Study Guide

Frank Zappa

Frank Zappa Essay - Critical Essays

Zappa, Frank


Frank Zappa 1940–

American songwriter, composer, musician, filmmaker, record and film producer, and director.

Zappa is a unique figure in contemporary music. Both offensive and appealing, his work merges such seemingly opposite elements as classical music, avant-garde jazz, 1950s doo-wop, and underground rock with bitterly satirical, outlandish lyrics into what is an unarguably original style. Through his band, the Mothers of Invention, he has utilized a purposeful bizarreness to point up the absurdity of contemporary society. The intensity and intellectual complexity of Zappa's work is undercut by ribald, tongue-in-cheek humor, which has helped to make him especially popular with young people.

Zappa began his career by composing orchestral works and chamber music. Until he was twenty-one he listened exclusively to classical pieces and the works of such twentieth century composers as Igor Stravinsky and Edgar Varèse, his biggest influence. It was not until Zappa discovered rhythm and blues that he began developing his songwriting. In 1964 he formed the first in a series of Mothers, and in 1967 they released Freak Out, a double album which both represented and defined the developing counterculture. His other early albums were also iconoclastic: We're Only in It for the Money parodied the Beatles's celebrated Sgt. Pepper; and he released Ruben and the Jets as a classical exercise in doo-wop during the height of psychedelia.

Zappa and the Mothers were the first to effectively blend rock with theater, making dadaist statements on drugs, war, the business world, and, especially, sex. In their concerts they encouraged involvement between band and audience. Zappa used a free-form format, which often included grotesque elements, to shock his audience into understanding the depth of their emotions. In 1969 he disbanded the group due to a combination of expense and public apathy.

After the breakup of the Mothers, Zappa concentrated on record production and film work. Uncle Meat, his first film, was never released, although it did yield a soundtrack album. He also began releasing solo albums such as the instrumental Lumpy Gravy and Hot Rats, which are often considered his best work. In 1970 Zappa formed a new Mothers to play the score for his film 200 Motels, a saga of life on the road. The film received a mixed critical reception, but was awarded cult status by many young people. Zappa also performed with conductor Zubin Mehta and the Los Angeles Philharmonic in an effort to combine rock and symphony material.

Recently Zappa has been criticized for his lack of fresh ideas, especially on Joe's Garage, a fantasy about the rise and fall of a rock band, and for his overuse of perversity and sophomoric silliness, as in his film Baby Snakes. For many of his critics, Zappa's notorious image has transcended his musical efforts; some, however, have called him a genius who is ahead of his time. Young people have always been Zappa's most faithful advocates, and have recognized the imagination he has consistently brought to his work. "My dreams," he has said, "are limited only by the size of my bank account."

Bertram Stanleigh

No other group of hippy musicians displays the same amount of freedom, variety, invention, and lunatic good spirits as the West Coast group that calls itself The Mothers of Invention. Utilizing a variety of electronic sounds and an agglomeration of strange forms of percussion, they produce musical backgrounds for a vocal message that ranges from the eloquently poetic, to earthy good humor, to embarrassingly unfunny bathroom jokes, to simple high-spirited inantiy….

But thoughtful listening reveals that there is a substantial amount of careful work and genuine sensitivity behind this coarse facade. Music that sounds like little more than a rude joke on first hearing, reveals unexpected inner subtlety and charm after a number of repetitions….

[There] is much of the same feeling of irreverent, zany funmaking about the Mothers that there was about the [Spike] Jones band, and if you don't want to search for the superior craftsmanship and creativity of this new group, you can still enjoy this music on its surface level for its wacky sounds and earthy lyrics….

[The MOI American Pageant on Absolutely Free] deals with drinking, middle-class status symbols, the high-school dance, sex, and the country club dance. It adds up to a pretty cogent picture of the hippy's view of American society, and if it's a distorted view, it's still a pithy and clever commentary that makes some pretty telling digs.

Bertram Stanleigh, "Jazz, Blues, and the Mothers," in Audio (© 1967, CBS Publications, The Consumer Publishing Division of CBS Inc.), Vol. 51, No. 11, November, 1967, p. 66.

