Has America forgetten the keffiyah drapped mysterioso posing on the cover of "Sheik Yer Booti?" Has American turned its back on the sixties counter-counter culture icon who dared to proclaim "We're only in it for the money" to the faces of those who claimed otherwise? Or has America just deemed irrelevant the prophet who dared to warn us, "don't eat the yellow snow?"
Three years after his premature death from prostrate cancer, America still doesn't understand who this man was. Was he serious? Was he a master of satire? Was he a genius composer and guitar player who like all the greats, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Moe Howard, went to his death young and underappreciated? Was he just another Warholian hoax, no different than those of Madonna, Dennis Rodman, or Johnny Rotten; famous for a moment, or famous for a handful? Or was he the restless hero, the rare glorified pop culture golden calf to a select few; a Jerry Garcia for the zombied? A Phish for the travelling teens in search of musical spirituality?
In some ways, Zappa reinvented music. He desacrified the sacred. He blasphemed the holy codes of rock music and became the pop star who looked down on pop stars ("Bobby Brown"), the creator of pop culture who wanted little to do with pop culture ("Valley Girl"). If anything, Zappa blended Dada with the sexual vulnerabilty of music in "Broken Hearts Are For Assholes" ("and whatcha going to do, cause you're an asshole"), "Cosmic Debris" ("the price of meat has just gone up and your old lady has just gone down"), and "Dinah Mo Hum" ("there's a spot that gets me hot/and you ain't been to it"). Zappa wrote for the London Symphony Orchestra. He staged the "Thingfish" rock opera. He asked the provocative, "Do you know what you are? You are what you is." And always the philosopher, he asked, "Is that a real poncho or a Sears poncho?"
His audience forgave him for "Valley Girl" and managed to get through "Shut Up N Play Your Guitar" at least once. They zoned out to "200 Motels" (putting up with Ringo Starr once again pretending he can act).
Yet, the sad thing about Zappa is that his spirit is seen relatively little, and when it is, it is still considered to be part of the fringe, tainted, uncool, unapproachable. While the American culture has become more accepting of explicit language on television, has permitted explored sexuality on Mtv (remember when they banned Van Halen's "Pretty Woman" because the she turned out to be a he?), and has embraced gansta rap as legitimate and entertaining, it has still ignored Zappa.
And was Zappa any less an American musical icon than Elvis? Did he contribute less to new innovations in style and subject matter than Dylan? As Zappa put it, " I tried to get different examples of different types of things that I play. I have one basic style, but inside of that style there are different things that I play." In a sense, Zappa was what American culture has prided itself on being: a mixture of different backgrounds, a melting pot of ethnicity which eventually merges into one being and one mind. It is this very melting pot, however, that has been lost to the country's music scene, a scene which rejects the unique, which spurns any attempt to blend styles and ideas. It is for this reason that Zappa is lost to all but a select few of the American music scene.
It was Zappa who said, "There are very few bands that are actually playing anything. They go onstage with a freeze-dried show, and in many cases at least fifty percent of the show is coming out of a sequencer or is lip-synced. Audiences have missed out on the golden age, when people went onstage and took a chance." In the 90's, where Pearl Jam, Sheryl Crow, and the ghost of Kurt Cobain are played over and over until they become nothing more than just a catch phrase or a message without a medium, Zappa is still right. What the country's musical mind has yet to fathom is that this was a man who invented his own sound. He wasn't rock and roll, he wasn't jazz, he wasn't musical satire. Unlike the majority of today's music heros, for Zappa there was never a reason to be one of these sounds. To be a sound is to be expected to do something specific and predictable. And for Zappa, the only acceptable predicatability was its natural opposite.