Popular Music (2001) Volume 20/2. Copyright 2001 Cambridge University Press, pp. 205222.

Printed in the United Kingdom

Or any art at all?: Frank Zappa

meets critical theory
D AV I D WR A GG

Back in 1982, Max Paddison suggested that Frank Zappas 1960s Mothers of Invention recordings deserved to be read in the context of Adornos views on mass culture. Based on a critical, self-reective attitude (Paddison 1982, p. 216) towards
their musical processes, as anticipated in Adornos essay, Music and technique of
1959, these records could be seen to mount an incisive critique of the culture industry. The title of a series of essays in Telos (Spring 1991), Special Section on Musicology: popular music from Adorno to Zappa, locates Zappa in a debate about Adornos continuing relevance where theories of popular music are concerned. More
recently, Ben Watsons Frank Zappa, The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play (1994) uses
a theoretical admixture of Marx and Freud in which Adorno looms large. (The
dust jacket photograph of Watson mirrors the photograph of Adorno at Oxford in
December 1935 which now adorns the 1997 paperback edition of Paddisons Adornos Aesthetics of Music.) The inuence of Adorno remains in Watsons later essay
in The Frank Zappa Companion (1997), which takes Dada as a crucial point of reference. Central to all this remains the question of Zappas identity and status as an
avant-gardist, and it is this issue which concerns me here. I agree that the Mothers
albums, together with later work, can be made to represent a radical popular music.
Its the word represent that causes the problem.
Some of the immediate difculties of bringing together Adorno and Zappa are
obvious enough. To begin with, there remains the formidable obstacle of Adornos
conceptual apparatus and prose style when these are strategic expressions of/
defences against the illness of Enlightenment modernity (the unlogical paratactic
method used in Aesthetic Theory being a notable case in point). Arguably, any
attempt to render Adornos thought amenable reduces it to a kind of populism, and
thus corrupts its avant-garde reection of society at the moment of consumption.
Moreover, Adornos mordant hostility to popular culture, in the context of his views
on artistic autonomy, requires us to locate a progressive popular music in the place
where one would expect it to be contaminated by the thing it opposes. Then there
is Zappas indefeasible commitment to market capitalism; the fact that his critique
of the culture industry does not preclude a certain disdain for some of those trapped
within it; and not least the difculty of assessing an extensive body of work whose
procedures include the theoretically productive montage techniques alongside less
obviously mediated material in the more serious music (Ill explain the scarequotes in a moment). Nevertheless, since the commentaries on Zappas music cited
above have used critical theory to locate the sociological dimension of Zappas
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work, the idea of a Frankfurt Zappa is worth reviewing. In what follows I will
work my way round to a particularly interesting aspect of his avant-garde dilemma,
centred on his notion of the project/object, which has so far received insufcient
attention. I am particularly interested in the reexive dimension of Zappas
approach to the culture industry, and the problem of how best to understand it as
potential critique.
A complex terrain becomes a bit easier to map once we register the fact that
the separation of Zappas music into categories of popular and serious is misleading. Zappas comment that the Mothers project was a composite, gap-lling product to plug most of the gaps between so-called serious music and so-called popular
music (quoted Watson 1994, p. xxix) can be read as an early insight into his critical
trajectory; a recognition of Adornos claim that the culture industry has collapsed
the boundaries between serious and popular art. Some of Zappas serious pieces
appear on The Perfect Stranger, with three tracks played by the Ensemble InterContemporain conducted by Pierre Boulez. The CD notes inform us that all this music
is entertainment, and not to be confused with any other form of artistic expression.
There are at least two ways of viewing this statement. In an interview for Guitar
Player in 1992, Zappa hinted that the pleasure of entertainment might have some
sort of compensatory value:
Well, I dont really understand people who think of art as an antidote to entertainment,
something that should not give you a pleasurable experience . . . Its a strange idea, to me,
to think that the more strenuous the experience, the more artistic it is like the ugliest picture
is the best art . . . Who needs that shit? The most interminable, grinding composition, even
if its well conceived, should you be forced to consume it because somebody says its artistic,
or should you consume it because you like it? (Menn 1992, p. 34)