Harvey Pekar

The "underground oratorios" Absolutely Free and The M.O.I. American Pageant by the Mothers of Invention are among the major achievements of experimental pop groups. The Mothers draw on a large number of sources for their music. They are competent rock musicians, as the building Invocation and Ritual Dance of the Young Pumpkin demonstrates. However, it is their humor, their satirical gift, that makes the Mothers' two oratorios notable. America Drinks and Goes Home, a selection from The M.O.I. American Pageant, for example, is a marvelous parody of closing time at a less than classy night club ("Oh, Bill Bailey? Oh, we'll get to that tomorrow night. Yeah. Caravan with the drum solo? Right. Yeah, we'll do that.").

The nice thing about the Mothers' humor on the two oratorios is that it is open and democratic rather than aimed at any specific inside group. (p. 39)

Harvey Pekar, "From Rock to ???" in down beat (copyright 1968; reprinted with permission of down beat), Vol. 35, No. 9, May 2, 1968, pp. 39-40.∗

Robert A. Rosenstone

The most successful song depicting the situation of the Negro was "Trouble Coming Everyday," written by Frank Zappa during the Watts uprising in 1965. Though the song does not go so far as to approve of rioting, it paints a brutal picture of exploitation by merchants, bad schooling, miserable housing, and police brutality—all of which affect ghetto-dwellers. Its most significant lines are Zappa's cry, "You know something people, I ain't black, but there's a whole lots of times I wish I could say I'm not white." No song writer showed more empathy with the black struggle for liberation than that. (p. 135)

The image [of inauthenticity, of plasticity,] recurs most frequently in the works of the Mothers of Invention. In one song ["Uncle Bernie's Farm"], they depict the country as being run by a plastic Congress and President. Then, in "Plastic People," they start with complaints about a girl-friend who uses "plastic goo" on her face, go on to a picture of teen-agers on the Sunset Strip—who are probably their fans—as being "plastic," too, and finally turn on their listeners and say "Go home and check yourself / You think we're talking about someone else." Such a vision is frightening, for if the audience is plastic, perhaps the Mothers, themselves, are made of the same phony material. And if the whole world is plastic, who can be sure of his own authenticity? (p. 138)

Robert A. Rosenstone, "'The Times They Are A-Changin': The Music of Protest," in The Annals of The American Academy of Political and Social Science (© 1969, by The American Academy of Political and Social Science), Vol. 382, March, 1969, pp. 131-44.∗

Ellen Sander

[Ruben & The Jets is] an album of The Mothers as mad historians, caricaturing a caricature and making it work. They exult the sexual symbolism of early rock by calling the shots. "Cheap Thrills in the back of my car" wouldn't have gotten by the censors in the old days, but it sounds disconcertingly familiar now. The Mothers camp it up with reconstructed oldies spoofing the elusiveness and the immediacy that brought teeny-boppers out in droves to the Murray the K. rock 'n' roll tours and the American Bandstand.

The Mothers of Invention reign as the prime purveyors of irreverent insight into American culture, and this time around, they are entrenching themselves. And as severe a reflection of the absurdity of itself as it is, Ruben & The Jets is a collection of good tunes…. It tells it like it always was, much to everyone's embarrassment, except theirs, and makes it fun to listen to at the same time. It's patently obscene without containing one dirty word. Now you've got to admit, that's class.

Ellen Sander, "Nostalgia: Oldies but Goodies and a Last Ditch Attempt," in Saturday Review (copyright © 1969 by Saturday Review; all rights reserved; reprinted by permission), Vol. LII, No. 13, March 29, 1969, p. 51.

David G. Walley

We all live inside a plastic balloon which Frank Zappa is trying to pop….

Zappa is no freaked-out psychedelic acidhead—his band is composed of consummate musicians, and their music is vital, alive, and important. Everything the Mothers do, right down to the multi-tracked belches, has infinite purpose. Zappa is a media master…. (p. 29)

The Mothers of Invention, for all their put-on obnoxiousness (studied, I might add) and healthy disrespect for the Establishment, are very much vital as artists in this culture. Some of their music is in the 50's folk medium (a capella pimple-rock)—what better way to describe a culture than by using the culture's music to do it? (pp....

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Lester Bangs

[Hot Rats] brings together a set of mostly little-known talents that whale the tar out of every other informal "jam" album released in rock and roll for the past two years. If Hot Rats is any indication of where Zappa is headed on his own, we are in for some fiendish rides indeed.

