Zappa - what a tight music arranger

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You have pre-conceptions about the man, and it affects your ability to listen objectively.
You're lusting for the pigeonhole.

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I don't give a crap about if someone likes him or not.

It's KVR, not much chance of agreeing.

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furry muff, everyone's entitled to an opinion, but i can't fathom that a musician doesn't like any of Frank Zappa's material. 60 something albums covering pretty much every possible music style, that, and being a pioneer of many of them.
Potatoes gonna potate.

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:lol:

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sqigls wrote:furry muff, everyone's entitled to an opinion, but i can't fathom that a musician doesn't like any of Frank Zappa's material. 60 something albums covering pretty much every possible music style, that, and being a pioneer of many of them.
Potatoes gonna potate.

This is a variant of the "no true Scottsman" fallacy. It only says something about the limits of your imagination, not anyone else's taste.

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woggle wrote:
herodotus wrote:
It always amazes me how hostile people are to music that is any more complex than a Michael Jackson song.
For me Zappa sounds incredibly conventional, very much like the naughty schoolboy trying to attract attention so someone will notice he is really clever. But at best he is still trying to emulate his heroes through a series of clever and heartfelt pastiches .
Well, that's super dismissive, and one doubts you have an open mind to it, or say listened to anything I posted here. So it's the same as the person that only knows the stupid songs and hates that, when you have a seriously negative disposition such as that you can't have heard but a little bit of it.

One eg., Sinister Footwear II, there is no precedent. I know what the notes are in the beginning, I have no idea how his mind goes there. It's beyond analysis, like magic.
His rhythmic language, improvising on guitar, who did he cop that from?
He took a solo, real-time composition from the Feb 27 Persona non Grata and made a completely different rhythm track where these rhythms scan in a brand-new way. In the first place, the genius of that solo...

Sinister III
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSgqfsiNmsk

Persona non Grata 2-27-78 (what he used comes in at 1:05)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUFFTWse7Wo

No, there is no prior model for these things. And I'm not so inconsequential a musical mind to fall for someone merely "trying to emulate his heroes through a series of clever and heartfelt pastiches" FFS. This is why composers hate music critics.

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sfxsound3 wrote:THE king of kitsch! You know, the dirty, perverted, overdone, gross and utterly not funny type of kitsch. His musical talent was totally nullified by his... 'character'.
I don't think this word 'kitsch' means what you think it means.

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THIS section, if I had to pick my favorite music of all time:

https://youtu.be/w3jlwaUk1pQ?t=4m13s

There's nothing like it anywhere.
Watch the bass player getting off on these final lines near the end.

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ghettosynth wrote:
sqigls wrote:furry muff, everyone's entitled to an opinion, but i can't fathom that a musician doesn't like any of Frank Zappa's material. 60 something albums covering pretty much every possible music style, that, and being a pioneer of many of them.
Potatoes gonna potate.

This is a variant of the "no true Scottsman" fallacy. It only says something about the limits of your imagination, not anyone else's taste.

Why don't you just let it go Ghetto, we're cool with you not liking him, but most of the rest of us do.

Is that fair?

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incubus wrote:
ghettosynth wrote:
sqigls wrote:furry muff, everyone's entitled to an opinion, but i can't fathom that a musician doesn't like any of Frank Zappa's material. 60 something albums covering pretty much every possible music style, that, and being a pioneer of many of them.
Potatoes gonna potate.

This is a variant of the "no true Scottsman" fallacy. It only says something about the limits of your imagination, not anyone else's taste.

Why don't you just let it go Ghetto, we're cool with you not liking him, but most of the rest of us do.

Is that fair?
If people are cool with someone not liking him how come they are trying to account for it by accusing people of 'preconceived ideas' or (ironically) not being 'open minded'. They should just accept that some people do not see what others see in his music and leave it at that.

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incubus wrote:
ghettosynth wrote:
sqigls wrote:furry muff, everyone's entitled to an opinion, but i can't fathom that a musician doesn't like any of Frank Zappa's material. 60 something albums covering pretty much every possible music style, that, and being a pioneer of many of them.
Potatoes gonna potate.

This is a variant of the "no true Scottsman" fallacy. It only says something about the limits of your imagination, not anyone else's taste.

Why don't you just let it go Ghetto, we're cool with you not liking him, but most of the rest of us do.