Yet since Zappa is obviously alive to the damage done to art under the culture
industry, it is difcult to see how liking something for pleasure can be at all
straightforward. A more immediately useful sense of entertainment arises when
we regard it as a diagnostic category; as a comment on the kind of experience which
constitutes the Lebenswelt and which embraces both popular and serious musics.
Indeed, this insight brings us conveniently to a discussion of Zappas project/
object, and the place of his music within it. I will return to this issue in due course.
Firstly, though, a brief reminder of Adorno on the culture industry will be
useful. The term is introduced in the chapter, The Culture Industry: Enlightenment
as Mass Deception, in Adorno and Horkheimers Dialectic of Enlightenment, where
the connection between perverted rationality and mass culture as a system of domination is made. Here we nd characteristic phrases such as a technological rationale is the rationale of domination itself, the need which might resist central control
has already been suppressed by the control of the individual consciousness, and
real life is becoming indistinguishable from the movies (Adorno and Horkheimer
1986, pp. 121, 126). In the later essay, Culture industry reconsidered, Adorno says
that the masses
are an object of calculation; an appendage of the machinery. The customer is not king, as the
culture industry would have us believe, not its subject but its object . . . The cultural commodities of the industry are governed . . . by the principle of their realization as [exchange-]
value, and not by their specic content and harmonious formation. The entire practice of the
culture industry transforms the prot motive naked onto cultural forms. (Adorno 1991, pp.
856)

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For Adorno, a genuinely popular culture is impossible under late capitalism. On

the subject of entertainment, Marcuse followed Adorno in attempting to unmask
the operations of the market place. One Dimensional Man tells that
The productive apparatus and the goods and services which it produces sell or impose the
social system as a whole . . . the irresistible output of entertainment and information industry
carry within them prescribed attitudes and habits, certain intellectual and emotional reactions which bind the consumers more or less pleasantly to the producers, and through the
latter, to the whole. (Marcuse 1968, p. 26)

In Late Marxism, Fredric Jameson reminds us that entertainment and pleasure go hand in hand in theories which are grounded in the commercialisation of
the lifeworld. So the rationalisation of leisure time as amusement is really an extension of work as rationalisation (see Adornos Free Time, Adorno 1991, pp. 162ff.).
Pleasure amounts to an act of forgetting, and thus a ight from any last thought
of resistance to wretched reality (quoted in Jameson 1990, p. 146). However, Jameson points out that entertainment in the culture industry provides a pleasure which
is not absolutely inert. The following, with its echoes of Adornos attempt to hang
on to Enlightenment even when used against itself, will be relevant to my concluding remarks:
What is inauthentic in the offerings of the Culture Industry . . . is not the remnants of experience within them, but rather the ideology of happiness they simultaneously embody: the
notion that pleasure or happiness (entertainment would be their spurious synthesis) already
exists, and is available for consumption. (Ibid., p. 147)
* * *

Since Zappas remark about the most interminable, grinding composition can be
construed as a rejection of Adornos theory of artistic autonomy, we should remind
ourselves at this point of Adornos view of the relationship between avant-garde
music and the culture industry. Essentially, Adorno theorises an avant-garde music
whose inevitable reection of the culture industry is bound up with its resistance
to same. As one might expect, the theory is difcult to gloss in a paragraph. But
we can get some idea of its sociological dimension by considering how the emergence of the culture industry is bound up with the idea of societys progressive
rationalisation under modernity (see Paddison 1997, p. 135ff.). Taking his cue from
Max Weber, Adorno saw modern music as caught up in this process. Under meansend thinking, the principle of exchange-value rules. This leads to what Adorno calls
the administered world, whose growth stems from the rationalisation of Enlightenment as instrumental rationality and means-end thinking. In serious compositions, means-end thinking is registered in the techniques of motivic-thematic
development and the disintegration of large scale forms in Austro-German music,
progressively rationalized towards total thematicism, the twelve-tone technique
and multiple serialism, resulting in what Adorno calls the totally integrated work
(Ibid., p. 139). Yet although the rationalising of compositional techniques represents
the Enlightenment attempt to understand and control nature (i.e. sound), and to
work out the implications of the bourgeois tonal system, music nevertheless
retains something of the irrationality which originated with Kants view of arts
purposiveness without purpose (i.e. arts lack of a purpose, which might translate
into a degree of freedom from means-end thinking). So although the aesthetic haven
of music comes increasingly under threat from the general principle of rationalis-

