Frank Zappa: Tinseltown Rebellion
By Charles Shaar Murray
FRANK ZAPPA
Tinseltown Rebellion (CBS)
IT HAS taken Frank Zappa – former wit, innovator, satirist and crusader against the mediocre and bigoted – a mere 15 years to become everything which he opposed in the '60s. 'Tinseltown Rebellion' is a double album of tedious, cliched music, mean-spirited and exploitative sexual fetishism and furious hatred of anybody less narrow-minded and screwed up than Zappa himself.
Zappa's work during his first six or seven years as a force in rock music ('65-'72, roughly) was genuinely challenging, compassionate and inventive, but the way that his current band handle 'Brown Shoes Don't Make It' (from 'Absolutely Free', the second Mothers Of Invention album) demonstrates just how far Zappa has slid since then, and just how little he cares about it.
Frank Zappa has become the sort of person who would not only spend several minutes on stage requesting women in the audience to remove their underwear and throw it on stage, but would also take up several minutes of an album with a live recording of himself doing so, and then cap the whole thing by printing a verbatim transcript of his monologue on an album sleeve.
He exposes himself completely on"TinseItown Rebellion', and he's too dumb and complacent to realise what he's exposed. He deserves pity rather than contempt.