http://www.science.uva.nl/~robbert/zappa/interviews/Bob_Marshall/Part08.html[/quote]
IanEye's quote in the panglossia thread reminded me of how great this 1988 Bob Marshall interview with FZ was . If you don't have time to read all 70 pages, here are some of my personal highlights:
Frank Zappa: ... I have the ability to watch news from all different kinds of sources and remember the details, and collate the details, and come up with a conclusion other than which the people who own the media want you to come away with. If you watch only one news service you're not getting the full picture. They try and tell you major world events in ten seconds, and you can't do that. So what you have to do is compare different outlets, compare their spins, compare that to print, and then draw your conclusions. And also reinforce that by first-hand conversations with people who might be there or might know something about it. I generally don't have access to those kinds of people when it's applied to U.S. politics, but in terms of things going on in other countries the information we receive here about what happens outside the U.S. is really quite thin. And since I do travel around it's easy for me to talk to people in the different countries and say what really happened. And to that extent I know more about foreign events than the average guy in the United States because I have some way to...
Bob Marshall: Direct access to the experiences.
Frank Zappa: Yeah, to develop the picture a little bit. In fact, I got some extra information just last night on things that are happening in South America. It puts me in a situation where the political part of my brain is looking at the world and saying, "I see trends developing and they're really horrible", and the musician part of my brain says, "I would really like to be just sitting in that room in there working on the Synclavier because that's more fun than anything else". And I spend my day trying to put these two parts of my brain together, and usually what happens is that at the end of the work-period there will be a product that comes out that is a combination of those two parts of my brain: what I know about what's going on in the world, plus what I like to do with music.
Bob Marshall: That's what I was interested in, you as a journalist, and I was wondering which was more prominent: the political or the musical. But you're saying you're not sure, you work out where you...
Frank Zappa: At this point they seem to be about 50-50. It's not exactly like being Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but it's hard for me to go in there and just work on music and forget about what's really going on in the world. I can't do it. I can't take what I know and throw it away and say, "Well, I just won't care anymore because I can't do anything about it." First of all, I think I might be able to do something about it, and just because I might, I have to keep thinking about it. So, there's no easy way to dispose of it.
Bob Marshall: So your activity dealing with the PMRC, I guess from '85 to '87, was not a radical departure from your interests. It was how you manifested that dilemma for yourself. That was the most immediate concern that you could deal with. You had to go political at that point.
Frank Zappa: I wouldn't say that was even going political. That was a civic obligation because I saw...
Bob Marshall: Well, that's what I mean by "political". Do you mean something else? Do you mean propagandistic by "political"?
Frank Zappa: No, we have a little semantic problem here because usually the way I talk about politics is in one sense and I've said this many times in interviews: politics is the entertainment branch of industry. When I talk about my political thoughts, I'm not talking about being part of the entertainment branch of industry. I'm talking more about policy in action. In other words, somebody has to decide to do certain things or not do certain things, and hopefully the person makes that decision has made the decision based on accurate information. The problem with most of the decisions of the last eight years in the Reagan Administration is they're all ideologically based and very seldom have the policy decisions been based
on practicality, or far long-range thinking. It's just been based on whether or not the rhetoric that appears in the news that day is in phase with conservative ideology, or appeasement to certain interest groups. It's not good politics in the true sense of the word. And another political act that you have to bear in mind is as long as people have the right to vote, the vote should be cast in a situation where the person with the ballot in his hand has access to enough information to make a practical decision. And that's where I come in. If I can provide an extra dimension of information which may, through this interview or through a record or some other way, get out to a person with a ballot in his hand, I'm doing a public service by
providing compilations of data that the news won't give you. It's not that they can't give it to you, they won't give it to you. So, that's the way I think about politics the way I'm involved in it.
Bob Marshall: Taking a statement that you made to Warner Brothers in 1971 in a pamphlet called "Hey, Snazzy Execs": "We make a special art in an environment hostile to dreamers"...