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ation when musics irrational aspects are increasingly rationalised, the musical
work is not exactly an example of means-end thinking as such. At the same time,
the purposiveness of such music depends on means-end thinking, since its critical
moment resides in a mimetic adaptation: i.e. the work takes into itself the process
of modernitys rationalisation in order to make amends for the damage done by
instrumental rationality outside art (Ibid., p. 142). In Philosophy of Modern Music
Adorno says of the twelve-tone composition:
The inhumanity of art must triumph over the inhumanity of the world for the sake of the
humane . . . [Art] has taken upon itself all the darkness and guilt of the world. Its fortune lies
in the perception of misfortune; all of its beauty is in denying itself the illusion of beauty . . . It
is the surviving message of despair from the shipwrecked. (Adorno 1973, pp. 1323)

Adorno sees rationalisation, the musical avant-garde, and entertainment as

the culture industry, as a tripartite structure. Avant-garde autonomous music is
inimical to music manufactured by the culture industry for the entertainment of
the masses, even if all music is contaminated by means-end thinking. Succinctly,
means-end thinking in music (as everywhere else) manifests itself in the absolute
value of the prot-motive, and the prot-motive is geared to manufacturing aesthetic residues with this end in view. Neither serious nor popular music can
escape this ice age; the distinction arises because the latter is simply identical with
the rationalisation of society, which it wholly afrms. Such music works to integrate
the listener into society; it practises the cruel deception of an aesthetic pleasure
which is purportedly life-afrming. This music requires no intellectual effort; the
listeners reaction is supercial and ideologically blind and afrms the standardised
nature of composition as the production of musical material according to the
assembly line logic of thoroughly interchangeable parts. What Adorno calls regressive listening also applies to serious music when elements are taken out of context;
the broadcasting of popular tunes in isolated symphonic fragments on Classic FM
would be a recent example among many.
Adornos diagnosis of modernity is notoriously bleak. The pervasiveness of
commodication in the culture industry leaves little room for manoeuvre when
autonomous avant-garde music must by denition be an oddity within the
machine. A problem identied by Paddison in 1982 arises when the possibility of
an avant-garde popular music appears to be blocked by the very idea of popularity,
which is by denition already commodied: [Zappas] later [i.e. post-Mothers]
records . . . seem to sacrice [critical self-reection] for a more obviously popular
appeal (lengthy virtuoso guitar solos, and moments when parody comes so close
to the thing being parodied as to be almost distinguishable from it) (Paddison 1982,
p. 217). Yet Zappa rejected twelve-tone music as too limiting precisely because of
the difculty it poses to listeners: If the intrinsic value of the music depends on
your serial pedigree, then who the fuck is going to know whether its any good or
not? (Menn 1992, p. 30) (This rejection served to maintain the gap between Zappa
and Boulezs IRCAM see Born 1995, pp. 2834.) By labelling all his work as entertainment, Zappa appears not only to have identied himself with the operations
of the culture industry, but in so doing to have recognised the fate of the avantgarde, as predicted by Adorno. In the 1932 article, Zur gesellschaftlich Lage der
Musik, Adorno foresaw the emergence of the relativism and pluralism of the post1950s avant-garde (quoted in Paddison 1997, p. 223). By the mid-1950s, he felt that
Darmstadt serialism had abandoned the historical necessity of formal development

