Zappa (2020)

Nearly every significant 20th century musician was a tangle of irreconcilable contradictions and Frank Zappa was certainly among the most complicated of them all. While undoubtedly a covert establishment asset, Frank Zappa was the aspirational artistic archetype for peers and subsequent generations alike. Since the dawn of the commercial artistic age, musicians of every stripe have had to grapple with the conflict between artistic ambition and the imperatives of the profit motive. Few have navigated this problem with more success than Zappa. Despite the fact that a Zappa documentary presents a seemingly impossible challenge for a filmmaker, Alex Winter’s attempt is as good as one could hope for given the enormity of the subject’s legacy and influence.  

Notoriously cantankerous and obsessive to an extreme, Zappa had something to offer to nearly everyone regardless of your ideological orientation or artistic preferences. In a world of democratized artistic standards and relative tastes that often favored the lowest common denominator, Zappa insisted on pursuing art that demanded both an objective standard of excellence and deep instrumental prowess in order to execute. He may have belonged to the surrealist and deconstructionist end of the avant garde, but his music rested on an objective foundation of aesthetic beauty. He appropriated the trappings and iconography of the counterculture, but he openly ridiculed drug abuse and hippies.  He was attuned to the corruption of the music industry very early on, and sought an independent path in order to preserve the integrity of his vision. He even paid the London Symphony to perform his composition just so he could have a recording of the best musicians playing his piece. Admittedly, his music isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but you can’t say he didn’t swing for the fences.  

Rhetorically, Frank was a jumbled mixture of fearless truth telling, blunt pugilism, and blatant misdirection served over heaping portions of sops to leftist pieties.  Naturally, he frequently targeted Republicans and religious conservatives, but he was equally contemptuous of feminists and the counterculture. You have to look to Ted Nugent to get the kind of red meat Frank was serving on a regular basis. Since we now live in a world where Van Morrison and Morrissey are dangerous apostates and the entire music industry is a monolith of wokeisms, Frank’s seemingly sincere defense of free speech would be a welcome voice in these times. It’s a damn shame he didn’t live long enough to witness the corporations casting art down the memory hole and the tech monopoly’s brazen censorship because it would have been interesting to see how strong those convictions actually were. 

One might look at Frank’s staunch refusal to be pigeonholed and believe that he was a true anti-establishment contrarian, but I believe it’s evidence of the opposite. Following the milquetoast lead of Echo in the Canyon, Zappa subtly suggests what Dave McGowan spent an entire book exploring; that Frank Zappa was the quintessential establishment man. At the beginning of the film, Zappa himself discusses his father’s employment at the Edgewood Arsenal as well as his own fascination with gunpowder and explosives. In other words, his father worked at a facility which produced enough chemical weapons to wipe out a significant chunk of the global population. When Frank tells you that LSD was used as a chemical weapon by the military, you should take him very seriously.  

Despite all the stories of establishment opposition, Zappa amounts to another posthumous affirmation of his place in the global establishment. His latter career shift to a shill for the IMF and World Bank advocating for the Czech Republic’s transition to a market economy attests to this. When Frank encourages the citizens of the Czech Republic to retain their uniqueness, it sounds great on the surface.  However, did their subsequent admission to NATO and the EU help or harm their chances at national sovereignty? I’m going with harm. Would Frank have been pro-Brexit? Would he have stood by Poland and Hungary in opposition to the EU? Doubtful. 

At the end of the day, I see Frank Zappa’s work and legacy as similar to fellow iconoclasts like Miles Davis, Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell. Their lives and works serve as iconic affirmations of the success of secular globalism, but it doesn’t mean it’s devoid of artistic merit or revelation. Frank Zappa had a lot to say about the world in which we live. What made him truly extraordinary is that he left it up to you to decide what to do with the information he presented.