Frank Vincent Zappa (1940–93) was an American rock-and-roll singer, musician, and songwriter. He was known for his masterful musicianship, his non-mainstream compositional style, and his prolific output. He recorded more than fifty albums.
Zappa’s “freak band,” Mothers of Invention, combined blues, rock, jazz, doo-wop, classical, and avant-garde with irreverent lyrics and politically oriented onstage theatrics. His derisive satire targeted both the establishment and the counterculture.
Zappa was also known for his skills as an audio engineer—he produced innovative collage or “pastiche” sequences that blended sound effects, conversation, and music.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Frank Zappa
One of my favorite philosophical tenets is that people will agree with you only if they already agree with you. You do not change people’s minds
—Frank Zappa
Topics: Philosophy
The computer can’t tell you the emotional story. It can give you the exact mathematical design, but what’s missing is the eyebrows.
—Frank Zappa
Do we really want to know how Michael Jackson makes his music? No. We want to understand why he needs the bones of the Elephant Man—and, until he tells us, it doesn’t make too much difference whether or not he really is bad.
—Frank Zappa
Topics: Fame
No change in musical style will survive unless it is accompanied by a change in clothing style. Rock is to dress up to.
—Frank Zappa
Topics: Music
Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.
—Frank Zappa
Topics: Time Management, Time
The manner in which Americans “consume” music has a lot to do with leaving it on their coffee tables, or using it as wallpaper for their lifestyles, like the score of a movie—it’s consumed that way without any regard for how and why it’s made.
—Frank Zappa
Topics: Music
Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe.
—Frank Zappa
Topics: Ignorance
There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something we’d all love one another.
—Frank Zappa
Topics: Music
You can’t be a Real Country unless you have a BEER and an airline—it helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a BEER.
—Frank Zappa
Topics: Alcoholism, Alcohol
The function of government ought to be: make sure you have good water to drink, somebody picking up the garbage, good roads to drive on, enough electricity to turn your light bulbs and your record player on, and whatever smaller amounts of regulatory assistance is necessary to make this society work
—Frank Zappa
Topics: Government
Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.
—Frank Zappa
Topics: Music
Don’t mind your make-up, you’d better make your mind up.
—Frank Zappa
Most rock journalism is people who can’t write, interviewing people who can’t talk, for people who can’t read.
—Frank Zappa
Topics: Journalists, Journalism
A drug is neither moral nor immoral—it’s a chemical compound. The compound itself is not a menace to society until a human being treats it as if consumption bestowed a temporary license to act like an asshole.
—Frank Zappa
Topics: Drugs
Fact of the matter is, there is no hip world, there is no straight world. There’s a world, you see, which has people in it who believe in a variety of different things. Everybody believes in something and everybody, by virtue of the fact that they believe in something, use that something to support their own existence.
—Frank Zappa
Music is always a commentary on society.
—Frank Zappa
Topics: Society
There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life.
—Frank Zappa
Topics: Stupidity
The United States is a nation of laws: badly written and randomly enforced.
—Frank Zappa
Topics: Government, Justice
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