Frank Zappa : the negative dialectics of poodle play

Citation preview

Frank Zappa: The Negative

Poodle Play

BEN WATSON

$27.50

ISBN 0-312-1 1918-6

$38.99 Can.

Zappa's musical career began

Frank

earnest

in

1964,

Giants

Soul

the

Mothers

of

the

into

Invention. For the next three decades,

would continually redefine himself his

and mostly esoteric albums

most

(infuriatingly)

Zappa

—through

uncommercial,

intricate, often

fifty-seven

in

when he formed

—

as perhaps the

misunderstood

popular

music composer of the rock era. Zappa's death

from

cancer

prostate

He

said era.

December

in

prompted one of the great

critical

1993

rewrites of

condemned

has either been

as a

purveyor of "smut" and scatalogical

cynical

humor aimed below the lowest common denominator, or championed as the twentieth century's

most

—

composer

eclectic

when

that are both inaccurate

Zappa.The Negative

Watson

Dialectics

definitions

isolated. In Frank

of Poodle

Play,

Ben

explains that these characteristics are

not mutually exclusive;

is

it

misguided to sup-

press either aspect of Zappa's genius. His social-

—designed to show up the repressions of contemporary — ly

transgressive shocks

are

culture

central to his art.

Watson

brings serious critical attention

to the musician, dissecting Zappa within his

him

context,

and

artists as

John Cage and Pierre Boulez. Zappa's

ideas

a

are

analyzing

interpreted

Western

radical

as

alongside

an

such

extension

of

encom-

that

tradition

passed the Marquis de Sade.the Surrealists, and

beyond, from musique concrete to doowop,

Theodor Adorno to Suzy Creamcheese,

Plato

to Punky Meadows, the Situationists to the

PMRC.

Zappa's

politics, as well as his

wit and

relentless attempts to break standard forms,

are integral to his music.

Not only a treatise on artist in

the most

modern composition,

Frank Zappa.The

Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play

pop criticism.Watson's subject himself

in

brilliant

analysis,

is

a

beacon

in

shared with the

an entertaining epilogue,

is

an explosive assault on the barriers between high and

low

culture.

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Digitized by the Internet Archive in

2012 with funding from

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http://archive.org/details/frankzappanegatiOOwats

FRANK ZAPPA:

THE NEGATIVE DIALECTICS

OF

POODLE PLAY

For Jeremy Prynne and Danny Houston, the true gurus on this one

FRANK ZAPPA:

THE NEGATIVE DIALECTICS

OF

POODLE PLAY

BEN WATSON

St.

Martin's Press

New York

Frontispiece: Frank

Zappa holding Breeding From Your Poodle, the book by

Margaret Rothery Sheldon and Barbara Lockwood, Oslo, 13th January 1980. Photograph taken by Marten Sund. See 'Shut Up 'N Play Yer Guitar' in

Chapter Nine: More Guitars.

FRANK ZAPPA: THE NEGATIVE DIALECTICS OF POODLE PLAY. Copyright © 1993 by Ben Watson. 'Oh No' © 1970 Frank Zappa Music 'Your Mouth' © 1972 Munchkin Music 'Stink-Foot' © 1974 Munchkin Music 'Debra Kadabra' © 1975 Munchkin Music The

Frank Zappa are used by kind permission of The Zappa Family Frank Zappa lyrics are copyrighted for the World by Frank Zappa Music & Munchkin Music and may not be reproduced in whole or in part without the express permission of the copyright holder. ZAPPA & FRANK ZAPPA are marks belonging to The Zappa Family Trust. lyrics of

Trust. All

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America.

book may be used or reproduced

No part of this

any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010. in

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Watson, Ben Frank Zappa the negative cm. p. :

ISBN 1. I.

dialectics of

poodle play

/

Ben Watson.

0-312-11918-6

—Criticism and

Zappa, Frank

interpretation.

2.

Music and

society.

Title.

ML410.Z285W38

1995

782.42166'092—dc20

94-36294

CIP

MN First published in

First U.S. Edition:

10

Great Britain by Quartet Books Ltd.

January 1995

987654321

List of

Contents

Acknowledgements

ix

Preface

xi

1

Origins

2

1

3

Freakdom and the Hippies Glam Rock and the Market

4

Music Music

5

Bizarre to DiscReet

6

Guitars

196 208 284

7

Lather

311

8

CBS

9

More

349 409

87

177

and Corporate Rock Guitars

10

Orchestras and Broadway

421

11

Synclavier and Total Control

12

Stageism, or, Issuing the Cfeuvre

457 473

13

Webern

501

vs.