Frank Zappa: That's right. The environment that is hostile to dreamers is always the environment that is run by right-wing administrations because in order for the right-wing administration to maintain its fiction, it has to be ideologically pure and that ideology does not admit for creativity. There is nothing creative about a right-wing administration. The whole goal of it is to freeze time and to move things backward. So, obviously the people who are most at risk, whenever there is a right-wing administration sitting in place, is anybody who is an intellectual dreamer or creative person in any field. They are at risk because they pose a threat to the administration.
Bob Marshall: But you were quite vocal about certain left-wing elements in the Sixties.
Frank Zappa: I don't think that the left wing is anything to invest in. I think that the left wing has probably done as much damage as any other kind of political force. I think common sense is the way to go. There's no ideology for common sense. It's easy to talk about politics in terms of right and left wing because that's the way the news portrays it. And so to a degree, if I talk about political things I have to use the common parlance so people understand it. But I think of myself as a person devoted to practical and commonsense solutions to things that are real problems, and they oftentimes sound weird if suggested simply because people are so attached to the ideological ramblings of the right or the ideological ramblings of the left. They think that you have to choose between these two extremes. On the left you've got Communism. Well,
Communism doesn't work. It absolutely doesn't work, and on the right you have Fascism and that doesn't work either.
Bob Marshall: So both environments are hostile to dreamers. Both political ideologies...
Frank Zappa: No, because the difference here is that the left has often employed artists and creative people in order to
further their goals. For the right-wing administration, the artists and dreamers are a threat to their way of life. And for the left-wing guys, the artists and dreamers are propaganda. So there's a danger coming from both directions. One side would like to snuff you out and the other side would like to co-opt you and usurp you in order to have you do stuff and promote their ideals. So, anybody who's got an imagination has to watch out for both sides. There's only one place where you're safe and that's in the middle.
Bob Marshall: You think you could work with a creatively sympathetic group like the leftists and keep them on their toes. You wouldn't be co-opted and it'd be better than a right-wing...
Frank Zappa: I'm not interested in working with any leftist organization I tell you the truth. I've said it many times...
Bob Marshall: No, I mean work in their environment.
Frank Zappa: No, fuck their environment because I refuse to be used by any of those people.
Bob Marshall: But you emphasized at the beginning that the right wing was more threatening for you.
Frank Zappa: The right would like to put you out of business and the left would like to hire you, and I'm not for hire. I don't think that anybody who has a truly individualistic way of evaluating the world of a creative urge to do unique stuff needs to be snuffed out or hired. You should be free to do what your abilities will allow you to do because it is only when you are free to do that, the benefits of what you can build will be distributed to those parts of the society who will find your work useful.
Really creative people don't work good as employees.
Bob Marshall: But you're saying there is more of a threat in the right-wing environment.
Frank Zappa: Yeah, that's the threat of death.
FZ: The problem with communicating with anybody in the English language is that so much damage has been done to the language itself by advertisers, by political campaigns, that the words themselves have been mutated to the point where you have to choose them really carefully because even if in fact it is "art", you don't way to say it's "Art" because the negative connotations of calling it "art" puts a weird spin on what you're saying.
So I generally try and avoid any connection with that word just because it impedes the process of trying to get your point across. If you're going to talk to somebody, you want to talk to them in a language they can understand using words that they're familiar with. That should be a goal for communication and "art" is one of the bad words these days.
FZ:Right now the United States is two hundred and forty million people dumb enough to buy anything that anybody sells them and smart enough not to buy their own stuff, O.K. And that is not something that you can continue for a century. You can't go for a hundred years just buying everybody else's stuff. Sooner or later you're going to have to redevelop the product base in the United States so that we buy our own stuff and that our commodities become valuable to people elsewhere. This trade imbalance is not a joke. It has long-range implications that could be very severe. And for every American that dreams of the American way of life and owning your own little home with the white picket fence and living next door to somebody who looks like Jimmy Stewart, they ain't going to get it.
