HOT FIVE: Zappa

05: Sheik Yerbouti [1979]
Featuring... "Dancin' Fool", "Jewish Princess", "Bobby Brown Goes Down", "Broken Hearts Are For Assholes", "City Of Tiny Lites"

Zappaphiles will scoff and snark at the inclusion of Sheik Yerbouti on this list of my five essential Zappa albums, but you must understand that this album was my proper introduction to Frank...At the age of thirteen, I knew who he was from my subscriptions to Creem and Rolling Stone, but the first Zappa song I ever heard in my life was "Dancin' Fool", which Steve & Garry played on their morning show on WLUP cuz, well, Steve Dahl hated Disco, hated it so much that in August of 1979 he hosted the infamous Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park...Steve & Garry also played "Jewish Princess" off this album, and I gotta admit, that's the song that convinced me to go to Galaxy Of Sound at the Manchester Mall and actually buy the album...Zappaphiles scoff because this is a solid but fairly unremarkable album in the Zappa discography...But to my perpetually juvenile ears, it's a double LP's worth of great filthy fun...Indeed, it's one of his funniest albums, if only because it's one of his dirtiest...Jewish princesses with pre-moistened dumpers, broken-hearted assholes sniffing the reeking buns of Angel, balls in vices, towers of power, golden showers, and stroking dingers with stinky fingers - you know, all sorts of wild love...Musically, it's worth mentioning that Adrien Belew is playing guitar on this record, and Terry Bozzio and Patrick O'Hearn are holding down the rhythm section and getting their shit together before going off to form Missing Persons...Stylistically, it's all over the map, with Disco, Punk, Doo Wop, Heavy Metal, Musique Concrete, Jazz, Classical, Klezmer and R'n'B, just to name nine types of industrial pullutants...Which is my sly way of suggesting that the inclusion of Sheik Yerbouti on this list means I had to sacrifice other, better albums, like Uncle Meat...Or Bongo Fury, Hot Rats, One Size Fits All...Joe's Garage...But no, the sentimental tug of this album is just too damn strong...It's been in and out of me, in and out of me, so many times, that I hope all you hungry freaks understand...Plus, it's got the song about the poop chute.


04: Boulez Conducts Zappa: The Perfect Stranger [1984]
Featuring..."The Girl In The Magnesium Dress", "Naval Aviation In Art", "Dupree's Paradise", "The Perfect Stranger"

Well, here's another selection that the hardcore fans are likely going to mock and deride, but I felt it was only right to include an album of Frank Zappa's "serious" music, and I put that adjective in quotes because who's to say that orchestral music is any more high-minded than Ska or Heavy Metal or ??? I mean, some people take their R'n'B quite seriously, you know? And at the end of the day, it's all just staff paper covered in dots and lines anyway...The Black Page...As far as Zappa's Classical music goes, The Perfect Stranger is my favorite album, and is probably the most accessible of his "serious" stuff...What I really love about the music on this album is Zappa's fondness for malleted percussion and woodwinds...This lumpen is thick with clarinets, oboes and bassoons, and I've always shared Frank's love for that particular instrument... "The bassoon is one of my favorite instruments. It has the medieval aroma - like the days when everything used to sound like that." But here's the thing - four of the seven songs on this album aren't even played by an actual orchestra, instead it's The Barking Pumpkin Digital Gratification Consort, which is just a fancy way of saying "Frank with his Synclavier and whatnot, down in the Utility Muffin Research Kitchen...

03: apostrophe (') [1974]
Featuring..."Stink-Foot", "Cosmik Debris", "Don't Eat The Yellow Snow", "Nanook Rubs It"

It only seemed right to place the apostrophe (') album at #3 on this list, right in the middle...The crux of this particular post, you might say...Running throughout Zappa's entire discography is something he called Conceptual Continuity, or the Project/Object...Here's Frank to explain: "Project/Object is a term I have used to describe the overall concept of my work in various mediums. Each project (in whatever realm), or interview connected to it, is part of a larger object, for which there is no technical name. Think of the connecting material in the Project/Object this way: 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 anytime in a future novel. Or...Rembrandt got his 'look' by mixing just a little brown into every other color -- he didn't do 'red' unless it had brown in it. The brown itself wasn't especially fascinating, but the result of its obsessive inclusion was that 'look.' In the case of the Project/Object, you may find a little poodle over here, a little blow job over there, etc., etc. I am not obsessed by poodles or blow jobs, however; these words (and others of equal insignificance), along with pictorial images and melodic themes, recur throughout the albums, interviews, films, videos (and this book) for no other reason than to unify the 'collection.'" Whew! If Frank came closest to actually directly addressing Conceptual Continuity in his music, it's in the song "Stink-Foot", in which Fido the dog (who himself bites and chews his way through plenty of Zappa's Projects) explains that the crux of the Conceptual Continuity biscuit is the apostrophe...Now, as a punctuation mark, the apostrophe does two things - it marks omissions, and it signals possession. That is, is represents what we have, and what we don't have. Taken a bit further, the apostrophe suggests that "things" are defined by what they are not (ain't) as much as by what they are...That life is nothing if not contradictions. This is nothing less than dialectics as put forth by Hegel and later Marx...(Don't laugh)... The idea that progress or unity is only achieved through opposition and negation. Hell, the very building blocks of the universe are electrons and protons, you know? And somehow Frank Zappa puts forth these very ideas through the voice of a talking poodle named Fido in a song about an exquisite little inconvenience by the name of "Stink-Foot"...Put another way, "ain't this boogie a mess?" Frank's Project itself was 30+ years of messiness and contradictions...From the sublime ("The Perfect Stranger") to the profane ("Broken Hearts Are For Assholes"), and everything in between...Frank was many things, but he was never boring, and he never stood still...