Televangelism

Epilogue: Going to

Meet

Appendix: Discography Index

Vll

the

Man

533

554 557

Acknowledgements

thank the editors who have nurtured the writings of Out to Lunch: Ian Patterson, Ken Edwards, Paul Brown, Marten Sund, John Wilkinson, Rod Mengham, Steven Holt, Harry Gilonis, Fred Tomsett; Caroline Arscott for discovering Weasels Ripped My Flesh and helping me formulate the mix of Marxism and punk that underlies this work; the rock musicians who have discussed Zappa with me: Tim Beckham of A. C. Temple, Andy Gill of the Gang of Four, Michael Rooney of the Primevals; the composers Martin Archer, Richard Barrett and Simon Fell; Leeds SWP members Martin Bennell, Matthew Caygill, Steve Edwards, Dave Ferris and Steve Skinner for the continuing art-political debate; Zappa fans Pancho Rodriguez Baez (get in touch, man!), Jorge Carretto, Simon Cliff, Chris Dean, Mike Laurence, Liz Leney, Frank Mabbitt and Gas Price for thought-provoking comments over the years; Emma Biggs for her inspirational rockism; Christine Rybek, Paul Furness and the Beauville contingent for explaining the true import of 'Bobby Brown'; John McMillan and Vinksu Chandrasekhar for the discography; the Leeds Jazz Committee (Dave Hatfield for lending me his magazine archive; 'Rhythm' in Chapter 9 is for Bill White); the tape-swappers Jack Collier, Steve Feigenbaum, Stuart Lester, Robert Taylor, Eric Ziarko; the many musicians whose remarks have illuminated Zappa for me: Chris Atton, Andy Blake, Stuart Edge, Billy Jenkins, Mike Jennings, Jan Kopinski, Tommy Mars, Orphy Robinson, Clark Rundell, Steve Swallow, Chad Wackermann, Alan Wilkinson; the many non-musicians who have done the same: Ina Dittke, Jane Dixon, Jackie Fournel, Melody Nalson, Everton Savage, Laurie Staff, Spencer Streeter, Anne Thoday, Simon I

should

like to

Thompson, my brother Oliver; the classical commentators David Osmond-Smith and Max Paddison; Vanessa Bridge for saying 'stuff

Roland Barthes and the primacy of the

text

- go to

LA

and

talk to him!'; the people in

Frank (of course),

Gail,

LA who made my

Bobby

Plotnik,

trip there so grand:

Gerry

Fialka,

PK, Matt

Groening, Johnny 'Guitar' Watson; Richard Cook for bringing me overground as a writer and for editorial wisdom; Andrew

Cowan, Simon

Mark

Gary

Watson and Geoff Wills for helpful nit-picking; my publisher Jeremy Beale for good humour and patience; Jane Williams for opening up a whole spectrum of modern music, and occasionally (when the words Prentis,

Sinker,

stop) admitting Zappa's brilliant; possibilities for

my

Steel, Ian

father, Bill, for suggesting

Zappa's character-seal on Zoot Allures;

Kay, for helping to transcribe the

book

German words

my mother,

to 'Ya

Hozna';

open the barn-door rather than say the last word, Our Exagmination rather than the Loeb edition, so all praise to jwcurry and Jonathan Jones for arriving at the last hour and making me believe this is a field others will plough. the idea of this

is

to

Preface

The

siren of the springs of guilty

song -

Let us take her on the incandescent

wax

Striated with nuances, nervosities

That we are heir to Hart Crane 1

Why Marx, why This book has

its

Freud

origin in writings that appeared in various avant-

garde periodicals of the early 1980s under the

pseudonym Out To

Lunch. 2 Frank Zappa's work was used simultaneously to analyse and denigrate the achievements of Western literature, from the romantics through to Henry James, a method that went under the name the negative dialectics of poodle play. Though written in a manner likely to attract the attentions of literati rather than rock fans, the first paragraph of the opening salvo - 'Frank Zappa: The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play Part One' - still for me

summarizes the joys and terrors of analysing Zappa and

his art.

In writing about Zappa I'm going to engage at certain ratios inside the

gearbox of accepted rationality because

Tor The Marriage of Faustus and Brom Weber, 1966, p. 31.

