Media Rants

By Tony Palmeri

from the July, 2006 edition of The Valley Scene

July of 2006 marks the 40th anniversary of the release of one of the most influential rock records of all time, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention’s “Freak Out!” The album made #243 on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 greatest albums of all time with the editors saying that it “declares the arrival of a visionary weirdo who dabbles in doo-wop, pop-song parody, protest tunes, art rock and avant-garde classical.” Visionary indeed, as we will see, the politics of “Freak Out!” seem better placed in 2006 than in 1966.

Inoperable prostate cancer took Zappa’s like in 1993. He was born Frank Vincent Zappa in Baltimore in 1940 to a Sicilian immigrant father and first generation Italian-American mother. A prolific artist, he released nearly sixty albums during his career; dozens of posthumous recordings, compilations, and tribute album releases followed. An archetypal Media Ranter, Frank was a fierce advocate for the First Amendment, highly critical of the establishment media, and able to detect crap across the political spectrum.

“Freak Out!” opens with “Hungry Freaks, Daddy,” a caustic critique of American mores. Replace the reference to LBJ’s “great society” with Dubya’s “ownership society” and the song makes a great deal of contemporary sense:

The album’s liner notes for “Hungry Freaks, Daddy” extends the critique: “Drop out of school before your mind rots from exposure to our mediocre education system. Forget about the Senior Prom and go to the library and educate yourself if you’ve got any guts.” Today, with No Child Left Behind breeding a generation of test takers, and with extreme “zero tolerance” policies mandating conformity, we should not be surprised if a new crop of “hungry freaks” emerges.

One “Freak Out!” tune that has gained in popularity over the years is “Who are the Brain Police?” The song evokes images of the contemporary “tap the phones, check the library records” obsession of the Bush National Security apparatus, along with the Federal Communication Commission’s intensified campaign to stamp out “indecency” in broadcast media. In the 1980s Zappa became a political activist against the Brain Police, taking a visible stance against attempts to affix parental warning labels on popular music albums. Zappa saw record labeling as part of a bigger move toward the right. Appearing on CNN’s Crossfire in 1986, he said: “The biggest threat to America today is not Communism, it’s moving America toward a fascist theocracy, and everything that’s happening during the Reagan administration is steering us right down the pipe.”

Today the US government finds itself at war against what it has labeled fascist theocrats in Iraq and Afghanistan. Zappa would not be an apologist for the Taliban or al-Qaeda; each represents a kind of religious dogmatism and extremism he opposed his entire adult life. But on “Freak Out!” the song “Help I’m a Rock” includes a repetition of the line “it can’t happen here” delivered ironically and suggesting fascism can easily happen here. A get out the vote activist in his later years, I have to believe that Frank would have seen the emergence of unreliable, inaccurate touch screen computer systems as “faith based voting.”

“Freak Out!” features one of the earliest rock and roll protest songs, “Trouble Every Day,” written during the Watts riots in Los Angeles. Its social commentary on media and race relations could have been written in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Some excerpts:

Zappa’s 1989 autobiography, The Real Frank Zappa Book (Poseidon Press) is filled with witticisms and worth reading as “Freak Out!” is worth a listen. I’ll close with one of Frank’s media rants from the book: “Techniques must be developed to enable each of us to escape the other guy’s bullshit (just as he wishes to escape ours). Heaven would be a place where bullshit existed only on television. (Hallelujah! We’re halfway there!).”

Tony Palmeri (www.tonypalmeri.com) is an associate professor of communication at UW Oshkosh.