I remember most of the music in the early 2010s. It takes me back to a time when things were less like they are now and when I still felt connected to my siblings. It was the kind of music that felt electrifying, and memorable, and what compelled you to listen to it at least over 10 billion times. And it never seemed to grow old. I always assumed that it wouldn't ever change, but time would later show me that that probably wasn’t something that I should’ve wished for.

Over the years it seems that the music of yesterday has long outgrown the clothes that it’s grown in. To me, it feels as if it is a clone of the very same thing next to it. Becoming all the same, never changing, and whenever it did, the rest in the line followed behind its coattails. This copy paste formula has been done so many times lately that there's really nothing all that great, or memorable, about it anymore. I can understand with most people that art is a relative concept, and that there are exceptions; albeit even some really good ones. But I don’t think that’s an excuse for it to be ephemerally soulless. 

Someone, however, would change that idea for me and bring clarity and a new light to something that I once believed was becoming more and more opaque. Frank Zappa had done that for me. He bestowed a possibility of musical creation where things were limitless and free from all bounds of constraints. It could be almost anything you could will it to be. It could originate from the movements and shapes of the very things we see and do all around us: driving cars, seeing a baby throw up, taking a shower, painting a wall, eating a burrito, or hearing your mom give you the Cinderella speech for not running the wash once. If someone can find a rhythm in any of these or just plain sounds from objects or instruments that could be audibly heard or perceived, Frank believed, it was something that could be potentially identified as music. And, which could be presented to an audience as something that was music.

Those people who are artists in many different areas of concentration, they are essentially composers to the compositions they wield and organize to bring life to. Multitudes upon multitudes of hands against brushes, pencils, and welding tools to accent, tone, and exaggerate; forming an opus across canvas and steel. 

Frank believed that almost anyone could be a composer in any medium if they had a willingness and an imagination to organize various things into a physical or audial sculpture. How one piece of work or genre did not have to define someone’s entire creative career, but that everything an artist has accomplished and implemented throughout their life and work, even by simply going to the bathroom, was a theoretical continuation of an artist's artistic process. He simply stated it as this:

“A novelist invents a character. If the character is a good one, he takes on a life of his own. Why should he get to go to only one party? He could pop up at any time in a future novel”(Zappa, 139). 

There was also a difference, Frank thought, between what a musician was, in contrast to what a composer did. If you were a musician, you only performed the music. As a composer, you created it and were the mastermind and soul improviser behind what gave your piece a sense of meaning. The reason he believed that this was the case, was that a lot of the rising popular music that was being created at the time, was more or less artificially produced. Meaning that, although there were bands that played this music, it was mainly a record company and their expensive machines that were the real puppeteers behind everything; including what they even performed behind the mic. It wasn’t totally real, and it carried nothing of emotional substance to it. It can’t really be considered music then, would it? It’s mainly the executives singing opera. 

“A composer’s job involves the decoration of fragments of time. Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid”(FZ, 193)

Of course,  musical technology has developed profoundly over the course of the past 10 years. It has made it conveniently much easier for many people who do or don’t have the  exact means to make music with all the fancy equipment, to be able to create it on a small device in a much simpler and accessible fashion. Plus, there are tons and tons of different things people could create with digital media more than ever before, so the creative process could and can become more and more diverse. But, there should be at least one rule that all artistic composers, even for those people who don’t consider themselves artists, should abide by when wanting to create and do something of purpose:

“If it sounds GOOD to YOU, it’s bitchin; and if it sounds BAD to YOU, it’s shitty” -Zappa, 188.

To me, the one tremendous takeaway I received from Zappa after a few years of following his music and his way of thinking–and what I believe to be the most important thing about making good art–is to have a good sense of what’s good for you. Frank came to understand that “the more varied your musical experience, the easier it is to define for yourself what you like and what you don’t like''(FZ, 188). Knowing what your own personal tastes and imagination are and not following what everybody else thinks, or thinks you should think, is important in  creative processes towards understanding and creating more meaningful ways to not only appreciate yourself and who you are and what you do, but also likely inspiring others to do the same because of your own personal sense of self, too. 

When I started listening to Zappa’s music in depth, a lot of what he composed was starkly idiosyncratic. Each song, depending on the album, was inherently different and creatively original from the one before and the one next in line to it. Even on some of the live albums he produced that played featured tracks from some of his studio albums could have a different guitar solo, tempo, beat, and timbre from the originals. Take for example, “Penguin in Bondage” from his 1974 live studio album, Roxy & Elsewhere. Although the song is relegated to only being a live version in this instance, the variations of this song, no matter how provocative the name is, still applies. This live song alone has around nine different versions of the same thing, which is baffling, but also interesting, because it contrasts in the ways it’s performed each time. 

But, his complexity doesn’t really end there. Most people that I’ve come across or I’ve known to have discussed Zappa in conversation at one point, have always seemed to recognize him or hear of him as that one weird ‘rock musician’ or that guy that everyone knows made “Valley Girl”. But announcing those facts alone is, I feel, a blatant misnomer for what he really was as a musician, and what I think dismisses his importance as an American artist. Zappa was not only just a rock musician, but also a conglomeration of bandleader, orchestral composer, jazz musician, and even hip-hop MC sorta at one point in time. His musical career can’t be defined then under one single genre; he was basically everything imaginable. Which is why his music is so vastly inconsistent from one album to another. His discography of 100+ albums total (even including bootlegs), could be made fitting for anyone to listen to, because it’s never all the same. Truely, that is what I think makes him so incredible, and an interesting foil to most other musicians that are around today. He was anathema to the capitalist nature of rinse and repeat; copy and paste. Rather than follow the traditional code of music, he made his own in his own creative sense, while making significant contributions to a new realm of imagination, where art could be seen and felt for more purpose besides dollars and cents.

And as it seems like we are heading to what Gandalf called “a second darkness” in the Lord of the Rings, now that our country seems to be getting the metaphorical conservative powerwash. Creative “deviations from the norm” are needed by local artists more than ever based on what I feel is something this world desperately is asking for. People who are currently or beginning composers in any craft or art field should be amazing, bizarre, spectacular, and outlandish in their work to stem the tides of greed and global ecological disaster that is facing our time. When the going gets tough, and it definitely is right now, don’t settle for anything less than what you deserve, it's great to take the hidden path every once in a while. “Deviate from the norm” Zappa says, or else the total cultural result?...

References

Zappa, Frank, and Peter Occhiogrosso. 1989. The Real Frank Zappa Book. New York, New York: Poseidon Press.