'Hart Crane, Letters, ed. 2

Out To Lunch,

'Frank Zappa:

The Negative

I

don't want to write myself

Helen', 1926, The Complete

Dialectics of

Poems and

Poodle Play Part One',

A

Selected

Vision Very

Like Reality, ed. Peter Ackroyd, Ian Patterson, Nick Totton, December 1979; 'Frank Zappa: The

Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play Part Two', Reality Studios, ed. Ken Edwards, Vol. 5, Nos. 1-4,1983; 'Erogenous Sewage: Poodle Play Explores the Work of Hart Crane', Heretic, ed. Paul

No. 2, 1980; 'Out to Another Lunch Party: Plato's transcendental sofa grounded by revelations concerning frightened phallicism, spatial screaming and nasal spores', Equofinality, ed. John Wilkinson, Rod Mengham, No. 2, 1982; So Much Plotted Freedom: The cost of employing the language of fetishized domination - poodle play explores the sex economy of Henry James' lingo jingo, Reality Studios, Occasional Paper, No. 6, 1987; 'Secret Hungers in Horace', Horace Whom I Hated So, ed. Harry Gilonis, 1992; Secret Hungers in Horace: The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play Performs a Psychoanalgesis on Horace, Form Books, Occasional Paper, No. 1, 1993, available from Form Books, 42a Lowden Road, Heme Hill, London SE24 OBH.

Brown,

Vol.

1,

in material hide

into impressionism

and

art for art's sake;

freewheeling

the necessity of forever travelling downhill.

is

constrained by

On the other hand I hate the

tedious mountaineer's blatant preoccupation with self -justification,

language becomes apologetic

it is

when

already corrupt3 and the language of

no exception. The discoveries of the Zappographer must warp in the waters of religion so that, as cane, they can be twisted into the tricky baskets in which they collect coined morality. Rather, these discoveries must be used to relieve the inflamed areolae of stomach-churning anxiety which disapproval spreads around even our most secret pleasure spots. Direct application of the salve, though, merely stalls the engine, like the fan belt which shrank and got shorter. 4 As in psychoanalysis, the aim is to summon a cure from within, not Zappology

is

not be

to

left

to initiate fencing with moral strictures, but unlike the domesticated

welcome motorway conveyor

perversions of psychiatry, Zappography doesn't envisage a return to the universal overdrive of the 2—4-6-8

Double declutching for all we're worth, we throw all locomotive and if the whole caboodle falls to bits then it wasn't worth patching up anyway. Not that I'm going to take any crap about the 'risk' involved in writing, you can always cross things out. The whole process is enacted in microscosm each time one Zappa theme proves its worth, anyway: day by day, significance and confidence recobelt.

intentions to the winds,

agulate. Facing the inevitable pressures for justification head-on is all wrong, but that doesn't say we don't get there in the end, or that I haven't pulled it off before. I prefer rear entry and physical occupation of the enemy from within. Primary strategy resides in grasping the cheapest irrelevancies, structures which afford no possibility of analogy, like teeth. But even before the perpetration of that heavy-handed stroke of wit, poodle continuity beckons. It's an irrelevance still cheaper because its dull reliability begins to ape the concerned cognitions of the

gearbox beneath the bonnet. 5

compare Zappa's 'Cheepnis' 6 to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan' - but general readers would no doubt benefit from some kind of preamble. 7 Besides being concerned with Frank Zappa and his records and concerts and videos, the negative dialectics of poodle play also seek to apply the insights of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. Supposedly superseded by the post-everything schools of

The

3

original

went on

to

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, The

Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1944, p. 219.

4

Frank Zappa, 'Florentine Pogen', One Size Fits All, 1975. 5 Out To Lunch, 'Frank Zappa: The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play Part One', A Vision Very Like Reality, ed. Peter Ackroyd, Ian Patterson, Nick Totton, December 1979, p. 22. These words also provided the text for a concerto for reader, orchestra and electric guitar by Simon Fell, Four of Zappa, 1992. 'Frank Zappa 'Cheepnis', Roxy & Elsewhere, 1974. 7 A preamble provided by the rest of this preface and the next five chapters. Readers wishing to skip ahead to the heart of the matter may turn to the discussion of 'pants' in the section entitled 'Roxy & Elsewhere' in Chapter 5: Bizarre to DiscReet. Slices

.

