Frank Zappa: Joe's Garage
By Ian Penman
Frank Zappa
Joe's Garage
Thus to hard-boiled Frank Zappa, who has successfully turned his career into a music (rather than the usual vice versa) and who continues to release every last stretch of studio time foolery with the kind of calculated post-'60s hip capitalistic zeal he will still insist in making a big deal out of lampooning.
For years he's survived on a reputation for challenging and confronting standard middle-class institutions and repressions, whilst promoting and playing off the same. Like that other popular middle-American satirist, Woody Allen, he's a supreme illustration of someone of moderate talents elevated into mass fame via the contemporary cult of the individual and safe public consumption of the self-satisfied diarist's skits on affluent, arty life.
'Joe's Garage' is yet another Zappa as grand narrator pseudo-opera, him sneering on our shoulders for want of 'serious' acceptance, ho ho. Always wanting to be a modern little 'composer' but carrying on carrying on his cynical socio-cultural sniggersnigger ringmaster persona to its tiresome limits.
'Joe's Garage' has it all: slick new backup band, mouldy old modal guitar solos, jokes about oral sex, VD, groupies, heavy metal bands, conspiracy plots everything you never wanted to hear but knew Zappa would tell you about just the same, just like he's done for a decade or more. Zappa has now settled completely into this career of re-packaging the '60s for those folks insecure enough to need them, and need to believe that they don't.
But the in-jokery has gotten beyond the worst pale of self-parody. Who cares to look beyond such tracks as 'Why Does It Hurt When I Pee?', 'Catholic Girls', or 'Wet T Shirt Nite' to find out whether legs are being pulled, moustaches drawn, Dadaism revived, the 'truth' about American society revealed?