Gail Zappa and her lawyers have made a full time job out of crapping on everything her late great husband stood for.

El Chode: Also, the music industry has effectively turned the creative process into a mechanical one, and that's why music sucks.

Music has, does and ever shall suck.

People tend to forget the amount of dreck that has been produced throughout the ages. For every Mozart there were hundreds of second- or lower-tier composers churning out operas and symphonies by the dozen.

ne2d: Shostie: Music has, does and ever shall suck.

People tend to forget the amount of dreck that has been produced throughout the ages.

And the funny thing is, if you started right now and listened to music nonstop, you would die of old age before you ran out of good music.

I disagree. There's PLENTY of great music out there. There are some obscure Eastern European composers who wrote incredible, powerful music. They are, however, little heard outside of their home countries or in hard-core music circles. Keep in mind that the origins of Western music go back as far as the Medieval (if not further). That's hundreds of years of music; some great, some not so great.

Whaddya mean Judes? Just because Mr. Bigmoney won't let us play the Copa Club why gorsh, that don't mean the shows over! Why the shows NEVER over!

We got a barn don't we!
We got a P.A. don't we!
We got an impressive alpine heap of Marshall stacks that makes Motorhead's setup look like they should be playing in a coffee shop!
We got thundering cock-rock supergroup brap and the huggabunch kids to open for us don't we!
So get to popping some corn and selling some tickets!
We're gonna rock this town so freaking hard its balls blister up and fall off!

Gee Mick, you forgot a don't we.

Oh that's rich coming from you, ya pillhead!

ne2d: Shostie: And the funny thing is, if you started right now and listened to music nonstop, you would die of old age before you ran out of good music.

I disagree. There's PLENTY of great music out there.

I think we're saying the same thing.

You know... You're right. Damn my lack of reading comprehension...

Even with El Chode's excellent decode, I still think Gail is going crazier every day. She's trying too hard to pretend that she's as intelligent and talented as her husband was. That essay is full of his quotes and sentence structure, but it reads like a rambling diatribe (and I oughta know).

Gail's superpower is to crush Frank's legacy into a fine powder, remix it and sell it on two discs for $60 with extensive liner notes. She has harangued talented, passionate Zappa cover bands like Project Object (with Zappa alumni), preventing them from performing in major cities by threatening to sue the clubs they attempt to play in order to protect her own Family cover band, the overpriced Zappa Plays Zappa. ZPZ is full of talent, but they don't give you the full Zappa experience like Project Object does. But Gail doesn't make money off of them, so despite the legality of cover bands, and PO's passionate take on Frank's music, she threatens to sue and the clubs back down because they don't want to spend money on lawyers. She's just as much of a fascist as the recording executives she's talking about. Plus she's shooting herself in the foot by attacking a potential generator of interest in the Zappa back catalog.

And she's not releasing Roxy & Elsewhere or 200 Motels.

Kyosuke: Now, instead of Frank's children benefitting from his work, I'll be stealing his music instead.

Frank's children are all grownups. Let them benefit from their own work.

It's actually a cyclical thing.

The music industry is like a pendulum that periodically swings from "control by the suits" to "control by the artists". Most of the time, the music is predominantly controlled by the suits -- the executives and label owners and investors and businesses who have a vested stake in the production of music but don't actually produce any. But every so often their pop mandate gets too insipid even for a docile music public to digest, and there's a Hegelian backlash to return the music to a purer, more real sound, which lingers for a few years while the suits back off, regroup, figure out how to market this new sound, and seize control of it again, slowly watering it down for mass consumption over time until there is another revolution. The late 50s and early 60s had a polished pop sheen on it so revoltingly wholesome that early Beatles records were a welcome, refreshing pace, and their middle and latter ventures sparked the late 60s championing of creativity and honest, earnest originality in music; the industry controlled by the artists. The same thing happened in the 70s when dirty black funk was softened into milquetoast, white disco (and the backlash to that was punk: raw, real, energetic emotion).

