Zappa Recommendations ?

As FZ once said, all his music would be instrumental, if it weren’t for the fact that there’s no market for that in ’modern’ pop culture. So vocals were a necessary requirement to get his material in the market place. But if you can grasp the human voice as just another musical instrument, the whole catalogue is open to investigation. Which is as it should.

My no.1 recommendation would be ’Uncle Meat’. While it has some vocals - mostly for comic relief - this is some of the most intricate instrumental music ever put on tape. It’s like looking at one of those fractal images, where a few recognizable patterns (in this case musical ’themes’) are being juggled around in constantly changing variations and/or instrumentations. For me it’s the ultimate expression of Zappa’s project/object narrative. ’You need a chicken to measure it’.....

@stuartk the likeness with dadaïst art is not far off the mark. FZ definitely had an absurdist outlook on life. He even called his non musical business ventures 'intercontinental absurdities'. If you're open to a new 'take' on Zappa's lyrics, you should make an effort to read the book "The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play" by Ben Watson, a British literature scholar. I won't spoil the fun by saying any more about its contents, but intertextual connections are made from ancient Greek tragedies to James Joyce and all stops in between. you won't believe what you read.

The author apparently was dead serious, but Zappa himself couldn't stop laughing. Ill as he was at the time, he even considered making a project out of it, inviting the author to his house and have him record a spoken word document 'with the fancy English accent and all', perhaps with musical embellishments to be added later. Regrettably this never came to be, it would have been hilarious.

 Does Humor Belong in Music? You bet.

I assume FZ would have been highly amused by the very idea that a person might consider himself too UNsophisticated to appreciate his stuff. The deliberate crudeness of much of his lyrical content had every intention to scare away the pretentious ’young sophisticate’. Zappa considered his social commentaries to be ’antropological field studies’, describing situations and characters pretty much as they appeared to him in real life. Politicians and evangelicals were the easy targets, but his insensitivity was pretty evenly spread around.

Back to instrumental recommendations: if electronic music doesn’t scare you, by all means investigate his synclavier compositions, most of all Civilization Phase III. He considered this material as being impossible to play by humans, but the Ensemble Modern proved him wrong by insisting to play several of these pieces live on The Yellow Shark. ’G Spot Tornado’ has remained one of their signature pieces.

Another great recommendation would be The Zappa Album by a bunch of enthousiastic young musicians from Finland called the Ambrosius Ensemble, using baroque instruments. Great stuff!

@stuartk There are many reasons to hold FZ in high regard as a musical force, but his complete disregard and rejection of the high culture/low culture divide is certainly one of them. These cultural categories are associated with class, status and power within our society. Things Zappa questioned and ridiculed at every opportunity. In the end all musical sounds, no matter in what style, were nothing but ’wiggling air molecules’. His job as a composer was to ’organize the material’ towards an intrinsic musical logic. For Zappa that logic was ultimately ’anything as long as it sounds good’. If that meant putting a Stravinsky quote next to a doowop line, than so be it.  The sounding result doesn’t fall inside any established or accepted cultural category, so whether you like it or not is entirely up to you.