1.) The Platonic Idea
Frank Vincent Zappa was the father and "mother of invention" of total music, conceiving the complete fusion of Rock, Jazz, and Classical Music. He was a prophet and alchemist of free music, a proponent of scandalous, irreverent, satirical art aimed at promulgating a pathological anatomy of society. The novelty of his style in the Rock domain was also in presenting himself primarily as a composer, giving much more emphasis to scores than to performance aspects. Like Sir Duke Ellington, the Baltimore boy conducts (everything and) everyone, but he respects the personal qualities of his musicians. He always placed a lot of emphasis on his satirical lyrics, which were central to the evolution of his open and complex suites.
2.) The Importance of Being Ernest/Frank.
Zappa has no epigones. Yet, usually, anything in Popular Music that is extravagant or bizarre is immediately labeled as zappian. Zappism is a religion. The one of those who believe in the importance of being Frank.
3.) Time.
Absolutely Free, ready in November 1966, released in May 1967 by Verve, is probably the first Rock opera in history. The year before, in June '66, the debut, the concept, and double "Freak Out" had been published (before "Revolver" and "Velvet Underground & Nico," before Jefferson Airplane and Jimi Hendrix, before the electric Miles!). With its successor, the experimental collage "We Are In It Only For The Money," from September 1968, he composed a superb psychedelic trilogy.
The Mothers of Invention, in the meantime, expanded with musicians from Jazz backgrounds, Ray Collins (Vocals), Roy Estrada (bass), Jimmy Carl Black (drums and tambourine), Don Preston (keyboards), Bunk Gardner (saxophone), Billy Mundi (percussions). And Frank (guitar).
4.) Plastic City/Plastic People/Plastic Music
Zappa, who mocks the San Francisco hippies, the freak scene, and the Los Angeles Freaks themselves, positions himself beyond them. If he ridicules and sneers at the powerful, the politicians, the multinationals, authoritarianism, the special thing is that he also takes on the common man. He wants to carry out a conscientization through his caustic social satire. Los Angeles was "Plastic City," and Barbie (the Fashion Doll) was the most human form. Frank rejected political militancy in the controversial years of Johnson, even before the tumultuous '68; neither was he satisfied with the naive, cynical demands of the "angry freaks." The hardened, stone heart of biblical memory in Zappism is evidently a heart of plastic. A surrogate. A prosthesis. What is missing, to every man, is then, as always, a heart of flesh. At least, a heart of an ox, Don Van Vliet would say. So, enough plastic, let's return to existence. A paradoxical existentialism, from jesters talking with thieves. Through a new Dadaism, art reveals life. The comic opera is the new Delphic oracle. Without assuming this somewhat histrionic stance, but not for its own sake or empty, if not the Zappian message, at least the "Absolutely" album in its beauty and richness would elude us.
5.) Help I'm a Rock
Zappa is Rock. Zappa is against. Do you know Goucho Marx, who sings "I don't know what they have to say, It makes no difference anyway, Whatever it is, I'm against it"? That's him. Zappa is against and within his time. Zappa is against and within all music. He does not bind to his generation, is not under any label. He does not conceive of stylistic barriers between Rock, Pop, Rhythm'n'Blues, Jazz, and scholarly music, placing himself at the origin of all future contaminations.
Zappa takes on and is against: his generation, compartmentalized music, the naivety and cynicism of the freaks, the naivety and dreaminess of the Hippies, the mysticism of psychedelia, Rock stardom, he is against prohibitionism, but he is also against drugs, against respectability, against hypocrisy wherever it hides, against stupidity, against massification, against the golden calf of money, and against capitalism.
The overwhelming parody presented in "Absolutely Free," which reuses musical clichés, advertising jingles, and stages gags of empty characters as in Plautine comedies, would like to chase young people out of the system, leading them to feel the need to free themselves from fashions and from an existence reduced to mere consumeristic dimension. To be, for being, then, what? Frank. Candid. Free. The importance of being Frank. "Free-headed and free-dressed." Through musical creation, he pursues Nietzsche's goal of making man something unsettling. Without arriving at totalitarianism and excessive rationalism. More simply, and beautifully, having fun in part and freeing from prejudices, fears, and masks. The only way is freedom. "Freedom. A worthy danger indeed," sings G.L. Ferretti. That stuff. Ok. After all, good old Frank, in those wild years, always held that music is the best. Everything we do is woven with music. Absolutely liberating music is the best. Without falling into another ideology. Just an expressive instance. Bravo Frank! Bravo Vincent!