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found in Schoenberg (thus loosening the tie between music and social rationalisation under modernity), and further that radical art had been unable to resist the
pressure to integrate with the culture industry (e.g. the appearance of tone rows in
Hollywood lm scores). Adorno remarks at the outset of his essay, The schema of
mass culture: The commercial character of culture causes the difference between
culture and practical life to disappear (Adorno 1991, p. 53). As noted above, even
free time when for most people the serious consumption of music takes place
is ideological when leisure is turned into a managed product.
It now goes without saying that Adornos pessimism has been extensively
criticised. In the case of the musical avant-garde, one might cite Alastair Williams
reading of Ligeti. Ligetis music continues to exert the possibility which Adorno
identied in music, of remaining troublesome in the face of standardized emotions
and responses (Williams 1989, p. 221). It achieves this by involving immanent critique in the political implications of experimentation. In the static music of Lontano
(1967), events and transformations are combined in such a way that a reection
of the culture industry is updated through an ossied structure [which] exists in a
state of ux (Ibid., p. 206), thus staving off the despairing closures of autonomous
music while recognising the enforced marginality of the avant-garde. However, in
the present context it is Adornos condemnation of mass culture which has raised
most hackles, particularly for those within the broad eld of cultural studies who
nd oppositional elements in the production and reception of popular music. This
is clearly a crucial area of debate in the evaluation of Zappas musical sociology.
For Russell Berman and Robert DAmico, Zappas identication of the realities of
the capitalist market place puts into question . . . the afrmative accounts of popular music by fashionable radicals (Berman and DAmico 1991, p. 75). Since Zappa
does, in fact, identify the operations of the capitalist market place in a way which
is roughly compatible with Adorno, we are faced with the problem of how his
identication with the culture industry allows him to stake out a critical position on
popular music from within its limitations as entertainment. It is here that an analysis of the project/object becomes crucial.
Zappas purported anti-intellectualism notwithstanding, it was tempting to
lead off my argument with the following selections from his published comments,
since I believe they represent a potential t with Adornos view of modern culture
(Volpacchio 1991, pp. 125, 127, 129; Zappa 1989, p. 141; Volpacchio 1991, p. 133;
Menn 1992, pp. 35, 51; Watson 1994, p. 545):
[Florindo] Volpacchio: Speaking of the Viennese school, do you see the collapse of functional
tonality and common time to be the single most important development in modern music?
Zappa: No. The single most important development in modern music is making a business
out of it . . .
Volpacchio: When you can hear, lets say, a Rolling Stones song promoting a commercial
product, what does that say about the inherent properties of modern composition or songwriting if music can be appropriated for such ends?
Zappa: Well, if you think of a Rolling Stones song as a modern composition you could
bemoan the fact that it winds up being used in a commercial. But I believe that at the time
most of that material was manufactured, the goal was to make money not to create an
anthem for a generation . . .
Volpacchio: Yet in your music, despite the overlapping inuences, you do consciously maintain a separation of styles and musical forms. Do you see a distinction between high and
low art?
Zappa: Or any art at all? . . .
Volpacchio: . . . despite the intentions of the guys who create the product, it appears that the

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music for the audience at least often carries more of a message than may ever have been
intended. Isnt this how a song becomes the anthem of a generation? . . . Even more to the
point, if you take the Sex Pistols . . .
Zappa: They were manufactured . . . Basically, what you are describing to me is a commercial
game which has been played. As far as I am concerned this has nothing to do with music. I
am glad that someone sneaks in there and makes a mockery of the business. But how much
of a mockery is it if they wind up being sold and distributed by the same business they
intend to mock?
Most people . . . say: Gimme the tune. Do I like this tune? Does it sound like another tune that I
like? The more familiar it is, the better I like it. Hear those three notes there? Those are the three notes
I can sing along with . . . Give me a Good Beat something I can dance to . . . Also, I want it right
away and then, write me some more songs like that over and over and over again . . .
Network television purports to create a type of entertainment which should be acceptable
and even enjoyable to people in the heartland. This is all concocted for people in the heartland by people in urban centers who hate the people who live in the heartland, have no
regard for them whatsoever, and think of them as bumpkins. Furthermore, on the days when
they have to make these decisions to provide entertainment for people in the heartland, these
same denizens are struggling for their own existence in a highly competitive environment
in these major urban centers. Basically, they have mutated themselves. And because they
have this type of a job, all their bad mental health is inicted on the rest of the population
through that medium. Their idea of what is beautiful . . . their idea of what is valuable . . .
their idea of what is exciting . . . their idea of what is news . . . everything is strained through
the mentality of these people in these urban centers. The little guy out there in the heartland,
he does not have a chance.
Zappa: . . . one of the hallmarks of contemporary life is what I perceive to be a conspiracy
against conscious thought . . . The contemporary message the subtext of contemporary life
is keep your fucking mouth shut and be a drone. And government is set up in such a way
now with its complete disregard for the value of education that theyre going to perpetuate
a type of stupidity that makes it possible to have an entire nation of people watching late
night infomercials on TV with their phone-in credit card . . .
Don Menn: How come you quit going directly before political groups . . . are you just tired
of the chore?
Zappa: No, no its not being tired. I mean, Ill still make comments about [the PMRC (the
Parents Music Resource Center), dedicated to censoring offensive music], but to go on these
debates, to be commoditized as yet another talking head anytime somebody wants . . . The
topic of censorship comes up, my phone starts ringing, you know? Some rap group gets its
record banned someplace and my phone rings. And they think that the next day, theyre
going to have their special sound bite where Ill go on and debate with Tipper Gore. I mean
thats the mentality, the level of the debate . . .
OTL [Out to Lunch: Ben Watson]: There are signs that literary and academic people are at
last coming round to appreciate the monstrous creativity of your oeuvre. I think I can see
signs of a Zappa industry in academia that one day might rival the Joyce industry.
FZ: [Laughs]
OTL: Do you have a message for such people?
FZ: Get a real estate licence.