thought, 8 their ideas continue to burn bright, perhaps because

what they talked about - capitalism and the family - are still with us. Though often said to be incompatible, Marx and Freud share crucial characteristics: materialism, hostility to religion, dogged insistence on the ability of human reason to grasp and change both the world and the mind. In his own unbookish way, Zappa holds to a similar belief in reason, a refusal to allow social norms to compromise a vision of how things could be. Marx wished to foment the political self-consciousness of the working class; Freud's slogan 'where id was ego shall be' shows a commitment to consciousness far removed from the Nietzschean pessimism of his Parisian inheritors. In unravelling the mysteries of the commodity and of the unconscious, Marx and Freud are frequently condemned by those who defend the current order - but far from damning their theories, to me this indicates an untruth in the way things are run.

anyone involved

mass culture seems to point to an untruth it would be Frank Zappa. Obstinate, irreducible, oppositional, his music presents a continual disjunct, a permanent dada. His explicit politics - loyalty to the family unit and the honest dealings of the small business - are as far from If

in the

way

in

things are run,

radical psychoanalysis or

Marxism

as

you could imagine,

yet

it is

precisely because he does not deliver back such philosophical

precepts

on

convincing

the level of representation that his music provides

grist for radical

thought. Zappa has produced a mis-

cegenation of high and low elements that puts the rhetoric of

Pop

Art and postmodernism to shame. Zappa's belief in knowledge as a blow against oppression is illustrated by this exchange with a born-again Christian during the

US

his

words were by an

Senate hearing on 'porn rock'.

You could

tell

how

heartfelt

uncharacteristic tremor in his voice.

born-again christian: Some of those

things are not normal sexual

relations. fz: It doesn't

you

.

mean you have

*The term postmodernism thus:

to do them. Information doesn't

kill

.

'A reaction to

is

notoriously vague, but was usefully summarized by

intellectual traditions that

Anna Copeland

attempt to explain the world using universal

concepts such as Freudian models of the personality, Marxist theories of economics, or the causeand-effect explanations used

by

postmodernism sees life in the late twentieth century smorgasbord of narratives or discourses that compete for

historians,

as a series of disconnected events, a

attention.' 'Two Cultures: A Reader's Guide', Omni, Vol. 16, No. 2, November 1993, p. 44. It is postmodernism of this ilk that poodle play opposes (along with Alex Callinicos; see his Against

Postmodernism:

A

Marxist Critique, 1989).

bac: They're too fz:

young

to

know

the difference.

Children learn the difference by receiving information which they

If you don't let them grow up and be ignorant. bac: I would rather have them ignorant of some things. [Applause.] fz: Anyone who would rather have their children be ignorant is making 9 a mistake - because then they can be victims.

can store and sort with your help as a parent.

know about

The

this stuff they'll

collapse of

communism

in Eastern

Europe has

led to the

demise of state socialism as a viable ideology for the liberal middle of

As the vacuum this has created is filled with a whole panoply new age irrationalisms, Zappa's appeal to reason is as unusual

as

it is

class.

timely.

Or any art at all? In an interview in Telos, the American quarterly of Frankfurt

School Marxism, Frank Zappa was asked whether he saw a distinction between high art and low art. He replied: 'Or any art at all?' 10 Blurring the distinction between art and life has been an

American activity since at least Walt Whitman, voicing unease with the honoured yet insulated status granted art in that society. It

explains the seemingly contradictory combination of discipline

and accident

be the tape with all coupled with 'what the fuck'. 12 Accident marks the entry of the real into his design. Like a Surrealist portraying a devastated Europe before the outbreak of the Second World War, 13 Zappa mixes in elements of the real world so that his art becomes microcosmic. Analysis bodies forth real information about the world, its past and its future. Not since James Joyce has anyone tried to raze the boundary between art and life with such productive zeal. To talk of art begs the question of its definition. To the Marxist, in Zappa's music. 'This has to

the right notes in

'Senate Hearing 10

Telos,

11

it',

on 'Porn Rock',

1985.

Spring 1991, No. 87, interview with Florindo Volpacchio, pp. 124-36. Thanks to Matthew

Caygill for telling

me

about

this.

"Frank Zappa preamble to 'Bebop Tango

(of the

Old Jazzmen's Church)', Roxy

&

Elsewhere,

1974. 12

Sleeve note to Frank Zappa, 'The Sheik Yerbouti Tango', Sheik Yerbouti, 1979.

Now

elevated

minor philosophy in a recent interview: Zappa! (a supplement from the publishers of Keyboard and Guitar Player), ed. Don Menn, 1992, p. 64. Here it is expressed as a combination of 'when' and 'what the fuck' (where 'when' could be interpreted as entailing the to the status of a

'right notes').