In the past both Zappa's high-flown "serious music" and his greasy Fifties routines grew heavy-handed, but this album suggests he may be off on a new and much more individual direction, inspired by Captain Beefheart, who is featured prominently on Hot Rats…. Beefheart is one of the true originals of our day, and his raffish dadaism is an excellent tonic for a Zappa too often pre-occupied with...

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Alan Heineman

Not much to choose between [Burnt Weenie Sandwich] and Uncle Meat: both are strange, fragmented, wonderful albums. The opening and closing tunes are pretty much throwaways, though perhaps they serve as frames, a way of saying, "This, oddly enough, is where all our freaky music begins." WPLJ and Valarie are black '50s rock epitomized—not very good, but fun. (p. 22)

It may well be that in the year 2000 (we should live so long), the Mothers' music will be considered the highest level of music attained during the present period. This album, despite a few fleetingly dull or repetitive passages, makes a good case for that view. (p. 23)


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Bill Reed

[Weasels Ripped My Flesh is another] nifty collection of music inspired by Frank Zappa's pre-occupation with Edgar Varese, death, bopping and jacking off.

Once I thought that Zappa and his group might be the saviors of pop music. Now after all the music that they've produced since their Suzie Creemcheese period I'm not sure that I don't still feel much the same. This random collection of editing room snippets recorded at Mothers concerts over the last few years finds the group peerless in the field of amalgamating satire, musical adventuresomeness, and flash….

It's all here: more assaults on the calibrated sexuality of early rock, and jousts at the pomposity which musical...

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Lester Bangs

Frank Zappa is a genius. Right. Frank Zappa probably knows more about music than you and I and 3/4 of the other professional musicians in this country put together. Right. Frank Zappa has made an incredible contribution towards broadening the scope of the average American kid's listening habits. Absolutely. Frank Zappa has certain possibly dangerous Machiavellian, manipulative tendencies. Yeah, probably so, but so what? Frank Zappa is a snob who underestimates his audience. Hmmm. Think so, huh?…

The public may not be quite as ignorant or as debased in its tastes as Zappa possibly thinks, and I suspect a lot of them are going to be even more let down by Chunga's...

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Lester Bangs

It may seem a quaint notion now, but there actually was a time when Frank Zappa was considered one of the prime geniuses of rock. Somehow it just didn't seem to matter all that much that those of his compositions which bore any relationship to rock 'n' roll form at all were either sarcastic exercises in calculated banality or self-indulgent parodies of Fifties group harmonies, and at the time we were still largely convinced that his perennial air of snot-mustached condescension was good for us….

[Those] early albums did contain some striking music and lyrics and were exceptionally well put-together, solid collages of satiric vitriol and Mad magazine scatology zappin' straight atacha with aim...

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Jay Cocks

Anyone who enjoys being the target of a put-on will revel in Frank Zappa's 200 Motels. It's an act of undisguised aggression against the audience—rather like a mugging in a movie theater. Zappa makes movies the way he and his group, the Mothers of Invention, make music—wildly, brazenly, eclectically….

If it can really be said to be "about" anything, 200 Motels is about the effect it has on the audience, which is not always pleasant and is occasionally exasperating and even disconcerting. It helps that the movie is sometimes exceedingly funny. (p. 55)

The craziness climaxes, fittingly enough, with full cast and chorus raising their voices in an irreverent anthem:...

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Dan Morgenstern

200 Motels is a very funny, original and entertaining film. It is Frank Zappa's film just as the Mothers are his group, and it is permeated with his personal vision. It is a film of many levels, but his own description, "a surrealistic documentary," is apt.

It deals with life on the road as experienced by a touring rock group, specifically The Mothers, and such real things as sex, food and drink, relationship of performer to audience, getting high, intra-group chemistry, groupies, interviews, etc., but these are not treated in a "realistic" manner….

200 Motels is an "experimental" and offbeat film of a type rarely touched by major studios….


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David Reitman

The Mothers new album, Just Another Band From L.A. seems to capture the spontenaity of the early albums, like Freak Out, Absolutely Free and We're Only In It For the Money, better than any other recent one….