For Adorno, the passive consumption of mass culture involves an active participation in the system: consumers are not always oblivious to their positioning by
television, advertising and so on; what they lack is the ability to unmask the historically determined nature of the culture industry as a structure of domination. Active
participation binds people together in ritualistic behaviours from which it is hard
to dissent without appearing socially anomalous. While one would wish to critique
Adornos characterisation of the culture industry as monolithic and homogenous
(on the operations of ideology in mass media see, for example, Thompson 1990, p.

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97ff.), popular music theory continues to use it as a reference point, either explicitly
(e.g. Middleton 1990), implicitly (e.g. Harron 1990), or in attempts to update the
AdornoBenjamin debate about the critical potentials of popular culture. David
Sanjek, for example, quotes Mark Crispin Miller on the rise of a national entertainment state as a result of mergers and consolidations in media and communications
corporations in America (Sanjek 1988, p. 183, original emphasis); here, Adorno
remains relevant while the horizon of expectations within which consumption takes
place is redened. In a useful essay, Bernard Gendron points out that even if
Adorno overstated his case on standardisation and neglected the potential of consumers to negotiate their roles in the processes of productionconsumption, the
culture industry thesis cannot be dismissed when certain forms of standardisation
undoubtedly exist (even if these inevitably undergo change over time) and are used
to cement the audiences identication with cultural products. Adornos dismissal
of popular music may be frayed at the edges, but we must guard against exaggerat[ing] the semantic creativity of the consuming subcultures (Gendron 1986, p. 36).
As we will see, the dialogue between production and reception turns out to be particularly relevant to Zappa, centred on the AdornoBenjamin debate.
* * *
Zappas response to Volpacchios remark about the Sex Pistols leads us conveniently to a consideration of the project/object as the central component in his
musical sociology. I want to suggest here that Zappas sense of irony (But how
much of a mockery is it if they wind up being sold and distributed by the same
business they intend to mock?) is, in fact, the key to the dilemma of what Paddison
calls his critical, self-reective attitude to popular music under the culture industry. The project/object can be thought of as a form of empirical research, evoking
Adornos detached sociological perspective when in 1935 he found himself exiled
to the United States as a result of the rise of National Socialism in Germany. While
Zappa lived his life in America (mostly in Los Angeles), he was always estranged
from its norms. He comes across as the rational observer; as the outsider looking
in on LA culture, and American society generally. This detached, observational
attitude also describes his initial place within music as entertainment culture.
One can get some idea of the project/object by way of a few examples.
Watson records the case of Larry Wild Man Fischer, a former patient in a mental
institution, discovered by Zappa pedalling rudimentary pop songs on Sunset Strip
in 1968. Zappa taped these under studio conditions for the Bizarre label, and added
a eld recording of Fischers activities. Dave Marsh has described the promotion
of Fischer as a particularly vicious example of Zappas penchant for sadistic social
commentary (Marsh and Swenson 1980, p. 130), and one can see his point. But as
a comment on the culture industrys ability to market just about anything, provided
it looks like making a prot, Zappa scores a direct hit. Yet if the manufacture and
exploitation of consumption is the currency of the music business, Fischers critical
potential served only as a demonstration, via Zappas ethnography, of its immediate commodication. If Fischer was a sign of the music business in operation, he
also signied Zappas knowing complicity in the process of artistic exploitation a
clear demonstration of an avant-garde dilemma.
Once the basic principles of the project/object had been worked out, its scope
was virtually limitless. It will be recalled that Paddison (1982) makes a distinction

