Frank Zappa was an unruly determine of Nineteen Sixties rock, a free-speech advocate and religious parodist outlined by his opposition to authority. His albums assembled the bones of rock and roll into an idiosyncratic fashion coursing with disbelief at nearly each facet of the American zeitgeist: hippies, automobiles, faculty, medication, California, and, finally, yuppies. He additionally hated report labels, authorities, and the police, positions stoked by a short jail stint at age 24 because of fees of “conspiracy to commit pornography,” after an undercover vice cop entrapped him into making a faux, audio-only intercourse tape. The expertise modified his life: Zappa turned as vehement in his morals as he was flamboyant in his presentation, a wide-eyed, comically bearded Girl Justice weighing the nation’s darkish aspect in opposition to its silliness.
Of his 100-plus albums, none distills his sardonicism fairly just like the newly reissued Over-Nite Sensation, a 1973 LP along with his band the Moms of Invention. It’s not Zappa’s most influential work—his 1966 debut, Freak Out!, principally invented the idea album, incorporating constant characters and ad-libs from a whiny teenage narrator Zappa handled as a logo of American conformity. However Over-Nite Sensation is his most inviting hear, forging a muscular, funk-inflected sound that couches the denseness of his extra avant-garde music in pop hooks. In the meantime, Zappa’s lyrics scrutinized his then-youthful fan base, caricaturing the counterculture with the cartoonish strokes of a melodic R. Crumb. Over-Nite Sensation is a triumph: a concentrated digest from maybe the preferred stretch of his profession, and a freeze-frame of his compositional flowering and ingenious lyrical ribaldry.
The younger of us who populate these songs usually are not murderous world leaders, savage real-estate moguls, corrupt executives, or any of the opposite high-powered heels who Zappa pilloried when he turned a tv pundit over the past stretch of his life. They’re city scenesters who dream of shifting to Montana as a result of they wish to develop dental floss, and woo-woo romantics who speak about amulets and tarot playing cards as a type of foreplay. Zappa was ensconced in a milieu of groupies, hangers-on, and common weirdos in his Los Angeles neighborhood of Laurel Canyon, and the characters in Over-Nite Sensation are equal elements risible and harmless, occupying a surreal world of youthful fantasy. The album’s lyrics made a reducing assertion concerning the flimsy values of its time—and the songs themselves have been a tightly wound coil of Zappa’s musical concepts.
Over-Nite Sensation leads with its humorousness and its equally waggish preparations. The velocity of the Moms’ rhythms, and the truth that a lot of Zappa’s busiest elements are performed on atypical rock devices such because the marimba or the vibraphone, could make his music itself sound humorous—he sends up symphonic largesse along with his totally rehearsed but gleefully preposterous ensemble. However the Moms’ melodies are attractive, and Zappa’s lyrics lucid. There are vibrant allegories for the evils of tv (“I’m the Slime”) and songs that supply whimsical imagery to match the glowing weave of electrical guitar, reeds, horns, and pitched percussion (“Camarillo Brillo” and “Zomby Woof”). Zappa prods at a ridiculous solid of early-’70s hipsters, suggesting that their sense of authenticity relies on skinny visions of consumerism. “Is that an actual poncho?” he asks in a sultry baritone throughout the glammed-out “Camarillo Brillo,” whereby a starry-eyed narrator recounts his one-night stand with a hippie lover. Throughout so a lot of his ad-libs, Zappa feels like a parody of sleazy TV presenters. Right here, we will’t inform whether or not he’s enjoying himself or somebody making an attempt to gatekeep participation within the counterculture: “I imply, is {that a} Mexican poncho, or a Sears poncho?”
The madcap narrative of “Dinah-Moe Humm” is beloved by Zappa-tistas due to its bawdiness: A marvel of cracked logic, the monitor follows a girl who bets a person “a $40 invoice” that he can’t make her orgasm, shedding the cash when her sister hooks up with him as an alternative. The music’s honky-tonk piano looks like interval Rolling Stones; Zappa’s loping, singsong phrasing locations it within the vast vernacular of Americana. However the lyrics mock everybody and the whole lot—together with the three lovers, Zappa’s folksy argot, and, implicitly, those that reply positively to its pitch-perfect rock pastiche. Tina Turner and the Ikettes present backing vocals, as campy as Turner’s later look within the rock flick Tommy. “Acquired a spot that will get me scorching,” she sings, “and also you ain’t been to it.”
Ultimately, the scope of Zappa’s satire widens: Each this monitor and the next one, “Montana,” rework into an commercial for an absurd client product (Zircon-encrusted tweezers). This zaniness evokes John Waters, a filmmaker with a shock worth to match Zappa’s. The latter, nevertheless, is more likely to be mistaken for his characters, a symptom of the misperception that songwriting, not like directing motion pictures, is essentially confessional. On this composer’s case—and for thus many musicians—studying autobiography into his lyrics is a mistake. Even Zappa’s lengthy hair and beard, which resembled a fermata, have been conceivably extra farcical than personally expressive. As layered as he was ostentatious, Zappa by no means wished to allow us to into his thoughts. His lifeless seriousness about music didn’t imply he stuffed it along with his emotions or convictions—lyrically, his songs have been like wind chimes within the crosscurrents of the American id, twinkling alongside to the nation’s breezes.
At the moment, it’s simple to consider Zappa as a easy provocateur. Satire has develop into a troublesome gambit: Since Donald Trump’s election, the kind of authority figures who Zappa used to deride have develop into crushingly apparent and too scary for humorous scorn to land its punches. Scandalizing for its personal sake has run its course, and comedic music looks like the province of very on-line youngsters or novelty acts (or each)—not the sort of materials {that a} good, if cheeky, composer excavates for his or her complete profession.
However Zappa’s satire is so efficient as a result of his music sharpened alongside it. Within the Nineteen Eighties, he stopped entertaining pop sensibilities as he turned to writing instrumental guitar compositions, symphonic items, and music for a digital synthesizer known as the synclavier. A lot of this work felt like an extension of the mischievous vitality that Zappa had harnessed for many years, and it continued to unveil new levels of his absurdity—and his righteous fury. Zappa accused racists and homophobes of enabling the AIDS pandemic on his brave, typically puerile 1984 faux Broadway solid recording, Factor-Fish, and he by no means focused the younger fairly like he did these ’70s youngsters. There have been, to make sure, greater fish to fry.
Within the ’80s, he additionally performed a sophisticated position in public discourse: Zappa turned a pop mental, just like the devious offspring of the writers Gore Vidal or William F. Buckley, adapting to this position quite rapidly due to the years he had already spent within the highlight. Although his music was mounted to his humorousness, Zappa was extra of a moralist than a troll. He wished to push society away from a cultural and civic stupidity based mostly in valuing “the underside line”—a situation that he felt had America lengthy sufficient in the past that the youths he lampooned on Over-Nite Sensation have been born with it. At the moment, the nation is dashing quicker and quicker within the route that Zappa anticipated. Politics has grown progressively tough to differentiate from actuality TV, artists are underfunded, and the so-called tradition industries have develop into much more brazen about valuing revenue over high quality.
Like a lot satire, Zappa’s catalog endures as a result of it each criticizes and stands exterior clear-cut stances. His songs don’t preach; he outlined himself by what he discovered value ridiculing, and he all the time labored in contrasts, swathing his acerbic, flippant lyrics inside serpentine music. Zappa’s finest albums, amongst them Over-Nite Sensation, uncovered a wider and extra harmful consciousness than his personal, which listeners may disregard at their peril: the fickle, perverse thoughts of America as a complete.