6.) The Tracks That Make Up the Album, the Album That Composes the Tracks. Pastiches.
From texts, context, and purpose, we move to the "musical" tracks. Ah, dear IlConte/IlComte @[IlConte], this music has a purpose, it's not entertainment; could this be the infamous "independence"? We'll ask Pin @[Pinhead]. But I think so. In the tracks, there is a feverish race to rhythm. Aside from some unpleasant "linguistic" censorship by the parent company, Zappa's love for the sophisticated noise-making of Edgar Varese, for Rhythm'n' Blues, for the cartoon music of Spike Jones, really brings many/all fruits. A surrealist, Dadaist, liberating musical bricolage. Zappa aims very high and far. Ready to be extremely mingling. Such it is.
It starts with two intriguing overtures, "Plastic People," a manifesto of intentions, and the eulogy of "The Duke of Prunes," which explode, as often happens in the LP, into spasmodic, frenetic, reluctant rhythmic pieces avoiding all formality, hysterical, with sudden stops and very frequent tempo changes. They overwhelm the song form, turning it upside down in an apotheosis. With clangor. Between the musings of a mad orchestra, picking Easy Listening, we notice "progressive" fugitives.
The bass is throbbing, the keyboards plot organistic miniatures, the caustic guitar sends stabs, the percussion is quick and thundering. In the instrumental Free Progressive " Young Pumpkin," the sax and harmonica soar. In "Call Any Vegetables," Zappa calls all the vegetables together, the only ones able to guarantee regularity to the organism. And this is the best indicator of mood, the perfect indicator of the state of happiness of every person. And it's true! Here we remember, with Frank, that Rock is not bewilderment, but a mission. The refusal of Zappian drugs is genius! It serves to have total control of the artistic processes. And this produces awesome music. A real blast! The opposite is easily falsifiable. And goodbye!
Then there is "Uncle Bernie's Farm," a blues with vibraphone, a drunk little choir, and the mythical Pop/Beat Yeah Yeah sketch of "Suzie Cream Cheese" (who wouldn't have wanted to meet her at least once?). Then, the oddities of "Brown Shoes," an incredible rapid and tentacled back-and-forth, of tunes and songs, in a narrative and sound collage, blended, and imploding with village bands, Free Jazz, nursery rhymes, informal avant-garde, classical with Stravinsky, Country, Easy Listening, Ethnic (Native Americans), Musichall, Cabaret, ballet. It feels like running in a straight line maze, musically intricately. Probably inspired by Virgin Forest by Fugs of Second Album (1966). With, however, more sudden changes, more defined songs, not just atmospheric, more complex and articulated. It's as if Diderot and D'Alembert's Encyclopedia were musically rewritten by new wise individuals, called Wowee, Suzie, and Duke (of the Prunes). The huge carousel closes, a loose ending, "reintegrated into the system": in a department store, cash register noises, a cocktail lounge piano, the lazy and alluring crooning of Ray Collins, a melancholic epitaph on the triumph of capital. With jelly too. It's not definitive. But America, the American style of life, plasticized boys and girls, for now, toasts and goes home. Arrogantly.
7.) Another Finale.
An overwhelming, omnivorous, adventurous, devastating, compact album. A dizzying succession of ideas, a masterpiece and an anti-masterpiece at the same time; that of the captain will be (only) the anti-masterpiece (par excellence). A bubbling magma. An instructive, cathartic shit-throwing. Necessity, the mother of invention. An "action cut-up" surrealist painting that tears music, freed, fast, breathlessly. From Doo Wop to Avant-garde Classical. Everything. Every thing. Absolutely free music, that freed from all ties. In Jewish mysticism, God is "En Sof," freed from all ties, "absolute/absolutely." Without boundaries. Absolutely free music has no boundaries. It is, somehow, divine.
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