Is that fair?
Sorry mate, this is a conversation. If you want to bring up fallacy to misjudge someone else's opinion, I'm going to call you on it. Being "cool with something" means accepting it, not using it as a reason to improperly judge some aspect of someone's character.

It seems what some of you "just need to let go of" is that not everyone likes Zappa. It's just that simple.

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jancivil wrote:THIS section, if I had to pick my favorite music of all time:

https://youtu.be/w3jlwaUk1pQ?t=4m13s

There's nothing like it anywhere.
Watch the bass player getting off on these final lines near the end.
I watched all of this and it reminds me very much of the time that I went to see a friend play live. I wasn't really into my friend's music, it was "local grunge", or something like that. In any case, I went to support my friend, and I didn't hate his music, but I'd not buy the album.

But that's not the part that of that experience that reminds me of Zappa.

My friend was the opening act and the following act played some sort of death metal. Ok, now, I have no idea if it was actual death metal, what I know about metal genres fits into a thimble. It could have been speed metal, speed core, hard goth, butt metal, death core, whatever, it was really loud, really hard butt rock and NOT AT ALL my cup of tea.

They were so loud I had to move away from the stage.

I hated what they were playing, I never wanted to hear it again, it did absolutely nothing for me, but....

I had to sit there and listen to it for about fifteen minutes. They were playing at the speed of light, in some strange time signature and stopping on a dime at really weird places. They were fantastically tight, really, I've never heard any rock group that was tighter. I was super impressed with their musicianship and considered it an experience to watch them for about fifteen minutes, but then I left. Fifteen minutes was enough of that experience for a lifetime.

Listening to Zappa reminds me of that experience. I can't really be critical of his skill as a musician, or his composition even, but I can say that it doesn't do anything for me and I can't wait to turn it off and listen to something else.

I've never heard of a song of his that I like the songwriting though, just like that metal band. At least with Frank though I can actually hear the lyrics.

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beginning of THAT section in the Ballet Orch score:
Sinister II at N.jpg
ignoring the shoes in an obvious manner
that's so Frank. But this for me is divine music; FZ decided to try and mount it as a really stupid ballet a couple yrs later.

One performance, in Berkeley. Kent Nagano conducted. There is a 1st movement which outside of that no one ever heard. I worked in the school library with Joan Nagano. Her brother was well-known by then, around this time FZ contacted Kent about some work.
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ghettosynth wrote: Listening to Zappa reminds me of that experience. I can't really be critical of his skill as a musician, or his composition even, but I can say that it doesn't do anything for me
Similar for me, all I hear in Zappa is a bunch of notes, I don't really hear a lot of music. And I don't get the innovation thing much either other than he imported some ideas from the classical western tradition. Which is fine, but not amazing. Innovation in itself is not that impressive in the arts anyway unless it naturally serves an artistic outcome. Same for skill.
But obviously lots of people love his work and "in matters of taste there can be no disagreement" it is not as if someone is wrong if they love his music
Last edited by woggle on Tue May 30, 2017 10:25 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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aMUSEd wrote:
incubus wrote:
ghettosynth wrote:
sqigls wrote:furry muff, everyone's entitled to an opinion, but i can't fathom that a musician doesn't like any of Frank Zappa's material. 60 something albums covering pretty much every possible music style, that, and being a pioneer of many of them.
Potatoes gonna potate.
This is a variant of the "no true Scottsman" fallacy. It only says something about the limits of your imagination, not anyone else's taste.
Why don't you just let it go Ghetto, we're cool with you not liking him, but most of the rest of us do.

Is that fair?
If people are cool with someone not liking him how come they are trying to account for it by accusing people of 'preconceived ideas' or (ironically) not being 'open minded'. They should just accept that some people do not see what others see in his music and leave it at that.
I can speak for myself. Greg Hooper* is an educated musician. I don't have any real interest in talking about music to mr ghettosynth. I like to argue points anyway, *'woggle' there has said some things which sound like he may know what he's on about because of a certain quality of verbiage and so forth and his general presence here, but the remarks are unfair and may mislead the innocent reader.

I don't think there's anything ironic about me saying that that looks like a closed mind. That isn't me closing my mind to possibilities, I didn't find that negative disposition opens me up to anything but negative disposition.

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