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between the critical self-reection of Zappas initial Mothers of Invention period

and the obviously popular appeal of the later work featuring lengthy virtuoso
guitar solos. But this distinction misses the initial point of Zappas parody. One
could argue that the guitar solos are all of a piece with the project/object. As such
they serve as representations of the once de rigeur rock guitar solo, and thus of a
particular triangular relationship between the music business, the virtuoso performer and the consumer. Consequently, the thought of listening to these solos for
purely musical reasons becomes fraught, if not ridiculous. To be sure, the astute
listener requires an appreciation of technical matters and a knowledge of the genre,
but the very act of such appreciation becomes part of the project/object. Lionising
Zappa as guitar hero would be to miss the point that his solos are really solos
when their appeal to the listener is already subjected to critical scrutiny at the point
of delivery. But at what point does parody become self-parody? At what point does
the gap between parody and the thing being parodied (or in Zappas formulation
above, the gap between the business being mocked and self-mockery), disappear?
This issue surely lies at the heart of Zappas enigmatic response to Volpacchios
question about a possible distinction between high and low art, and thus bears
on his avant-garde credentials within the sphere of entertainment music.
The project/object entails work on the culture industrys pre-existing signiers, musical and otherwise. Zappas use of collage/montage techniques, based on
the modern recording studios multitracking facilities, enabled him to defamiliarise
and satirise existing musical sounds and styles, and other social signiers such as
bits and pieces of dialogue. Were Only in It for the Money (1968) is a good example of
the early work-in-progress. Zappas shock tactics had already provoked a prescient
comment in the New Musical Express following a concert at the Royal Albert Hall in
September 1967: This was the greatest send up (or down) of pop music, of audience, America and the group themselves Ive ever witnessed . . . An entire concert
of biting ridicule, both verbal and musical however well done is just a bore.
(Quoted in Watson 1994, p. 108) Zappas lampooning of hippie counter-culture in
Money was intended as a jolt to both normative and critical popular consciousness.
The record contains ditty-like tunes, disjunct compositional strategies, satiric lyrics,
a mixture of serious and popular elements and, in the nal track The Chrome
Plated Megaphone of Destiny, a piano-inspired instrumental/musique concre`te
which showed up the Beatles nal chord [of A Day in the Life] . . . for the naive
piece of pretension it was (Ibid., p. 118). Zappas pastiche of the cover of the Beatles Sgt. Peppers includes a bust of Beethoven, eyes covered, in front of Zappas left
leg, next to a couple of cartons of draft beer Is this a reference to the cancelled
optimism of Schillers Enlightenment in the nale of the Ninth Symphony (no
longer feuertrunken just drunk)? Once Zappa settles on a target one must be alert
for what he called conceptual continuity, the elaborate system of musical and
sociological interconnections across his works. Teen-age Prostitute from Ship Arriving Too Late to Save a Drowning Witch of 1982, which portrays a destitute girl who
runs away from uncaring parents into prostitution and drug abuse, appears to
update the cloying sentimentality of McCartneys Shes Leaving Home.
A later example of collage/montage occurs in Porn Wars, the opening track
on Frank Zappa Meets the Mothers of Prevention (1985). Zappas work had been targeted by the Parents Music Resource Centers right-wing constituency. Zappa
devotes a chapter of The Real Frank Zappa Book to his involvement with its activities
(Chapter 15: Porn Wars). The PMRC presumed to promote healthy social values