Much has been made (by Zappa) of the Mothers being labelled a "comedy" group. Well if he thinks that's ironic, or he doesn't like it, tough shit, because this record is one of the funniest he has ever done. Zappa still pokes fun at the country he lives in, the West Coast culture, even (especially) the people who come to listen to him…. The humor is very adolescent (Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan only encourage this) but I like sophomoric humor when it comes off….


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Mike Bourne

In his inexorable odyssey toward gesamtkunstwerk (the Wagnerian "total" artwork), Just Another Band is the most perfect example of the synthesis of theater and music in the art of Frank Zappa.

Billy the Mountain alone is exemplary…. Up front, the narrative is bizarre—and at least not about genital size, the Mothers' too often prevalent theme. But above all, the music is the energy of the piece, reinforcing and contributing to the comedy throughout.

On the other side, the reverse is somewhat evident, with the music more to the fore…. Magdalena for once integrates their bawdy burlesquing (this time about incest) with the music, without their...

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David Walley

Freak Out was a conceptual masterpiece…. [It] served as a living testament to L.A. freakdom, a truly honest work…. It captured the essence of the American Experience with songs like "Who Are the Brain Police."… (p. 60)

Freak Out also had some outrageous parodies of Fifties rhythm and blues tunes with "Go Cry on Somebody Else's Shoulder."… The songs on the first record dealt for the most part with common reality. The pieces of extended music on the second record were unheard of during that impoverished period of rock and roll imagination.

Side Three of Freak Out contained two memorable compositions: "Trouble Coming Every Day," a song about the Watts riots...

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Arthur Schmidt

[Zappa's] formula is wearing thin—or perhaps this Brucean music of disgust suffers in the current buyers' market for outrage. Only one song [on Over-Nite Sensation], "Montana," approaches parody, and that of an indefinite genre…. One of Zappa's most persistent themes and/or subjects, silly hippies, though it provides the best cut ("Camarillo Brillo") seems, well, dated.

Except that this is close to a good record, one would be tempted to compare Zappa to Henry Miller, with whom the former shares a vision of sex as rancid, dumb and funny: Like Miller getting older, he is less shocking, tapeworming himself, and overwriting.

Even if the lyrics are jokes, this is machismo rock...

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Peter Kountz

Zappa [is] an extremely creative and highly proficient composer and performer of truly serious contemporary music, whose musical and artistic perception clearly transcends the narrowly defined limits of pop and whose breadth of musical experience outstrips the boundaries of all forms of American music, not simply pop.

By "serious," I mean a learned and studied writer of music; one who has studied the traditional techniques of theory, harmony, counterpoint, and composition; one who is aware of the history of Western Music especially and who can both appreciate and appraise contemporary music and its materials; one who has both a personal vision and aesthetic and who has the training to be, in Charles...

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Alan Niester

Roxy & Elsewhere is about as close to a traditional musical form as the Mothers are ever likely to come. There's bound to be lots of strangeness—long, spoken raps (preambles), Zappa's own weird form of humor, post-acid fairy tale lyrics and a lot of just plain wasted vinyl—on any double album from the Mothers. But in between there is actually lots of solid and inventive jazz-rock.

Alan Niester, "Records: 'Roxy & Elsewhere'," in Rolling Stone (by Straight Arrow Publishers, Inc. © 1975; all rights reserved; reprinted by permission), Issue 177, January 2, 1975, p. 68.

Zappa for the life of him can't seem to...

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Eric Salzman

Frank Zappa, the Franz Liszt, Jonathan Swift, and Spike Jones of the pop avant-garde, is the standard bearer of whatever is left of that theatrical school of rock music which is at once commedia dell'arte zaniness, social critique, and high-class musicianship on a low-brow trip. Zappa has perfected a kind of rock-and-roll tone poem, with a surrealistic text scraped off the soft underbelly of American life—a dippy blues riff, some elaborate jazzy musical developments, and a rousing return to cap it off. (pp. 85, 87)

A good deal of [Roxy & Elsewhere] is taken up with funny business…. The meat of the album lies in the half-dozen tunes and a couple of good-sized instrumentals that...

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Freak Out and its follow-ups, Absolutely Free and We're Only In It For the Money, became legend primarily for the visual images superimposed on the music; Zappa's ironic critique of society…. Zappa seems to have no limit of contempt for aspects of Ugly Americana, including his audience (and, perhaps even himself).

