Frank Zappa Sucks Teats On Rotting Underbelly Of Pop Dept.

Shake them tatas for daddy, baby!

Old School Zappa fans - there is no other kind - tend to either forgive the Turtles Of Invention period or skate right by into the (*cough*) grown-up music of Waka Jawaka and beyond. Some go so far as to claim the Flo n' Eddie years are a creative high point; we can only back slowly away from these people, avoiding eye contact.

Weasels Ripped My Flesh, although stitched together from various sources in Zappa's already time-honored tradition, showed a fatal lack of direction in its scattershot, scruffy approach. There's no attempt at the cohesion that made Burnt Weeny Sandwich and Uncle Meat so successful; it's a mess, and you can love it for that if you find that kind of thing loveable. The title track, two minutes of chaotic noise, may have been fun in performance but on record sounds like Frank telling us he has nothing to say any more, and he's going to say it as loud as he can and incidentally, fuck you.

Enter the Twin Tubs O' Lard™ from The Turtles, a band which ambiguously flirted with satirical humor to atone for their sublime Bonner & Gordon chart hits. You got more than a snicker out of Battle Of The Bands? Kudos, lonely person! After sacking The Mothers (to be fair, they'd gone as far as they could together) Zappa, eager for a niche, or a hit, or anything, saw the market potential for infantile sniggering and fat-boy falsetto that others had missed. Chunga's Revenge was as fucked up as Weasels, only with added Flo n' Eddie as the sickly icing on a cake left out in the rain. Lyrically, it reiterates themes he'd already explored, to much lesser effect, because he was either stuck in the studio or stuck on stage or stuck in a motel room. He was just stuck. He'd turned his back on the commercial and artistic success of Hot Rats, which seemed to work for everybody on every level, and rather than do the unthinkable and just take that well-earned break, insisted on non-stop touring and shitting out albums because he's a workaholic, and he had nobody close with the authority to tell him to stop, please stop, Frank! In the name of all that is holy! Four albums, and one of the least watchable movies ever made - right up there with Let It Be - in eighteen months. It's quite the achievement.

The nadir of this period is the unforgivable Magdalena, from Just Another Band From L.A.. Zappa had already, uh, touched on pedophile incest in the effectively funny, bitter, and angry Brown Shoes Don't Make It. There he - just - gets away with it because it's part of a satiric portrait of a hypocritical upstanding member of the community, and the most graphic it gets is "Smother my daughter in chocolate syrup and strap her on again ..." In Magdalena, an audibly sweating mutant Turtle recounts in beady-eyed pornographic detail sexually assaulting his daughter. But as it's all in his imagination, it's okay, right? Satire, right? Come on! It's a j-o-k-e!

It wasn't only Magdalena that forced us to examine the limits of our hypocrisy, or whatever it was Zappa thought he was doing. Shove It Right In and other immortal compositions from this fertile period described life on the road with relentlessly unfunny ugliness. But there's an audience for that. He made millions of people exorbitantly happy during the full two years of Turtle wax.

Frank dragged his snoot out of the sewer with Waka Jawaka, but the temptation to roll in the sleaze would return, and never really went away. Zappa's problem, after that incredible burst of creativity ending with Hot Rats, was always with the lyrics. He had nothing left to say. Nothing insightful, anyway. No longer an active participant in the outside world - he'd been a key player in L.A.'s freak scene - he covered up for lack of connection with lame pastiche of stuff he'd heard on the radio, or in-joke gibberish, which critics admire for its dadaist surrealism, or its surrealist dadaism. I enjoyed Ben Watson's granular analysis in The Dialectics Of Poodle Play, but Ben's basically a nut.

Zappa was capable of true beauty, but always hedged his bets, not wanting to appear sentimental and weak. Much of his orchestral composition is gorgeous - shafts of light illuminating the overflowing toilet of 200 Motels. In Watermelon In Easter Hay he laid down one of the most lyrical, moving, and achingly beautiful solos ever recorded. And on the same album (if memory serves) described being anally raped with a domestic appliance.

Rock intellectuals like to stress that all of Zappa's music is one Great Work - the "project/object", if you will - and you have to see the Big Picture, which is fine in theory but breaks down if it means spending time with Magdalena. The Big Picture; the rancid ugliness as well as the beauty and the stoopid snork humor and the instrumental virtuosity and the many beautiful songs interpreted by singers the world over and whistled by urchins in the street. Maybe not the many beautiful songs interpreted by singers the world over and whistled by urchins in the street. Maybe not even one actual song, unstained by irony or his insane urge to fuck shit up.

That would have been nice. Just one song, with emotive and sincere lyrics sung from his heart and a melody that didn't trip over itself. His efforts to avoid that during a thirty year career of sneer were astonishingly elaborate, but ultimately successful.

(Don't worry if you didn't get through this - I didn't either.)