Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Aug 23, 2018 6:32:57 GMT -5
Started listening to Frank Zappa since Doomkid talks about him all the time. Some album impressions:
Hot Rats: very good. Like Doomkid said, Willie The Pimp sounds quite advanced for the time, but the real highlight for me is The Gumbo Variations. It's an incredible jazz improvisation recording that keeps surprising you with more and more cool moments.
Roxy & Elsewhere: without a doubt, my favorite so far. It features hilarious joke songs (Dummy Up, Cheepnis), a nice romantic composition (Village Of The Sun), great pieces which are very difficult to play (Don't You Ever Wash That Thing?, Be-Bop Tango), and, of course, Frank's charismatic speeches. His stories and interactions with the crowd are wonderful, and they really bring the whole thing together. Fantastic album performed by incredibly skilled musicians.
One Size Fits All: ok, Inca Roads belongs to like my top 3 Zappa compositions. It's an excellent musical journey full of unusual time signatures and his trademark humor. Thumbs up for Po-Jama People and Florentine Pogen too. The other songs didn't stick in my mind but I'll definitely return to them one day.
The Man From Utopia: not sure about this one yet, seems surprisingly simple music-wise. I guess this time the focus was more on the lyrics? I might try it again at some point...
Jazz From Hell: amusing for sure. Some tracks seem almost unlistenable at first, but once you get used to the weird harmonies you can have good fun with them. Obviously G-Spot Tornado is the king here, but I also love St. Etienne (probably the most "normal" song on the album), Night School, and Massaggio Galore.
Overall I've been really enjoying Zappa so far, I'm definitely going to continue exploring his art, and I can certainly see why Doomkid is so fascinated with him. Frank had amazing musical skills, excellent sense of humor that he wasn't afraid to include in his works, and and admirable love for all sorts of experimentation. And I haven't even got to watching his interviews yet...
|
|
|
Post by bigolbilly on Aug 23, 2018 14:39:37 GMT -5
I think Zappa’s one of the most fascinating figures in American music. It’s a bit unfortunate, in my view, that his legacy is mostly a small-but-devoted cult following, when I think he’s more deserving of the label “genius” than just about anyone in American music (save maybe James Brown, Charles Ives, or Miles Davis). I’ve heard probably 50 or so albums out of the 80+ he released in his lifetime, and while not all are necessarily good or inspired, pretty much all have the same passionate creative spirit and ooze that distinctively Zappaesque personality.
As a public figure—or even public intellectual, which was something Zappa at times seemed to aspire to—my feelings are more mixed, but even here I think he’s a pretty interesting guy. As a pretty left-leaning person myself, there’s a lot that speaks to me in Zappa’s work and even at times seems prescient—his lifelong worries about the relationship between mindless conformity, fascism, and mass media perhaps most especially, but also importance he placed on craftsmanship and unbounded creativity. At the same time, of course, there’s plenty of (to me) appalling sexism and anti-worker sentiments in his music and interviews, especially in the later seventies and eighties. But there’s a dimension of Zappa’s “conservative” side that’s at least iconoclastic and original. More than anyone I’m aware of, he’s first real “South Park libertarian” in American pop culture, combining a love of scatological humor, dogmatic commitment to individual freedom, and a strong anti-traditional critique of “collectivist” movements on the left and right. And even here he’s a little tricky to pigeonhole, since he never totally abandoned some kind of critique of capitalism, especially as it related to artistic production, which makes it hard to write him off as a simple free-market fundamentalist. Like his music, Zappa’s politics seemed to be shaped by a tension between elitist and democratic impulses—just as his music liked to dramatize the confrontation between high modernism’s severeness and the dumb hedonism of pop culture, his lyrics and various statements sometimes seem to bounce back and forth between an imperious distaste for the ignorant masses and a sincere concern with the possibilities of (possibly universal) human liberation.
He also wrote pretty melodies and played a mean guitar.
My favorite record is Absolutely Free, and to me you can’t really go wrong with that early run—Freak Out!, WOIFTM, Lumpy Gravy, and Uncle Meat are pretty much pure uncut creativity in slightly different flavors, and that period has some of his sharpest lyrics. Other gems are The Grand Wazoo (unique mostly instrumental LP with a Hot Rats-goes-big-band flavor), Sheik Yerbouti (really fun, if deeply problematic, collection of vicious, cynical, and offensive pop songs) Läther (a deliriously sprawling and undisciplined quadruple LP, only posthumously released in its intended form) and Civilization Phaze III (mega-inscrutable avant-grade compositions, a hell of a note to go out on!).
|
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Aug 30, 2018 8:31:45 GMT -5
I don't know how I missed this thread, really liked reading both of your posts. It's all been summed up well above, but I may as well mention my favorite album: Joe's Garage probably takes the cake, not only for the excellent music but the funny, weird, and tragic story told throughout the course of it. It's crazy to me that one guy could arrange so many styles/genres/sounds but his ability to do so explains the sheer girth of his discography, sitting at a whopping 62 albums by the time that he passed away!
|
|
|
Post by mistercornbread on Feb 25, 2019 11:52:56 GMT -5
Joe G's arage probably takes the cake, not only for the excellent music but the funny, weird, and tragic story told throughout the course of it.
So you may jealous to learn that I have part 1 of Joe's Garage on vinyl. I love the album cover, of Zappa cradling a mop, his face covered in thick brown grease. I also love the narration and the way he mercilessly shits all over the imaginary band, who plays shitty crowd-pleasing music but never gets anywhere. It's really funny and lighthearted while also being deeply cynical of the whole idea of a "rock group."
|
|