But what may have seemed hostile in '68 (say, for example, the parody of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band on the inside cover of We're Only In It …) turns out to make good sense in retrospect. In fact, Zappa was a very earnest humanist: "Drop out of school before your mind rots from exposure to our mediocre education system. Forget about the...

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Lester Bangs

[Frank Zappa] ran out of topical relevance even quicker than most of his musical contemporaries, largely forfeited lyrical cogency early on, and has for several years been recycling adolescent grossout yuks interspersed with random verbiage…. Zappa's lyrics only begin to work [on One Size Fits All] when they redelve into the Southern California greaser suburb murk-Montclair mentality …, and even then whatever possible effectiveness they might have is usually obscured by his … melodic quirks which tend to keep the vocalist gibbering like a Pachuco on whites humping the glory hole of a pinball machine. (pp. 65-6)

[Frank] loots enough styles to make music that sounds complicated, throws in...

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Robert Duncan

With regard to poo-poo, snot, vomit, depersonalized sex, booze, zoot suits and the banality of mainstream rock, Frank Zappa, one of rock's original angry young men, remains vehement. And Zoot Allures is his latest blow against the Empire. You do remember the Empire?

In other words, there are few moments of musical interest on this album, and nearly all are marred by a lyric text that is alternately mindless and condescending, always unfunny.

Robert Duncan, "Records: 'Zoot Allures'," in Rolling Stone (by Straight Arrow Publishers, Inc. © 1976; all rights reserved; reprinted by permission), Issue 229, December 30, 1976, p. 70.


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Andy Doherty

Zappa in New York sounds as much like formula work as anything this character has ever foisted upon his public….

At its most pedestrian, this album offers "Titties and Beer," yet another Zappa attempt to secure the affections of the sophomores in the audience by reviving the crudest elements of vaudeville. The song centers on a locker-room dialogue between Zappa and the Devil …, who has eaten Frank's girl and beer. Sound familiar? It should—the routine aims for the same sleazy places Flo and Eddie (to cite the obvious example) explored years ago…. Being predictable is bad enough; "Titties and Beer" is that and mild, a far greater sin.

"The Illinois Enema...

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Tim Schneckloth

Studio Tan is one of the most satisfying Zappa releases of the decade. It's a well-balanced sampler of Zappa's unissued '70s work, including two major instrumental compositions, a hilarious parody of Southern California beach music, and a fully orchestrated, characteristically strange operatic piece.

The narrative line of Greggery Peccary, the side-long "opera," follows the misadventures of the title character, a suave, hip young "pig of destiny" engaged in the heinous practice of "trend-mongering." The story leads us into some social commentary that seems rather heavy-handed and dated by now, but a lot of it is genuinely funny, especially if the listener happens to be a sucker for...

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David Fricke


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Peter Reilly

Introducing his own label [with Sheik Yerbouti] gives Frank Zappa the opportunity to deposit several giant do-do's on your carpet and then, in an equally infantile way, wait for you to tell him what a good boy he is. He giggles and pants and shouts through such things as the swinish Wild Love, the repellent S & M, pansexual excesses of Broken Hearts Are for Assholes, and the childish exhibitionism of I Have Been in You with all the gleeful abandon of one of Rodney Laing's patients smearing his feces on the wall to prove his essential "health." The all-time low point (one must hope) is plumbed here in Jewish Princess, a belligerent, incredibly gross piece of hate-filled crap that...

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Jon Pareles

Frank Zappa's attitude runs so thick you could smear it on sidewalks. For a decade, his name has conjured a rude blend of cynicism, scatology, and conceit, and until seven years ago he was entitled to all three. Zappa's scabrous all-Americanism, as promulgated on the first half-dozen Mothers of Invention albums, was enough to nurture the Tubes, the Residents, and others; his shifty-meter tunes, tape tricks, and rock-jazz arrangements would be revered and revived by Tin Huey, Hatfield and the North, the Residents, and many others. Yet his best work (the Mothers' Freak Out! and Weasels Ripped My Flesh, and Zappa's solo Hot Rats) went unbought….

His response was so cynical it...

