Customer Reviews

The Words and Music of Frank Zappa (The Praeger Singer-Songwriter Collection)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Based on the holdings at Amazon, did you know that there are more biographies (and autobiographies) of Frank Zappa than there are biographies (and autobiographies) of Chester A. Arthur, the Twenty-First President of the United States?

In WORDS AND MUSIC OF FRANK ZAPPA, Lowe offers a chronological presentation of the historical content surrounding Zappa's albums and CDs. Such an approach is a creative platform for composing a biography. I have seen this approach employed once before in Greenblatt's WILL IN THE WORLD. I think it is a creative departure from the mechanical writing found in most biographies. Like Greenblatt's work, Lowe used this approach with expert skill. In addition, he offers a critical analysis of each work.

Lowe chronologically reviews each album/CD. At the beginning of each discussion, Lowe offers some general information. Most interesting is his report of the highest BILLBOARD ranking. I don't understand why, but I was fascinated by these rankings. I found myself contrasting each album/CD with the others and discovered that many of Zappa's works that I felt to be his best were, in fact, given low rankings in BILLBOARD. Either good sales don't suggest quality, or I have very bad taste in music! Some had such bad sales, they were never ranked! These include: BROADWAY THE HARD WAY, THE FISH THING and THEM OR US. I very much like BROADWAY THE HARD WAY and THEM OR US. I can't believe they didn't get a BILLBOARD rank.

Sadly, Lowe's work is not comprehensive. He failed to include the following: ORCHESTRAL FAVORITES, LONDON SYMPHONEY ORCHESTRA 1 & 2, THE PERFECT STRANGER, THE YELLOW SHARK, CIVILIZATION PHASE III, JAZZ FROM HELL, AHEAD OF THEIR TIME, BABY SNAKES, THE BEST BAND YOU'VE HEARD IN YOUR LIFE, DOES HUMOR BELONG IN MUSIC?, MAKE A JAZZ NOISE HERE, the 6 volume set YOU CAN'T DO THAT ON STAGE ANYMORE, SHUT UP AND PLAY `YER GUITAR, JOE'S CORAGE, JOE'S DOMAGE and ZAPPED. However, if he included these additions, I am sure the book would be over 600 pages long. Although most people wouldn't want a book that long, I would! I particularly enjoyed ORCHESTRAL FAVORITES, LONDON SYMPHONEY ORCHESTRA 1 & 2, THE PERFECT STRANGER, JAZZ FROM HELL, and SHUT UP AND PLAY `YER GUITAR and would have enjoyed reading about them.

Below is a list of books written by or about Frank Zappa. These titles are ranked in terms my perception of quality. What makes Lowe's book interesting is that he cites most of these within the pages of his book. He contrasts his critique of Zappa's work with the other authors.

1. THE REAL FRANK ZAPPA BOOK by Frank Zappa and Peter Occhioigrosso
2. THE WORDS AND MUSIC OF FRANK ZAPPA by Kelly Fisher Lowe
3. MOTHER! THE FRANK ZAPPA STORY by Michael Gray
4. FRANK ZAPPA: THE NEGATIVE DIALECTICS OF POODLE PLAY by Ben Watson
5. THE ACADEMY ZAPPA: PROCEEDINGS OF ESEMPLASTIC ZAPPA edited by Ben Watson and Esther Leslie
6. ELECTRIC DON QUIXOTE: THE DEFINITIVE STORY OF FRANK ZAPPA by Neil Slaven
7. NECESSITY IS... THE EARLY YEARS OF FRANK ZAPPA AND THE MOTHERS OF INVENTION by Billy James
8. COSMIK DEBRIS: THE COLLECTIVE HISTORY AND IMPROVISATIONS OF FRANK ZAPPA by Greg Russo
9. NO COMMERCIAL POTENTIAL: THE SAGA OF FRANK ZAPPA by David Walley
10. FRANK ZAPPA: THE COMPLETE CUIDE TO HIS MUSIC by Ben Watcon
11. MY BROTHER WAS A MOTHER: AZAAPA FAMILY ALBUM by Patrice "Candy" Zappa
12. THEM OR US by Frank Zappa
13. UNDER THE SAME MOON by Suzannah Thana Harris
14. BEING FRANK: MY TIME WITH FRANK ZAPPA by Nigery Lennon

In addition to citing the some of the above, Lowe also cites reviews he read on Amazon. Thus, if YOU send a commentary to Amazon on any of Zappa's LPs or CDs, you might be cited in Lowe's book!

