The original title of the piece (for the first, oh, week or so) was "Blow Job". But eventually he made it a narrative about Mo and Herb charging Frank for their vacation in Pamplona. Sarcastic is exactly the right word. Don't forget the airhorn at the end.
The original title is too funny. "Blow Job" sounds like the closest thing to a generic Zappa title he ever came up with. And the sarcasm, I don't know whether it came through as such to my girlfriend -- she seemed rather baffled by the whole thing.
But if you can appreciate Zappa's sense of humor and the peculiar physicality of his music -- I don't know if this makes sense, but Zappa referred a lot to the physical processes involved in making music (e.g. the air moving around a room), to the extent that I sometimes get the feeling he did think of himself as almost like a kind of scientist. I feel like a scientific attitude informed much of the way he approached music. In any case, when I listen to Zappa's music I feel a strong sense of the physical world, of an appreciation of sounds in themselves, rather than the intellectual, abstract music of most composers in the European classical tradition.
In other words, although I'm sure there are exceptions one might think of, I feel like in general when Zappa composed, he was thinking about sound itself more so than he was thinking about things like harmony, melody and "meaning". Not that he didn't possess a lot of technical knowledge, but it was being used in ways that the people who canonized Western "music theory" would not have intended (or even have been able to conceive of).
Perhaps it isn't too much of a stretch to say that Zappa took the tools of Western music and basically used them to negate the purposes for which they had been designed. However, if this is an accurate statement, I believe it was only a means to an end: to subvert people's expectations and allow them to really LISTEN, at least for a little while. Once he had done this, they would be ready to hear the true content of his music: raw, uncensored imagination, translated into the physical world through the medium of sound.
You wrote "We still do not know why Zappa wrote music like Mo 'n Herb's Vacation." - he wrote music of all kinds because that's what he did; it was fundamental to him, like eating or breathing.
I would be foolish to argue that writing music was not fundamental to Frank Zappa's nature. However, as I am at times an exceptionally foolish person, I'll go ahead and do it right now. I think composition was fundamental to his personality -- but I think it could as easily have been something other than music that captured his interest. It was the physical immediacy of the sounds of Varese and R&B music that drew him, I believe. Had those two types of music not been there for him to absorb as a teenager, he might have turned out quite differently.
Are you wondering why this piece didn't come out sounding like Bobby Brown or Dynamo Hum. It's trite but also true to say "because he was a good composer" - he picked the beginning materials (guitar licks for sure and some people say even a quote from Varese) and he developed the ideas creatively until the piece said what he wanted it to (in the Zappa language) and until he liked the way it sounded.
I don't have much to add here, except to say that I agree, and to emphasize the last part: liking the way it sounded was crucial for him. I think Zappa had a large variety of sounds that he enjoyed and wanted to hear expounded in certain ways. So for him, the sounds inherent in the formation of "Bobby Brown" were important enough, in their own way, for him to complete its composition. He may not have enjoyed playing that song (or "Dinah-Moe Humm") dozens (hundreds?) of times, but he recognized its appeal and felt it was a small price to pay for being able to continue his career.
What I want to know is - did your girlfriend enjoy the music - or did she just wonder why he had even bothered?
I don't think she enjoyed it. I think Zappa is really baffling to her. She's a musician but she loves music that is complex in very different ways: Carlo Gesualdo, Monteverdi and J.S. Bach, for example, are three of her favorite composers. Mind you, I really enjoy that stuff too, but Zappa will always be closer to my heart, I think, because it is what I listened to when I was young and impressionable. Even when I don't listen to Zappa's music for many months at a time, I feel like it's still right there with me.
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