02: We're Only In It For The Money [1968]
Featuring..."Who Needs The Peace Corp?", Flower Punk", "Let's Make The Water Turn Black", "The Idiot Bastard Son", "Hot Poop"

Frank referred to his band and the people around them as "freaks", and he was always very clear that freaks were not hippies...Zappa didn't care for the hippies, and We're Only In It For The Money is essentially his manifesto against those people and that movement. First of all, he never cared for drugs, and never used them because he never believed he needed them to progress and do his thing. But more to the point, he felt that whatever noble intentions the counterculture (anti-war & civil rights) movement of the 1960's might have had in the beginning, it very quickly devolved into nothing more than a fashion show and an excuse for a bunch of spoiled white kids to take alot of drugs and basically sit around doing nothing, and in the process avoid the realities of their young adulthood (see also, Grunge)...Especially that horrific war on the other side of the world...Now, Frank certainly didn't like the war either, and avoided it himself (contradictions!), but he understood that the anti-war movement was ineffectual (we didn't leave Vietnam until 1975, sixteen years after we arrived), and that for most participants, it was about dressing the part, acting the part, doing the right drugs, listening to the right music, and in general, fitting in...For all the talk about free love, self-expression, and whatnot, there sure was a ton of conformity within the movement...So many contradictions...As Frank himself once infamously said from the stage when a fan shouted that there were uniformed cops in the audience: "Everyone in this room is wearing a uniform, and don't kid yourself." Ah, so many Hegelian dialectics at play...The counter-culture opposing the government, and Frank and his freaks opposing the counter-culture...Frank opposing his own fans...I think for Zappa it was a matter of "If you can't join 'em, beat 'em", and since the hippies left such a bad taste in his mouth, he decided to beat 'em at their own game...While it's certainly true that the freak scene that emerged around Frank was every bit as conforming, Frank essentially stood in opposition to everyone and everything, with the exception of his family, his Object and all Projects therein, and his bandmates. This album is ultimately a huge, hilarious and satisfying bitchslap to an entire generation of phonies with crabs. The crux of the Zappa biscuit is his continual and intentional practice of creating music and presenting ideas that contradicts and challenges conventional wisdom, good taste, and various interpretations of the First Amendment. Everything he did seemed like a conscious attempt to avoid fame and fortune, everything he did as a professional musician ran counter to the way one works within the music industry, and yet, despite working in this way for more than 30 years, he became not only rich and famous, but arguably one of the most significant songwriters/composers/musicians/entertainers of the 20th century, at least according to those who supposedly understand such things and shape popular opinion. Consider this - his most radio-ready songs usually had the filthiest fucking lyrics or subversive ideas, insuring hardly any of that sweet, sweet radio play that created stars back then, but dammit if it those very songs didn't fill arenas around the world and allowed Zappa to finance his more "serious" Projects, which were often so modern, idiosyncratic and avant-garde that they too would only ever appeal to a fairly small number of people. Then again, Jazz From Hell won a Grammy, and mark my words - 50 years from now, Zappa compositions will be as common as Stravinsky or Mahler in orchestral repertoires around the world. Or maybe I just bought the myth and drank the Kool-Aid. Frank Zappa was a salesman and barker as much as anything else, and he sold one thing - Frank Zappa. Chew on that, Fido.

01: Zappa In New York [1978]
Featuring..."Titties & Beer", "Cruisin' For Burgers", "Punky's Whips", "The Illinois Enema Bandit", "I'm The Slime", "The Torture Never Stops"

It seems to me that the most essential Zappa album would have to be a LIVE album, because a Zappa concert was never just a bunch of men with beards standing around and playing their hits exactly like they do on the records...Zappa put on SHOWS in the truest sense of the word...They were EVENTS, complete with songs (of course) and dances, dramatic re-inactments, giraffes full of whipped cream, tons of left-turns and surprises, and plenty of audience participation...And of course plenty of conceptual continuity...Every show was an OBJECT with it's own SECRET WORD and it's own aroma...For me, Zappa In New York is the single most perfect example of Zappa's PROJECT. It's got plenty of the funny, filthy songs, it's got plenty of the more "serious" music...Oftentimes, Frank shuts up and plays his guitar, and that's a whole 'nother wonder I didn't even talk about in this entire blather of mine, and finally, it's got Don Pardo doing the sophisticated narration throughout. I can't necessarily say that this is the very best Zappa album (it's a serious contender), but if I were to recommend the single best album for a Zappa neophyte to start with, I'd have to go with this one...Arf! Arf! Arf!

Hotcha! Hank