"Max

Ernst, Europe After the Rain, 1933.

the bourgeoisie's halfway house -

midway between the and the permanent re-creation of everyday life that would characterize post-commodity society. Before the advent of the bourgeois class, artworks - tales of advenart

is

religious pageant of feudalism

ture, occasional portraits, scores for lutes

and

viols

- were not

by the romantics. If you had metaphysical quandaries, anxiety about the place your individual soul had in the cosmic scheme of things, you consulted a specialist: the priest. Religion had a monopoly on such expertise, invested with the personal meaning given art

castigating as heresy direct reference to the Bible (or to

1789 the French Revolution made the old order: in

its

it

plain

how

religion

God). In

propped

revolutionary phase the bourgeoisie wanted

none of the old hierarchies of feudalism and faith. They demanded a rationalist world picture. Who now to plumb the depths of the soul, gauge the pulse of the 'inner' life? The poets and painters stepped

in.

Art was the replacement for religion, a repository for values 'higher' than those of making money. The reactionary implications of this kind of idealism can be read off (in degraded form) from the triumph of Senator Paula Hawkins when she asked Zappa a question about profit at the US Senate. ph:

Do you make

a profit

from these rock records?

fz: Yes.

ph:

Thank you.

I

think that statement

tells

a story to the

Committee. 14

While the record industry offered to censor itself in exchange for legislation that would bring in income by taxing blank tapes, an artist who says he makes a profit is pilloried. The very statement that should align Zappa with the economic interests of the American ruling class is held up as proof of his worthlessness as an artist and his moral bankruptcy as a citizen. Such statements are apt to draw equal condemnation from the they too moralize against commitment to the profit motive. Left aesthetics have suffered a decay since the days when Leon Trotsky corresponded with Andre Breton about the revolutionary left as

The

implications of surrealism.

negative dialectics of poodle play

has no time for so-called Marxist critiques of art which merely tail-end the prescriptive high-mindedness of the liberal bourgeoisie.

To

like art

under capitalism

the only other option

is

is

to revel in contradiction;

a lifetime of reading

"Senate Hearing on 'Porn Rock', 1985.

books on Percy

Shelley.

15

To

the sneers of those

who

baulk

at

poodle play's combi-

nation of Leninist politics and Zappology, 16 negative dialectics

makes

this point:

Zappa's

art,

though necessarily underpinned by

a petit-bourgeois belief in cottage-industry economics,

is

just as

much

part of a protest against the divisions of capitalist society

as the

music of Charlie Parker or Kurt Weill. Those

Marxism to morality the rest - have ruined

a set of shibboleths

dialectics as

much

who

reduce

which separate us from as

they have prevented

any understanding of the culture industry. These are all the same curmudgeons who said the left should ignore punk. Art is not simply a representation of aspirations to be judged as worthy or not. It is itself a material process. This creates problems for the idea of art as a repository for 'higher', so-called nonmaterial values. During the nineteenth century, its own technical development threw it into crisis. As the romantics squeezed more and more personal expression out of the old forms - chromaticism and dissonance in music, symbolism in poetry, pictures about art, but lost it its audience. In the 1910s and 1920s artistic modernism presaged a

painting - they extended the material scope of

new

era in which representation was no longer required because humanity was actively reconstructing the world - the promise of the Russian revolution. Casimir Malevich's White on White was an object in the world itself, not a window on a world beyond the antagonism of self and society. Society was now the gallery in which art was to operate. As the revolutionary gains of 1917 were rolled back, such refusals of the divisions of capitalist society

were no longer welcome. In the West, the distance between modern artworks and the lives of the mass of the population were held up as evidence of mass stupidity; under communism they were banned altogether. Stalin's

name

counter-revolution suppressed workers'

power

in the

of 'socialist' ideology and instituted Socialist Realism, a

return to nineteenth-century forms with a proviso as to content.

Modernism became purged the

the bad conscience of his regime. Just as Stalin

entire personnel of the Bolshevik central committee,

were persecuted and confined to insane asylums. Unsurprisingly, the United States saw that it could promote abstract artists

15

This remark

is

directed at Paul Foot and the Lukacsian social-realist cabal

who monopolize

Review, the monthly magazine of the Socialist Workers Party. l6 These remarks are directed at the anarcho-bohemian cabal who run the Termite Club, the monthly showcase for free improvisation in Leeds. cultural criticism in Socialist

abstract art in the

name

of freedom and enterprise.