Frank Zappa: I see it. Let me tall you about another trend that I see as long as we're talking trends here. The amount of money that is generated by cocaine that flows directly into the hands of the cartels that make the cocaine is, right now, translating into political power. And over the next, say, twenty-five to fifty years will translate into even more political power for those people. They will transcend governments. Because there is something that I heard about last night, that I imagined could happen, and it turns out I was right. This friend of mine who's spent some time in Brazil verifies the fact that the cocaine cartels have gone into the worst slums in Brazil and played Robin Hood to the people there. They're giving them cocaine profits to give them clothes and set up these little fiefdoms. Basically what they've created is an army of people who are willing to protect them. The police can't even go into those slums because they're at risk. Those slums are literally under the control of the guy from Colombia with a bag of money in his hand. Now as a test balloon, I would say what's happened in Rio with that would indicate to any good businessman, and I would presume that these cocaine guys are good businessmen, that that's the way to go. Think of every place in the world where you have an underclass - it's poor and it's being pushed down by the middleclass, directly above in the case of the United States, or the upper crust that does all their bad stuff. Who is going to take care of these people? In the United States you've got a homeless underclass that's developing that is unprecedented. If the cocaine cartel came into the United States and helped the homeless, what do you think would happen to the War on Drugs here? Playing Robin Hood is easy when you got that kind of a profit base. It is so peculiar to think about that and I predict that there is going to be more of that happening all over the world. It doesn't cost that much to give people a little something to eat and a little something to wear. When they've got nothing, anything looks good. You don't have to be a major benefactor - just give them a little present and you're a good guy.
Bob Marshall: Two people who predicted that, too, were Mae Brussell and a person who is running for President of the United States, Lyndon LaRouche. He has mapped that out. His magazines are very good for charting these cocaine cartels. Would you support a President who wants to fight that trend or a Presidential candidate who's honest about that?
Frank Zappa: I certainly wouldn't support Lyndon LaRouche. I'll say that if he has information that backs up what I just heard from a guy who was down there, then I credit him for having at least one piece of good information. That seems a little better than saying that the Queen of England is involved in the drug traffic, which is another one of his favourite...
Bob Marshall: That's the way the media present him. I've read his literature and he doesn't say that. He says that those old banking networks allow this laundering of dope money to happen through their banks and don't take action which he claims he would do.
Frank Zappa: Well, what he's done, he's taken some things which actually are facts and said them in a way that makes them sound ridiculous. Because of the banking laws in England it is possible that especially British banking concerns and British off-shore banking concerns have been deeply involved in money laundering. In fact, some of their branches set up in Miami are involved in it. We're just now beginning to see how this stuff works, but the other thing that ought to be said is that these people who make the billions from cocaine also finance right-wing governments. You know why? Because as long as the right-wing governments are in operation, their drugs are going to be illegal and as long as they're illegal, they're going to make more profits. It is so twisted.
Bob Marshall: Like the pornography racket.
Frank Zappa: That's right.
Bob Marshall: But what if LaRouche is taking on this issue? He's the only politician who's doing that. That's commendable, isn't it?
Frank Zappa: No. I wouldn't say that Lyndon LaRouche is commendable by any stretch of the imagination. I believe, although he hasn't been convicted yet, that the whole business with the credit cards and the rest of that scam, that's not commendable. That's the end justifies the means. That's not commendable.
Bob Marshall: Right. But what if certain people have a control over the media and can distort the public's perception of
LaRouche, and that there are even people infiltrating his organization to do the credit fraud because he's the only one taking on this most present, pressing problem that you predicted or that you see coming?
