Frank Zappa
"Frank Zappa: A Smokin' Mother" is licensed by Michael Redman under CC BY-ND 2.0.
It would be difficult to overstate how much I loved Frank Zappa. I loved Frank Zappa and I still do. He's very much a personal topic for me, inasmuch as getting to know his music was so closely bound up with a decade of personal and musical exploration and growth. Pursuing Zappa's music led to my first master's thesis. It lead me to my first publication. It lead me to Bad Doberan, Germany in 2004 for the annual Zappanale festival. It lead me to dinner in London at a favorite author's house, where I humiliated myself! There's ecstasy and exultation, but also embarrassment, closed-mindedness, missing out, self-judgement, and regret.
A lot of the sophomoric and casual chauvinism is just intolerable, yet I still revere Frank Zappa. At the end of the day, I am out of words to describe just how in awe I am of his output. The encounter with his explosion of a high/low aesthetic divide has always been such an inspiration to me.
I am fairly certain I no longer have any of the files to any of my academically-oriented Zappa writings, which reflect my interest at the time in Marxism and Critical Theory, but you can read this one, if you like, in the following places:
"The Negative Dialectics of Arf-lightenment." Naked Punch 03, December 2004, 87–89.
"The Negative Dialectics of Arf-lightenment." Academy Zappa: Proceedings of the First International Conference of Esemplastic Zappology, Ben Watson and Esther Leslie, eds. London: SAF Publishing, 2005.
Here is a link to the Academy Zappa book. I like the Watson/Leslie edit much better: given that it was originally a rambling, meandering master's thesis, there was much that needed to be cut. This paper was originally my Master's Paper at King's College London, where I completed the Master of Music in Historical Musicology. Professor John Deathridge served as my advisor.