When

Jasper

Johns exhibited American flags in art galleries, a patriotic gesture that could not really have been made more blatantly, his action was explained by Clement Greenberg as a further step in a mysterious discussion of the flatness of the picture plane, a dialectic that

pretended to bypass cold-war politics altogether. A Jasper Johns retrospective at London's Hayward Gallery in 1991 - at the height

War - was sponsored by Texaco, one of the American companies whose profits were threatened by Saddam Hussein's annexation of Kuwait. Such political observations, which challenge the transcendent status of art in society, exceed the frame of American art ideology - including that of postmodernism. 17 Zappa's 'or any art at all' also serves to free him from such obfuscations. The need of the dealers for new waves of artists to promote, and artists' dissatisfaction with a commodity system that could not deliver the promises of modernism, led to the instant obsolescence that characterized post-war Western art styles. Art became a schizophrenic danger zone, a contradictory mish-mash of retroreligion and avant-denial. As commentators sought to find in art the 'balancing' humanity of a system geared only to the rationalizof the Gulf oil

ation of profit,

it

disappeared before their eyes into the archaic

hocus-pocus of religion (T. S. Eliot, Bob Dylan, Arvo Part) or the self-cancelling cryptograms of modernism (Samuel Beckett, John Cage, Joseph Beuys). In keeping faith with modernism, in recognizing art's inability to deliver its message in a commodity culture, artists found themselves involved in permanent paradox, a guerrilla warfare of subterfuge and denial. Hence the cultural establishment's preference for the classics produced during the heroic phase of the bourgeoisie: Shakespeare, Beethoven, Rembrandt. Recycling the old serves to hide the worrying fact that modern capitalist society can only produce authentic art by vaunting social flaws, resulting in an obsession with the past that postmodernism, with its enthusiastic consumption of filtered mass culture under the name of high art, has done little to mollify. Frank Zappa's pursuit of modernism is intuitive rather than theoretical, in keeping with the fact that music and art are concrete philosophy - sensually embodied thinking about the world. Them or Us (The Book), his 'answer' to questions about conceptual continuity, is prefaced with a disclaimer. ,7

See the discussion of

Hans Haacke

of Late Capitalism, 1991, p. 159.

in Fredric

Jameson, Postmodernism,

or,

The Cultural Logic

This cheesy

little

who

people

home-made book was prepared

already enjoy

Zappa Music.

It is

amusement of

for the

not for intellectuals or

other dead people. 18

Some site

fans take this hostility to systemized thought as a prerequi-

which would make

for understanding Zappa,

a project like

the current one pointless. Faced with the musical philistinism

of the 'educated' classes, this

is

indeed tempting. However,

it

lets

them to Zappa has an

the custodians of high culture off the hook, allowing

Zappa

dismiss

as a rock-cult eccentric.

awareness of the historical role of place in

it,

that

is

as clear-sighted as

Zappa has long declared an cal

In fact,

and

art, it is

a vision of his

own

materialist.

interest in the possibilities of classi-

music. After discovering the existence of an eighteenth-century

composer named Francesco Zappa, he released an album

called

Francesco of the eighteenth-century Zappa's scores realized on

He was

under no illusions, though, that the Baroque some golden age of musical creativity. As David Ocker pointed out in his sleeve-note, the eighteenth-century Zappa 'found honest employment sawing away while noblemen ate computer.

represented

dinner'. 19

Zappa expanded on the

issue in

The Real Frank Zappa Book:

All of the norms, as practiced during the olden days,

because the guys

who paid

the

bills

wanted the

came

'tunes' they

into being

were buying

to 'sound a certain way.'

The king pope or

chop off your head unless it sounds like out your fingernails unless it sounds like this.'

said: 'I'll

said: 'I'll rip

this.' The The duke

else might have said it another way - and it's the same Your song won 't get played on the radio unless it sounds like People who think that classical music is somehow more elevated

somebody

today: this.'

'

than 'radio music should take a look

who's paying the

bills.

at the

forms involved - and

at

20

Zappa's use of scores has nothing in

bourgeois daydreams of pre-industrial

common

with the

harmony

petit-

that underlie

twentieth-century consumption of classical music (and rock neoto Michael Nyman). with other figures in the American 'inventor' tradition - Buckminster Fuller, Charles Ives, Harry Partch, John classicism

In

from Meatloaf

common

Them or Us {The Book), 1984. "Frank Zappa, Francesco, 1984. Frank Zappa, with Peter Occhiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book, 1989, pp. 186-7. Note that at the level of typescript itself - the overuse of emphases - Zappa offends the protocols of literary good manners. '"Frank Zappa,

20

Cage - Zappa's

ideas have a kooky, crackpot, homemade feel, but because of his attention to the facts of his matter (and his

impatience with liberal justifications) his insights are abetted by

and avant-garde artists operating in very different circumstances. De Sade and Wyndham Lewis traced parallel trajectories. What follows examines the more recent manifestation of such ideas in Jacques Attali and the Situationist International, though it is really Marx and Freud (and the way their ideas were applied to music by Theodor Adorno) who are uniquely capable radical philosophers

of gauging the decimating ferocity of Zappa's

Why Jacques

Attali

art.

