Frank Zappa
Frank Zappa was a prolific rock singer and electric guitarist; he made many contributions to the world of rock and underground music and gained critical acclaim from all fronts in the music world. He was also a political singer and was often ill from living near mustard gas when he was a child and from having radium therapy. Despite this though, he clawed his way to the top of rock star charts and his music brought to light things like germ warfare and he fought against the attempted censorship of music with sexual or satanic references. He was influenced by many and he would inspire many musicians to follow in his footsteps.
Frank Zappa was born in 1940 in Baltimore, Maryland. His family moved around a lot since his father worked for the army as a chemist and he was always in close proximity to chemical weapons and other weapons which would later influence his music. His family also moved around a lot because of Frank’s ill health; exposure to things like mustard gas made him very sickly. They finally ended up in San Diego where he began playing in a high school band and became more interested in music. He especially enjoyed percussion instruments, modern classical music, and other underground music movements which he would become a head of, often attacking ‘fad’ music like disco in his own music. From the high school band, he moved on to forming his own band and working in nightclubs and managing Studio Z. In his long list of bands he joined and formed, you can see The Mothers of Invention in the mid to late sixties which included the album Freak Out! The Mothers of Invention went through several mutations, including band member changes, a few accidents and injuries in nightclubs and some movie performances like 200 Motels. The band would break up, get back together, and go through a few different genre changes in their music until the late seventies when the band finally broke up following a list of lawsuits which the producer of the record company the band worked with and Zappa fought over. Zappa would continue creating music until his death in the 1990s, doing things like digital music and classical music; a change in genre, but never in his messages against things like censorship. He died in 1993 surrounded by his four children and wife and had a private ceremony.
Frank Zappa’s lyrics were sometimes shocking; he claimed to be reporting on life as he saw it and so he unblushingly wrote songs about sexual criminals, like Michael Kenyon which got him into a lot of trouble with parents and other people who feared that his music would corrupt everyone who heard it. Frank went before the senate protesting a group that was trying to shut him down, pointing out that stopping him from singing life as he saw it was just one step before censorship of music and that it couldn’t be allowed. He also wrote a lot about germs, illness, and germ warfare, based on his own experiences with various types of chemical warfare. What Frank Zappa left for future musicians was the idea that music can become a journalistic medium that should never be censored, that you can turn horrible life events into music for anyone to listen to, and that through these things, you can become a brilliant composer and musician-all you have to do is pay attention to the world and put your own spin on it at all times, despite what anyone says about it.
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