Frank Zappa: I don't think that he's really taking it on. I don't see him taking it on. I see him stating some facts that any trend spotter could state if you saw it. The way I arrived at it was: I just start with the premise - follow the money. You know, the old Iran-Contra "follow the money". (Both laughing) Now, if somebody's got money, what do you do with it? Answer number one: you go for power. Now, where do you get the power? Power comes from might. The might is either going to be in large armaments or in large armies. Now, where's a man, with a buck in his hand to spend who wanted power, going to get an army? The answer is simple: any slum. And then, just by chance, last night I talked with this guy who had been in Brazil and he said that's what they're doing down there. O.K., why? Now, Lyndon LaRouche may see this same trend. I on't see Lyndon LaRouche out there fighting it. I see Lyndon LaRouche doing a credit card scam. That's what I see. If I had other information, I would see something else. I don't.
Bob Marshall: But you're relying...
Frank Zappa: I've seen LaRouche on television. I've seen him being interviewed and he does not come across to me as a guy that I would trust at all. I don't buy Lyndon LaRouche.
FZ: The problem is that the public gets saturated with the rhetoric about "just say no to drugs, there's a drug problem", and this and that and it puts it into a context where it becomes a moral menace. It's not a moral problem. It is an economic problem. It is a social problem. It is a mental health problem. And it can be a matter of physical danger to you when you have people who have life-and-death control over other people, who are users and they can endanger the life, like a physician, who might use drugs, who might give you the wrong kind of an operation. Or different ways the person who uses the chemical can fuck up your life. That's what you've got to look out for, but the substance itself is neither here nor there, and the person has as much right to drink a beer as he does to use the substance. The only difference is we have prohibition now of these certain substances. If you'll let your mind drift back to the time there was prohibition against alcohol, think of what happened. Remember: those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. Without Carry Nations, every Italian in the Mafia would be out of business right now. It was Carry Nations who put them into business. Because there was the law of supply and demand. People wanted to drink beer. They wanted to drink gin and a few guys say, "Hey, I don't care, I'm going to supply the demand", and they became billionaires. And they eventually found out and people got killed for years all during Prohibition. The machine gun was busy. People were dying because they wanted a beer, and the government literally could not enforce the prohibition on alcohol. And in the time that they had this moral law to keep people from drinking alcohol, they managed to create the empire of organized crime. And the same thing is happening with cocaine. A guy in the jungle with a swami shirt on some place is going to wind up ruling half the world because somebody decided that cocaine was a moral problem. Cocaine used to be an ingredient in Coca Cola. Was it a moral problem then?
Frank Zappa: "One size fits all" means that the Universe is the one size. It fits all.
Bob Marshall: Oh, I see. It's not imposed. It adapts to everything.
Frank Zappa: "Impose" is the wrong word. It exists and you can consider the Universe an imposition if you're truly arrogant, or you can just deal with it the way it is. Here, it's a universe of rates. You have molecular rates. You have large- scale rates.
You have the expansion of the Universe rate. You have the rate of atomic decay. You have the rate of aging. You have all these rates. So, it's a world of rates, and rates are time. Just so you really understand it, the rate is the difference between when it starts and when it ends. That's the rate. These are cycles. A cycle is the way it goes up, the way it goes down. That's one cycle. You know, it's pretty consistent the way I look at stuff. But I seldom do interviews with people where they ask me about any of these kind of things. They usually want to know, "Well what about that Tipper Gore?"