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Karl Dallas

[What] we have [on Joe's Garage Act One] is just another set of songs on the sort of subject that seems to have occupied [Zappa's] forebrain for the past decade now, as the titles indicate: "Catholic Girls", "Crew Slut", "Wet T-Shirt Nite", etc., etc. The narrative structure seems to have been imposed on them after their composition, so it's hardly surprising that it fits rather loosely. Worse, very little of it grabs the short hairs at the back of the neck like "Concentration Moon", putting the Seventies to rest as definitely as "Money" did the illusions of the Sixties.

Musically, of course, it is as impeccable as ever, though the emphasis seems to be upon overall surface polish rather than...

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Shel Kagan

Though the title song [on Joe's Garage, Act 1] is a delightful history of every garage band that ever came out of rock & roll, the album is marred by a fault that has dogged Zappa's career since its beginning: sheer overindulgence. The narrative, otherwise perceptive and satiric, is weighed down with an overtext supplied by a computer voice dubbed The Central Scrutinizer, an icon which represents the establishment.

In both the album notes and the spoken narration, Zappa uses the Scrutinizer to say that higher authority is trying to a) do away with music; b) enslave the population through use of music. Forget the paradox; despite the pun (the Scrutinizer is screwing us, see?)...

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Cole Springer

Although it is certainly not being hyped as such in this day and age, Joe's Garage is nothing less than a rock opera. It has distinct scenes, a large cast of characters and, best of all, a storyline that is actually easy to follow….

Zappa narrates his satire in the guise of the Central Scrutinizer…. It's all very tongue-in-cheek, but—lest anyone miss the point—Zappa spells it out in his liner notes: "If the plot seems preposterous, just be glad you don't live in one of the countries where, at this very moment, music is either severely restricted, or, as it is in Iran, totally illegal."

The overall concept is, in the main, well executed, but there are some flaws. The...

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Tom Carson



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Jon Pareles

Unlike 200 Motels, Zappa's first film, Baby Snakes doesn't pretend to have a plot, and it is edited percussively, for maximum disorientation.

For die-hard Zappa fans, there are a few illuminating sequences. It's fascinating to watch Zappa conducting at close range; his band translates his hand motions into sound with telepathic precision. But those scenes are separated by tedious stretches of Zappa's cold-eyed, unfunny "comedy," which seems to be aimed primarily at socially retarded twelve-year-old boys. His staples are dirty-word jokes, outdated rock satires and disturbing antigay slurs….

The concert footage is competently shot, but [Bruce] Bickford's animation is...

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Don Shewey

Frank Zappa's satirical rock opera, Joe's Garage [Act I and Acts II and III] is ambitious and mad, brilliant, peculiar and incoherent…. As a music maker and recording artist, Zappa has always cultivated two warring images—the serious composer with a social satirist's sense of irony versus the smutty crowd pleaser with a puerile sense of humor….

Joe's Garage ties the dual extremes of Frank Zappa's sensibility closer together than ever. An attack on authoritarianism in which fascist governments, self-help pseudoreligions and the music industry are inextricably linked, the opera simultaneously tells the tale of a boy and girl….

As a stage musical, Joe's...

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Larry Birnbaum

Abandoning his middle period flirtations with jazz improvisation and contemporary orchestration, [on Joe's Garage (Act I and Acts II & III)] Zappa has reverted to the conceptual doo-wop format he last employed on the Mothers' Kafkaesque exercise in cosmic paranoia We're Only In It For The Money. Joe's Garage is similarly premised on the imminent prohibition of music … as it traces the journey of protagonist/guitarist Joe through the travails of the robot age…. [The] greater portion of this extravaganza is of no more substance than hamburger helper…. [Frank's] purulent invective oftener-than-not degenerates into the most putrid scatological doggerel, lacking, however, the power to shock...

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Paul Tickell

A decade ago his satirical, nihilistic humour and scatological obsessions hurt. But Zappa's themes have worn thin, and his targets grown easy. It's rather like watching a '60s underground mag turn yellow and date. This lessens the impact of the music [on "Wembley Arena"], however brilliant: it comes over as pastiche (mere imitation) rather than parody (imitation with something to say).

Zappa has always avoided the laughable spiritual commitments which musicians of this calibre often take on. But he pays a price for his flippancy. As the musical expertise grows and the wit declines, the effect becomes strangely syrupy and operatic. Frank, ever scornful of rock 'n roll values, has merely ended up as...

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