon of choice was music. The forms, chord changes, vocal harmonies, and timbres of doo-wop and R & B ballads were lampooned ("I Ain't Got No Heart," "Go Cry on Somebody Else's Shoulder," "How Could I Be Such a Fool," "You Didn't Try to Call Me," and "I'm Not Satisfied"), as were some of rock's newer cliches. The riff underlying "Hungry Freaks, Daddy" originates in the Rofling Stones' 1965 smash hit, "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction." The sound of "Motherly Love" mimics that of the proto-Bubblegum band, Paul Revere and the Raiders, who regularly headlined Dick Clark's afternoon television show "Where the Action Is," aimed at a newly identified demographic: teen yboppers. (27) "Who Are the Brain Police?" with its aural effects and paranoid lyrics, reflects the dark side of psychedelia.
In addition to the unpredictable shifts among musical styles and text meaning, Freak Out! sends other conflicting signals. The cutting-edge psychedelic cover art evokes West Coast Flower Power at its zenith, yet the liner notes remark condescendingly on listeners' emotional and intellectual limitations. Concerning "Any Way the Wind Blows," for example, we read that:
[This] is a song I wrote about three years ago when I was considering divorce. If I had never gotten divorced, this piece of trivial nonsense would never have been recorded. It is included in this collection because, in a nutshell, kids, it is... how shall I say it? it is intellectually and emotionally ACCESSIBLE for you. Hah! Maybe it is even right down your alley.
False acknowledgments of pop icons who "contributed materially" to the album--Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, and Brian Epstein, among others--appear alongside names of twentieth-century composers whom Zappa considered truly important influences: Stravinsky, Anton Webern, Arnold Schoenberg, and Karlheinz Stockhausen. The jackets of this and later Mothers albums echo a sentiment first expressed by a defiant Edgard Varese, idol of Zappa's youth: "The present-day composer refuses to die!" (28)
Any concern that The Mothers would be considered just another novelty act may have troubled Zappa, but probably only as he imagined himself on his way to the bank. Before founding the group, in fact, he had recognized the possibility of making a living by combining avant-garde music and humor. Billing himself as a contemporary composer, for instance, he had appeared playing an upturned bicycle on a 1963 broadcast of "The Steve Allen Show," a late-night television celebrity interview/comedy program. (29) Whereas most academic composers of the day would likely have shunned such publicity, Zappa relished it. According to a friend at the time, Paul Buff, the appearance "in part . . . convinced him of the viability of producing the kind of music he ended up producing." (30) Zappa even tried to cash in on his connection...
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