FZ: ...in order to motivate the people who are already susceptible to that sort of bamboozlement, you have to provide them with data through another way. You have to either do it through a metaphor or you really have to draw them a picture. They have to be persuaded. They can't work on the logical level. You can't just say, "Look, here are facts". Because those people have gone beyond the medium of fact retention or fact processing. They're "feelies". Everything that motivates them must be wearing warm and fuzzy clothing. They want to have that warm, fuzzy sensation that whatever it is that you're selling to them makes them even warmer and fuzzier. But it can be done. In order to do it, you need to have access to media so that the message can be presented properly. The problem is that the whole myth of the liberal media bias is preposterous because nobody who owns a broadcast license, or a newspaper, is a Democrat. They're all screaming on the right. And the flap about liberal media bias was manufactured by the right wing. The right wing goes to some of their friends in another part of the right wing and says, "You attack my network. You say that CBS is too liberal, and that gives us the license to behave more conservatively in order to appear to be fair". Thereby pushing any liberal idea completely out of their broadcast, and doing it in a way that's saying, "We're doing this to provide balance". Perfect fakeout. Because that's exactly what the people always wanted to do to begin with. The demise of the Red Lion Decision guaranteeing equal time for opposing points of view in a political situation - they got rid of that last year, or the year before. Most people don't even know that regulation doesn't exist anymore. It is no longer required of a broadcaster to give equal time to the opposition. And so the removal of that regulation, combined with the desire to have only one point of view presented to the American public, has given them this great opportunity in this election.
Bob Marshall: Did you learn a lot about that when you were in advertising in your early twenties?
Frank Zappa: No.
Bob Marshall: Did you know that before, or did you figure it out with what you went through?
Frank Zappa: The first clues that I had to this were from a book called "The Hidden Persuaders" by Vance Packard which I read a long, long time ago.
Bob Marshall: That was in high school because it came out in the Fifties, I think? But you read it when you were quite young?
Frank Zappa: Yeah. I was in high school in the Fifties. I'm forty seven.
Bob Marshall: So, Packard turned you on to some of that stuff.
Frank Zappa: Yeah, but not what I"m telling you right now because the advertising was mutated into something different in the Eighties than it was in the Fifties, the whole technique.
Bob Marshall: Because many societal changes have happened. So, there's a different context, right?
Frank Zappa: It's not just the context. It's the style. Well, the flavour of the dread has changed. The types of things that people are afraid of have changed to some degree. Certain basics remain. Death is a constant. Impotence is a constant. Poverty is a constant. But at certain times in American history, certain things become more important than others With the growth of the Yuppie culture, the fear of impoverishment and people laughing at you is probably more dreadful than death or impotence. So, that particular type of dread would be stressed more in a 1980's commercial than it would in another era.
FZ: Why not with sound? Because the largest organ in the human body, correct me if I'm wrong, is your skin, and your eardrum is only part of your skin, folks. So, that may be the most sensitive part of the skin. But I believe the whole skin responds to sound, and different parts of the skin over different parts of the body have different resonant frequencies. In other words, frequencies that strike them better. Because of the size of the eardrum, it has a centre frequency susceptibility at around 2K. That's why telephones sound like telephones. Your ear is most sensitive around 2 kilohertz. It can hear other things, but that's the real sensitive range. So, maybe other larger patches of skin resonate with other different frequencies. There's been research done that showed that certain frequencies of certain amplitudes produce physical effects. Ten cycles of a certain amplitude stops your heart. You can die from sound. You wouldn't even "hear" the ten cycles, in the traditional sense of the word, because your ear doesn't go down that low, but a couple of good boops and you're dead. And there are frequencies that will make you piss, and frequencies that will make you shit, and frequencies that will make you do all kinds of things. I don't think they've discerned the entire range of them, but there is a connection between human organism and the way moving air molecules affect that organism. So, we shouldn't be so short-sighted as to rule out the possibility that therapies for different kinds of conditions, as well as the ability to kill people, could all be induced by sound. And the clue to that might be the soothing effect that certain types of music have on certain individuals. And the trick is, what passes for nice music in one culture, is radically different than nice music in another culture. I doubt seriously that most Americans would find it soothing to listen to six hours of Chinese music, but I don't think that the Chinese would find it too soothing to listen to six hours of Barry Manilow, either. So, each culture has a different ideal of what constitutes good music. But the thing that is existing in music, that transcends the style, the orchestration, or the timbre of the music, is the pitches of the notes. So that may be the determining factor.