(a little)

Zappa's appraisal of the record industry as a business geared to

making

profits

21

shows he has no

and

follies

make

a case

illusions in the fads

of the rock press. Its sole reason for existence

is

to

for the significance of buying records. Jacques Attali has talked of

the necessity for the record industry to spend

demand because 'repetition') is

is

the

effect

of mass

precisely to diminish the unique

to be valued for (which he calls Fetishized as a commodity, music

is

money

production

stimulating

(his

moment

term is music

that

'ritual'). illustrative of the evolution of

our

entire society: deritualize a social form, repress an activity of the body,

specialize

its

then see to

it

practice, sell

that

it

as a spectacle, generalize its

stockpiled until

it is

it

loses

Despite Attali's claims to novelty, 23 this

on

is

its

consumption,

meaning. 22

actually Marxist theory.

of exchange in a argument was commodity A developed by Walter Benjamin, 24 pointing out that mass production destroys the 'aura' of the work of art. Unlike Attali, though, Benjamin does not say

Attali

registering

is

the impact

system.

21

For

culture

similar

a trenchant slice of Zappa's

views on the record industry, censorship, global

read The Real Frank Zappa Book,

politics, etc.,

written with Peter Occhiogrosso, 1989, brought out in

number of unauthorized books about Zappa that appeared at the end of the 80s. punchy, readable account of Zappa's explicit intentions you couldn't do better - for this reason The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play is not concerned to relate Zappa's declared views. Instead, I want to examine his art and see what it tells us, placing it in the larger context of the response to a

For

a

history of avant-garde

art, its

relationship to class struggle ('high' versus 'low') and to investigate

the unconscious structures of the work.

The Real Frank Zappa Book has obviated the excuse

for

any more rock-bio cash-ins. "Jacques 23

Attali, Noise, 1977, trs.

believe this hypothesis

Brian Massumi, 1985, p.

new', p. 30. "Walter Benjamin, 'The Work of Art in the 'I

nations,

trs.

5.

is

Harry Zohn, 1968.

Age of Mechanical Reproduction',

1936, Illumi-

he

'superseding' Marx, a claim Attali subsequently put into

is

by involvement with Francois Mitterrand's catastrophic on the standard of living of the French working class - which ushered in the rise of LePen's action

association of socialism with attacks

Front National.

Zappa pays acute atten(Tenguin in Bondage'), empty ritual ('Bogus Pomp'), body functions ('Why Does It Hurt When I Pee'), showbiz (Thing-Fish), mass production ('A Little Green Rosetta') and loss of meaning through repetition ('Teen-age Wind'). The grotesque 'extremes' of Zappa's imagination are really no more than a response to a commodity Nevertheless, Attali's formula

is

useful.

tion to these themes, foregrounding fetishization

system that treats people as things, with all the vocabulary of race and slavery the American experience supplies. The use of the term 'spectacle' is the key to the energy of Attali's concepts: he is evidently one child of 1968 who did not throw away his situationist tracts. The spectacle was both the Situationist International's analytical tool and their enemy: the sum total of media life - TV, radio, magazines, politics, rockshows, religion

-

that lives

life

for you.

By

criticizing the

way

successful

so-called 'Subversives' (Surrealists, socialist architects, 'Marxist'

film-makers, painter-rebels) merely contributed to the spectacle,

basking in

its

rewards of fame and

people's everyday creativity

by

money

while they replaced

developed strategies that resembled those of revolutionary politics: supporttheir exploits, the SI

war what unStalinized Marxism they could find (which included Henri Lefebvre and Herbert Marcuse and their vision of a left-wing Freud 25 ) ing unofficial strikes, perpetrating protests at religion and that resulted in action rather than applause. Steeped in

the SI developed a telling cultural rhetoric that has informed (and/ artistic development since. It is therebe surprised that Attali's concepts should be 'answered' by the rise of punk rock26 - Jacques Attali and Malcolm McLaren were both using situationist ideas, but at the academic and rock 'n' roll 'levels' respectively (though such splits - or specializations - constitute betrayals of situationist lore). Because they deal with what capitalism does to people, the horror of living

or anticipated) every radical

fore

naive

to

"Though Guy Debord's

partiality for Georg Lukacs, despite the latter's uneasy compromise with Czech Stalinism, indicates a satisfaction with totalizing abstraction impossible in either revolutionary socialism or Frankfurt School negative dialectics. 26

As were

afterwordist Susan

McClary

in the

1985 edition of Noise and

her Feminine Endings in The Wire, No. 96, February 1992.