Each time the suits seize creative control of the music back from the artists, the machine of pop music gets better at what it does. For an example of this, check the late 80s. A streamlined marketing juggernaut that vaulted pop starlets like Tiffany and boybands like New Kids on the Block onto every teenage girl's bedroom wall. It also seemed that the business had become self-aware of the cycle, and was making efforts to prevent the backlash from happening too quickly or being too bad, and it was keen on evolving its sound to avoid the critical mass that was to follow. Indeed, it would require a major catastrophic event to bring pop music to its knees.

That event came on November 15 1990, when Milli Vanilli played a live performance on MTV, only to have the record skip. It wasn't the event itself that was so shocking; the public has always known that pop music is manufactured, cheap, and fake. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain and all that. They just dislike it when the manufactured, cheap facade is so transparent. People aren't as interested in the lie as they are in its persuasiveness.

The stars must have really been aligned that Fall. In concert with the Milli Vanilli farce was Guns n Roses, the reigning kings of the opposite end of the music industry: hard rock and metal. They released not one but TWO albums, both filled to the brim with incredible, ambitious progressive rock. Over 150 minutes of music. Nine of the songs were over six minutes long. Named "Use Your Illusion I & II", the band ventured to use everything, from orchestras, piano changes, operatic set pieces, and even straight-ahead goofy 80s heavy metal. In short, they were no longer making music; they were making art. And the albums would've gone down in history as one of the most fascinating pieces of rock music ever, except for one thing that no one -- especially them -- could have foreseen.

A couple months later, in January 1991, Nirvana released Smells Like Teen Spirit. Like a break in the clouds, it was the simultaneous antidote to the bloated excesses of heavy metal and the plastic sheen of pop that had betrayed the public. That one song, and the accompanying album "Nevermind", suddenly made everything pop and rock were trying to do -- all their excesses, all their extravagances, all their big hair and flashy clothes and massive stadium concerts and dance choreography and plastic, perfect smiles and squealing guitars which had dominated the music industry for ten years -- suddenly seemed very terribly uncool.

Heavy metal was dead. Pop music was dead. The public did not want pretty faces and mass-produced artists anymore. No more cover ups, no more boob jobs, no more plastic surgery and plastic people singing canned, plastic songs. People wanted something REAL, something unprocessed and unpolished. Grunge was in. Nirvana was the spearpoint of a revolution, a change in music psychology. The magazines doted over them, the press reported incessantly about them, labels scrambled to Seattle to sign similar bands, everyone cut their hair and dressed in flannel. The style on the stage was angst, blue-collar, non-showmanship, and almost faux-homelessness. The very antithesis that music stood for in the yuppified, Reaganomically me-80s. The hype machine was in full swing, and for the first half of the 90s, everything was grunge, and grunge was everything.

For a few years, the artists again dictated what music should sound like and what direction they wanted to take it (and this is why Farkers always talk about the early 90s being the last great musical era). But, as it always does, the pop industry crept back, learned the rules of their game, and co-opted the spoils of their musical creativity. It wasn't until the late 90s that pop music felt the waves were calm enough to assault the charts again. Brittney, Christina, Jessica, Mandy, and the boybands that were literally carbon copies of each other retook the airwaves from the real musicians (it also helped that they were riding the wave of a demographic baby boom in the 80s, so there were more tweens to market the music to). The system is now in more control of its product than it has ever been at any time in the past, and thanks to the all-pervasive media and the global reach of the internet, it is possible to make pop stars by proxy. It's no mistake that the latest formula for pop star success is nepotism, as evidenced by Aaron Carter (brother of Backstreet Boy Nick), Kelly Osbourne (daughter of Ozzy), Hailey Duff (sister of Hilary), Jamie Spears (sister of Britney), Noah Cyrus (daughter of Billy Ray, sister of Miley) and Ashlee Simpson (coddled sister of airhead Jessica).

But pop music will fail again. It will get sloppy and complacent, and artists will wrestle for control. It always happens.

/sorry for the essay