Frank Zappa is one of my favorite artists of all time, but I’ve always found why that is hard to explain. Not because I don’t know why, but because there’s so much I could say. He recorded so much music that I can’t narrow my suggestions down to one “definitive” album. I could say Läther is my favorite album one day and One Size Fits All is the next. The reasons why those albums work are all different. Some are hilarious, some get me to cry, others are so compositionally dense and experimental, some are all three. It’s hard to talk about the musicians who backed him because it was a rotating door of talent. Some of the greatest and most underrated musicians of all time define the material in their own ways. And even going beyond the music, where do you start with the man himself? His gift for composition? His demeanor and conflicts with music labels, musicians and politicians? Where do you start with his personal views? I could spend days talking about his politics alone, but that opens even more avenues to go down. Zappa himself didn’t make it much easier. One of his driving ideologies was the idea of conceptual continuity. I think the late Mark Volman put it best. “...an artist's career should not be judged on any singular project, no single record, film or any other individual piece of work. Frank felt that a person's art could only be judged as part of the whole of their career. Each individual creation was a part of that whole. No critique of any single work could change the overall end result, which was what should be seen as an artist's entire body of work. Only in that end result can it be judged and critiqued.” You can’t talk about Zappa’s work in the way he’d want it to outside of a complete breakdown of every appearance ever, and given that he has over sixty albums in his main discography alone, that’s a herculean task.
The other thing that makes it hard to discuss his work is the unavoidable elephant in the room: this just isn’t for everyone. While he covered such a large range of genres and experimetned in so many fascinating ways, it’s challenging, abrasive, annoying and vulgar. Even diehard Zappa fans can admit that there are certain songs that upset them. It’s not a “snowflake” problem as much as it is a “why would you ever write this and be proud enough to release it” problem. It’s hard to explain to someone that the man who wrote “The Illinois Enema Bandit” is a genius. However Zappa is also one of those artists where you kind of wish in retrospect that you didn’t know how the sausage was made. While his infidelity was certainly par for the course for musicians of the era, there’s elements of his life that I can’t understand for the life of me, such as his continued collaboration with the (apparently now deceased) sex offender Roy Estrada. While one could argue that you must separate the art from the artist, Zappa proved it’s a cowardly endeavor. You can’t disconnect the music from his humor and ideology. This is often a great thing, but there are certainly times where one must wonder what it says about the man himself.
All of that said, I still really respect his music. It changed my perception on what art can be, and it certainly has changed my sense of humor. Despite the horrific elements of his career, I do think it’s worth studying and celebrating. So here’s the plan. Tomorrow is the start of Zappadan, a fan holiday celebrated by his most diehard listeners starting on December 4th, the day of his death, and ending on December 21st, the day of his birth. For each of these days, I’ve written a little blurb about one song that I find interesting. Some are fantastic, some are unbearable, and some are just so odd that it’s hard to categorize them. This is my gift to you: an open door into all the complexities of Zappa’s conceptual continuity. A little advent calendar for you.