Lowe makes a very important and well written contribution to the understanding of this most complex writer/composer. I strongly recommend WORDS AND MUSIC OF FRANK ZAPPA to every Zappa fan.

I really wanted to like Kelly Fisher Lowe's ambitious book. Unfortunately, it seems as if he tried to bite off more than he could chew. He attempts to say something about nearly every song on the 40 or so albums he's chosen to write about. In trying to cover so much ground, he has no choice but to maintain a rather brisk pace throughout, which makes for some fairly shallow readings of Zappa's songs.

For example, Lowe describes the lyrics to Pygmy Twylyte as "absurdist" and "inscrutable" when, in fact, there are some pretty obvious references to drugs and their side effects. The "green hocker" is a drug abuser, one of the regular objects of Zappa's scorn. Since the hocker is "Crankin' and a-cokin" and "hurtin' for sleep in the Quaalude moonlight" we can presume he's trying to balance himself out via an equal distribution of stimulants and depressants in his system. However, the combination of all those drugs has made him sick and he's "'fraid to die." He has a "crystal eye" and a "crystal kidney" -- methamphetamine is a crystal, and kidney damage is a long-term side effect of amphetamine abuse.

The term "pygmy twylyte" is similar to City of Tiny Lites, another song about drug abuse. The City is visible after the use of downers and wine; similarly, the green hocker is "smokin' in the pygmy twylyte" after doing Quaaludes and amphetamines (and/or cocaine). Maybe Frank saw or heard about someone like this. Many of his songs are "true stories" or derived from "folklore".

Anyway, if you can't get any of this out of his lyrics and are willing to dismiss them as "absurd," why bother writing a book that purports to concern itself with an analysis of Zappa's lyrics?

The book is also riddled with the usual factual errors and typos Zappa fans have come to expect by now. Getting the facts wrong is a continual problem that seems to plague everyone who writes about Zappa and/or his music. Apparently, it is impossible to publish a Zappa book that someone actually fact-checks and proofreads.

In Lowe's book, the VERY FIRST PAGE has a glaring typo: he refers to a "Stratocaster and a Fender Camp" from the song Joe's Garage. Excuse me?? Fender f@#$% Camp?!? Even Google knows better than that (seriously, try Googling "fender camp" and you'll see what I mean).

Then there are the factual errors that any hardcore Zappa fan could easily correct (for example, the album Does Humor Belong In Music? actually documents Zappa's touring unit in 1984, NOT 1982 -- two VERY different bands).

Another annoying thing is that Lowe, admittedly not a musicologist (and presumably not a musician), nevertheless bandies about technical music terms that have very specific meanings and, not surprisingly, uses them incorrectly a number of times. He refers to the song Mr. Green Genes as a "half-time waltz" for example, which it is clearly not (at the bare minimum a waltz has to be in 3/4). Similarly, he asserts that Who Needs the Peace Corps? starts off as "a basic shuffle," which it does not. There is not a single second of shuffle rhythm in that song. It is much more akin to a march, an attribute that is accentuated on the 1988 live arrangement as heard on The Best Band You Never Heard In Your Life.

In fact, almost every time Lowe writes about the music rather than the lyrics, he either gets it wrong or writes a description so generic as to be interchangeable. For example, here is the rest of his description of Peace Corps: "As the song develops, you find Zappa working in his usual vein of odd and varying time signatures [Reviewer note: actually the entire song is in 4/4!]. The song starts and stops and segues quite unexpectedly. It finally ends up with a marvelous light jazz outro with Zappa speaking over it."

