"He'll be rewarded for never maturing, for never understanding or learning"
- Bo Burnham, "Art is Dead"
I watched a DVD the other night of a live Zappa show. It's from a much later time period than the one we're covering in class - 1984, to be exact. This wasn't Zappa performing with the Mothers or any incarnation of them since.
The title of the show was "Does Humor Belong in Music?", which is taken from the name of a Zappa album. The songs were very different from what I was used to! There has been a bit of humor in all of Zappa's music, but listening to the lyrics of this show was almost like listening to a comedy album!
Regardless, I really enjoyed it. Since reforming the MoI in favor of more talented and more musically diverse musicians, he had clearly handpicked the best of the best musicians he could find. For instance, the drummer (who I Googled after the DVD) has been called 'one of the greatest drummers of all time' by several critics.
It was a bit strange nonetheless to hear him doing this kind of music. I also noticed that his other band members (particularly Ray White and Ike Willis, as well as some man in short-shorts and a tight shirt whose name I didn't catch) were doing a lot of the work for him. While Zappa played a bit of guitar and contributed some of the vocals, I felt like in the grand scale of things he didn't do much. I did enjoy the other vocalists though, a lot!
An interesting quote from the film to end the post:
"Well, to me a cigarette is food, you see. Now that may be a baffling concept to people in San Francisco who, who have this theory that they will live forever if they stamp out ah, tobacco smoke. I find this a little bit difficult to deal with, but, I live my life eating these things and drinking this black water in this cup here, OK?"
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