FZ: I've also talked about the End of the World being a question of whether it's going to be by fire, ice, paperwork, or nostalgia. And there's a good chance that it's going to be nostalgia because the distance between the event and the nostalgia for the even has gotten shorter and shorter and shorter with each nostalgia cycle. So, projecting into the future, you could get to a point where you would take a step and be so nostalgic for that point where you would take a step and be so nostalgic for that step you just took that you would literally freeze in your tracks to experience the nostalgize of the last step, or the last word, or your last whatever. The world just comes to a halt - remembering.
FZ: That's what I mean by telling people to go into the military. Because it is not my field of expertise, but I'm convinced that the law of averages would indicate that somewhere out there, there's somebody, who has an aptitude for military thinking, who's also a long-range thinker and who might care more about people than about rhetoric and politics. The military should be an organization which performs a service for the rest of the society just like a police force. AS long as you need it, it should be reminded that it is working for the rest of the citizenry. These are people who have been given a license to carry a gun and kill people with it, and they should not use that against the citizens which gave them the license. They should always act in the interest of the citizens that gave them permission to behave in the militaristic way.
FZ: I also suggested we could make the world better by going into media, which is exactly the reason why Falwell and Robertson have these colleges to train people to go into media. They're going to use the same thing to put their clones in place to keep the lid on stuff, and they're out there. There was a guy who graduated from Robertson's University who was working at Fox Television Network on the Joan Rivers Show. They're out there, they're already in place. These are like moles. You don't know that they came from that brainwash camp, but if you're talking about a Christian Lord, you're talking about doing the work of an imaginary deity that wants to keep people stupid. That's the job. So, these are people who ultimately, when they are in place, will keep "content" from managing to get into the airwaves.
Frank Zappa: I don't approach any of this stuff from a mystical standpoint. I'm not a mumbo-jumbo guy. I think that there are physical realities and most of them are not understood. Part of the reason why science moves so slow is because many of the people who do science and who receive grants have to be "conservative" individuals in order to receive the money to do the research. And people who can convince a foundation, or a funding source, that they are conservative enough not to squander the money are not really the best guys or gals to do science. Give me some Teslas, bring out some Teslas here. Give me some maniacs. Let's just try it and see what happens. That's the way you're going to get stuff to happen. The other criteria by which people are funded is whether or not the end result of the research will yield something that explodes or kills. If you can convince a funding organization that you have a new way to kill, and you are conservative and won't squander the money, you can be in the science business.
Bob Marshall: So much of what you say is common sense and what people have said a lot, maybe through history. But since World War Two, there have been a lot of books written and movements come up, and nobody seems to have the staying power to apply it in a practical way. They get lost in the ideal of "this is the way it should be", and then fumble when given the opportunity, or don't even know the odds they're up against.
Frank Zappa: Well, another thing you have to remember about all science and all art: it is impossible if you're starving to death. Society has to reach a point where you can be self-sustaining to the point where your basic physical needs are taken care of so you can allow your brain to think about stuff like art and science. That's why artists and scientists have to keep their eye on the economy. Because if things get tough, they can't do their shit anymore.
Bob Marshall: Scientists and artists?
Frank Zappa: Yeah.
FZ: I don't know whether I would buy "Science is moving closer to Art". I think Science is moving closer to weaponry and Art is moving closer to commercialism. And never the twain shall meet.
FZ: At the time that Hippies were happening, you couldn't say anything against Hippies. They were hot merchandise. You couldn't ridicule them. And to ridicule them and have long hair, that was blasphemy.
Bob Marshall: So, who are the brain police?
Frank Zappa: It could be anybody that decides to opt for employment in that organization. A lot of people police their own brains. They're like citizen soldiers, so to speak. I've seen people who will willingly arrest, try and punish their own brains. Now that's really sad. That's vigilante brain policism. It's not even official, it's like self-imposed.
Annie Aronburg