What purpose do these kind of descriptions serve? For those of us who know the songs as well (or better than) Lowe, it doesn't advance our understanding of the music. For those who don't know the song, it certainly isn't specific enough to give one much of an idea of what it sounds like -- and the parts that are specific are either misleading or downright inaccurate.

In all there is very little in this book to recommend it, but I have to give Lowe some credit for at least trying to do something other than yet another biography (thus the 2 stars).

Despite its highbrow appearance and air of scholarship, this book is a failure. The writing is banal (the overuse of the words 'hilarious' and 'interesting' is particularly annoying), and worse, Lowe's arguments, when he attempts them, are unsupported. This would be less troublesome if Lowe knew something about Zappa's music. His descriptions of the music are amatuerish ('Who Needs The Peace Corps' is not a 'shuffle'!) and he misquotes and edits lyrics. Poor handling of music and misuse of the lyrics adds up to a book that abuses its title. This is partially a survey of other extant material on Zappa's work, and he relies a lot on Ben Watson's 'Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play' (which he seems to dislike) and other recent books; if you've read them, you don't need this. In fact, if you've read Ben Watson's book, and understood even a portion of it, whether you liked it or not, you probably understand Zappa better than this author. He also quotes many internet sources, including [...] and the All Music Guide.
This book probably wouldn't work as a doctoral dissertation, or even a master's thesis. I was disappointed.

As the title implies this is not a biography of Frank Zappa, this is a look at his work. If you want a biography, go with Barry Miles' simply titled Zappa: A Biography. There is enough biographical information to provide context, but the primary point is to discuss Zappa's astonishing creative output.

This is a frustrating book. Lowe is capable of great insight and has provided interpretations of some particularly troublesome lyrics (notably "Bobby Brown") that I found extremely valuable. He gives among the strongest defenses of many of Zappa's more scatological numbers that I have read, without resorting to outright delusion like Ben Watson does so frequently in Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play. Unfortunately, he seems incapable of expressing himself and never uses a descriptive adjective when the word "interesting" will do. What's truly terrifying is that he refers at one point to teaching writing to other people!

Lowe is well aware that he is not a musicologist and wisely limits himself more to the words than the music of Frank Zappa. He attempts to review every Zappa album, but leaves out most of the instrumental ones, which I think is a smart move on his part given where his strengths as a commentator lie. This book would have benefitted from sharpening his focus even further so that he only critiqued work about which he had something to say. He clearly loves the Sheik Yerbouti album, but there are several times when he glosses over certain songs by saying "Baby Snakes is catchy" or "Wild Love is much more constructed" and gives a paragraph or two of perfunctory analysis so that he can get to the tracks he really wants to talk about.

One truly interesting aspect of this book is that it works as an excellent guide to other Frank Zappa books. The samplings of opinions he cites from other authors gives a sense of what those other books are like and which the reader might be most interested in checking out. He even includes reviews of those books in the bibliography.

The newest volume in Praeger's "Singer-Songwriter Collection" series, The Words And Music Of Frank Zappa is not so much a biography of Zappa's life as it is a close study of the popular culture songs associated with this rock music composer. Leaving no note unturned, author and academician Kelley Fisher Lowe scrutinizes everything from Zappa's gift for satire to contribution to "progressive rock" to his scathing criticisms of American culture and society, his drive to speak out politically, and much more. Highly recommended for students and scholars of modern American music in general, and Zappa's song lyrics in particular.

The Words and Music of Frank Zappa has as its background a comprehensive look at the era in which Zappa created his music. Many people didn't (and still don't) understand Zappa's mocking, or satire, of our culture in his songs. Like Donald Fagan, Zappa used the characters and events in his songs to expose consumerism, teen culture, issues of sexuality (and sexual freedom), and politicians. Lowe does a thorough job of following these movements in Zappa's music, and tells the story of Zappa's stories, album by album.

I'm a old zappian fan and I think that this Book is the most important support to know deeply the big master's opera, because in this precious instrument there are every things, I mean very musical things, about FZ necessary to know his music and ideas, out of the simple ugly news that we can read in every news paper. Good

hi, please provide more information about the product. it was not that I expected. thx anyway