Mark

Sinker reviewing

beings in thrall to the accumulation of things, the themes of Attali

and punk are also those of Zappa: sexual

slavery, bodies, machines,

commodity-fetishism, product, death, libidinal investment in atro-

- what Attali theorises as sacrifice: the repressed violence or unspoken crime that guarantees the social. city

The Situationist International and Frank Zappa The most talk

is

recent writer to bring discussion of the SI into rock-

Greil Marcus, with his archaeology of the situationist sub-

stratum to punk, Lipstick Traces. 27 Marcus flicting ideas of Surrealists, Lettrists

and

sifts

through the conwith a tone

Situationists

of blithe wonder, never once resorting to opinion or argument.

As only an American

could, he finds a

way

to convert these

Adorno commodity sense') into gold-crumbed morsels of consumption. It's a good read. Despite this recuperation, reflected in the use of the word

prickly, aggressive, electric ideas (precisely designed, as

modern

described

'situationist' all

art,

to be 'unpleasurable in the

over the rock press, such theory was originally

explosive, a critique that could talk art

not just punk and Attali

breath. It

is

criticism,

from the new

art history

-

all

and

politics in the

same

the best ideas in cultural

(Tim Clarke was

a

member

of

the British wing) to avant-garde literature (Jeremy Prynne, Iain Sinclair),

more

have been fired by their theses (only camel dung finds

applications).

A

powerful indication that only Marxist con-

cepts are capable of conveying the bacillus of revolution.

vacuum opened up by the revolutionary moment of May 1968, the SI was not good because it was extreme, nihilistic and cool (though it was), or because its members wrote slogans In the

down

(though they did), but because they had a Marxist analysis that had no truck with the Stalinism of either the their ties

Communist Party or

the Maoists. This gets forgotten.

They

failed

and occupying students away from the leadership of the CP and the reformist left, who proceeded to deliver the revolution to de Gaulle and the CRS riot police on a plate. They hadn't learned from Lenin the need to build a to swing the striking workers

27

Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces:

A

Secret History of the Twentieth Century, 1989.

revolutionary party rooted in the working

class:

they

failed.

This

also gets forgotten.

However, unlike the sad grouplets of

who

situationist 'followers'

deposit their diatribes against everything under the sun to

wilt in

sundry left-wing bookshops, the SI were not anarchists or

romantic individualists. They understood the nature of the state

and the importance of the workers' councils; they had a realistic view of the balance of class forces. Unlike Sartre, they saw through the Third Worldism of Fidel Castro and Mao; 28 unlike the Red Brigades they opposed terrorism as inconducive to mass activity; 29 unlike the Communist Party they saw the crucial need for unity between workers and students. 30 Because of this their views on Zappa are worth recording. In 1967 Raoul Vaneigem had this to say:

The only way

to

produce

a brief aesthetic outburst

is

to take a

momen-

David Hockney, Frank Zappa, Andy Warhol, Pop Art and Reggae can be bought at tary lead in the spectacle of artistic decomposition:

random in chain stores. To talk about a modern work of art lasting would be like trying to discourse on the eternal values of Standard Oil. 31

The

idea of the 'lasting'

work

of art reveals an uncharacteristic

though the way Vaneigem's book becomes mired in purist incantations - repeated ad nauseam - does show an idealist tendency. The list of names exhibits the crudeness of the Si's emphasis on consumption (a crudeness which postmodernism, despite a different slant, repeats). The boom years of the 50s were hard times for revolutionaries: capitalism seemed to be delivering everything it promised. The situationist critique of consumption - slogans which pointed out that anything that could be bought wasn't worth having, their sheer disgust with the ad-world of happy nuclear families - was a sneeringly definitive goodbye to the 50s and subsequently much plundered: from 'radical' art magazines like Re/Search to the Church of the Subgenius, Devo and advertising itself (the retro-50s chic of recent Brylcreem ads, for example). In Lancaster, California, Captain Beefheart and Frank aestheticism,

28