Endless wars. Corporate Greed. Decline of living wages. There are many societal woes in this country that continue to get worse with little positivity in sight. Many issues feel out of our control. Still, there is one issue that remains in your control, and it’s your refusal to check out my Zappa recommendations.
I know we’ve been through this before, but I really think you will enjoy his work if you heard the right tracks. You probably haven’t heard the best stuff. He released sixty-two albums and a hundred twenty-nine more posthumously. I refuse to believe that you bothered to give all of that a listen. His ability to blend genres is far too vast for you to hear a couple of songs and go “I’m done here. He’s just trying too hard to be weird and coming off pretentious”.
As you fear for the future of this country and planet as a whole, take a few hours out of each day to appreciate the soothing music of complex time signatures mixed with kazoo sounds. Lots of great orchestral jazz adjacent experimental work from albums like Hot Rats, Lumpy Gravy, Civilization Phaze III, and ofcourse, Jazz From Hell. I know you said before that you are not into long instrumental jazz pieces with improv dialogue, especially how one features the comedy of uh, Michael Rapaport, but what if I told you that the music sometimes sounded like a Fred Flintstone running on his tippy toes?
Check out the song “I Promise Not To Come In Your Mouth” and you’ll be thinking “what kind of drugs was he smoking when he came up with that one?” Zappa never did drugs once. He was pure Zappa. That’s what makes him special. I Promise Not To Come In Your Mouth is not something he came up with high, but something from the heart. It’s good to remember such passion as you pace back and forth wondering if its possible to raise children in our inevitable future.
Please, please, PLEASE stop watching the news and check out his movies as well. 200 Motels, Baby Snakes, and Uncle Meat are great as long as you skip the terrible attempts at comedy and focus on the animation each one has for about 10 minutes which are all very good. Or perhaps you’d feel better if you heard the music live. He may no longer be with us but his son Dweezil continues to perform all the songs his dad wrote about banging groupies.
It’s time to open that mind, stop having panic attacks, and concentrate on the meaning behind “Don’t Eat Yellow Snow”.