Ah well, yes, a genius. Most of the falsehoods about him iterated above have already been rebuffed in subsequent posts. How does Burnt Weenie Sandwich play in Czech? Great. It's almost entirely instrumental, and the vocal compositions are silly songs. He had fun with lyrics, but their contents were a vehicle for two amusement and social commentary. On the other hand, his vocal writing was fantastic. To him, music was basically instrtumental -- organized sound -- and the voice, so far as musically relevant, was just more sound. He wrote some stupendous choral music -- check out the medley starting with "Beauty Knows no Pain" on "You are What You Is" for an example. A main reason he had lyrics at all was that he realized you couldn't get american popular music audiences to pay attention to instrumentals. He needed to fill pop concert halls, to get money to finance orchestral performances. But even so, the lyrics are rather brilliant, though there is not a trace of sentimentality in all of Zappa's public life. See Ben Watson's "The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play" for a long haired, long winded rather crazed, but fascinating account of Zappa and his work, repleat with psycho-analytic and post-modern critical theory analyses of his lyrics.
For my money, also, Zappa is the most original and riveting electric guitarist of "rock" music. Everyone else, great thought they are, including Hendrix, is pplaying blues -- (not "The Blues", but blues). Zappa is not.
I did not get into Zappa until affter he died, after I listened to almost nothing but classical music and some Jazz for nearly 15 years. My taste ran to the relatively complex and "difficult" musics of both genres. Pop just wasn't musically interesting enough for my ears. Metrically too simple, altogether compositionally thin, dynamically compressed, emotionally unsubtle. All the songs like so many huts. Then I heard Zappa -- a grad student of mine lent me some of his CDs; I think that YCDTOSAM volume 2 -- the Helsinki Concert was the first. Blew me away. Inca Roads, Uncle Meat, Dogbreath, RDNZL. In it I found the compositional virtues I loved in classical music. Architectural palaces, or at least mansions -- Beethoven Bach, Starvbinski wrote palaces. And it ALSO rocked. cool. I listened to almost nothing else for about 2 years. Really couldn't see the point.
I am back into popular idioms now to a pretty substantial extent. Interestingly this coincides with my getting a better system, so that I am now listening more to my equipment than I had before. That's telling and ironic, since my system is pretty decent, but really no match for really large or complex music. So I tend to listen to stuff that my system can more easily handle. Getting interested in equipment and fidelity has made me more attentive to the virtues of what I think is, from a compositional standpoint, musically less impressive stuff. Great bluegrass playing, the Beatles, The Band, The Allman Brothers: my system makes them far more satisfying to me than ever before. But I am wistful for my ability to listen to compositions themselves. My ears may be happier in a sense now, but my musical intelligence is a little less acute, and my musical experience a bit impoverished.
Sorry for the tangent, relative to this thread.
Uncle Meat is probably my favorite Zappa album (out of many I love). What a feast.