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by rating records for offensive material, prompted especially by explicit sexual

references. Claude Chastagner (1999) has shown how recommended ratings via
record cover stickers could turn into a form of censorship: he cites the case of the
Dead Kennedys Jello Biafra who was left seriously in debt and without recording
opportunities despite being acquitted of distributing harmful material to minors.
Chastagner draws attention to a likely accommodation between the PMRC and the
Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) when the latter agreed to the
PMRCs demands in return for support with their Home Audio Recording Tax Bill.
Zappa attacked the implied claims of the PMRC that impressionable (presumably
already half-way deviant) listeners would be corrupted by offensive material on a
number of grounds; for example, that there was no scientic evidence to support a
link between pornography and antisocial behaviour; that the proposed scheme
would in any case be unworkable (what is the denition of pornography? Why
should lyrics about masturbation carry a health warning when the act itself was
perfectly legal and healthy?); that censorship violated the First Amendment. His
defence against the aims of the PMRC (letters to President Reagan and to the RIAA;
his statement to Congress in September 1985, all included in The Real Frank Zappa
Book) effectively staged the hypocrisy of an intended mechanism of social engineering which was predicated on the wider contradictions of American democracy.
Outrageous music is, in any event, easily commodied when shock becomes institutionalised, or was institutionalised at the outset (see Zappa on the Sex Pistols
above). Zappas articulate suit-and-tie intervention invited his opponents to take
him seriously, but it also had the effect of satirising the whole debate as a form of
entertainment, and was thus in keeping with the tone of Were Only in It for the
Money. Porn Wars collages together snippets from the Senate Commerce, Technology and Transportation Committee hearings, including Zappas testimony, bits of
speech from the Lumpy Gravy sessions, borrowings from Thing Fish (Ike Willis on
the American way of life), mantra-like repetitions of key words and phrases
(sometimes speeded up), a pornographic reference to fart-snifng; all set against
a musical score which mixes a guitar solo, drum machine-like sounds and avantgarde instrumental tinklings. The result is both an amusing carnivalesque, and
disturbing when set in the context of Senator Ernest Hollings proposed litmus test
of pornography can it be redeemed through any possible social value? (He actually phrases this in such a way that the question becomes its own answer.)
The above examples give some idea of Zappas semiotic critiques of the culture industry. His debt to Dada has long been noted, and there is certainly an
absurdist element in his output (including some wacky or is it wacky? views
on time expressed in Menn 1992). But his raids on what Tristan Tzara in the Dada
Manifesto 1918 called the greasy objectivity of bourgeois rationality (Tzara 1992, p.
251) always contained an objectivist desire to look behind the facade of entertainment. What one might call Zappas negative work of destruction (Ibid., p. 252) is
a process of semiotic reconstruction:
Composition is a process of organization . . . As long as you can conceptualize what that
organization process is, you can become a composer in any medium you want . . . Just
give me some stuff, and Ill [re]organize it for you . . . Project/Object is a term I have used to
describe the overall concept of my work in various mediums. (Zappa 1989, p. 139)

In Theory of the Avant-Garde, Peter Burger reads John Heartelds photomontage as a critique of art-for-arts sake aesthetics (which must obviously be dis-

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tinguished from Adornos sense of autonomy in progressive music). In the wake of

nineteenth-century bourgeois cultures loss of critical function, Burger hopes to
identify the moment when the institution of art was identied, and an attempt
made to return art to life praxis. (Incidentally, one might take issue with his opinion that in Cubist collage social comment remains subordinate to aesthetic principles after reading Francis Frascina on works like La Suze and Still Life Au Bon
Marche see Frascina 1993, paras. 91100.) Burgers analysis clearly indicates how
Heartelds work on the sign is a form of ideology critique. Millions Stand Behind
Me (1932) collages images of a fat German banker and Adolf Hitler in such a way
that the former appears to be putting a wad of bank notes into the open palm of
the latters Nazi salute. The caption and associated phrases, Der Sinn Des Hitlergrusses (The Meaning of the Hitler Salute) and Kleiner Mann bittet um groe Gaben
(Little Man asks for Big Gift) complete a politically transparent meaning while
simultaneously illustrating how the sign can be manufactured for political ends.
Thus, the most effective (because politically transparent) avant-garde art both
engages with, and intervenes in, pre-existing signiers of social reality in order to
reconstruct their ideological messages. The object is to make a work which demysties reality, such that a purely aesthetic appreciation becomes meaningless. This
kind of avant-garde work actively seeks involvement in political reality. Now in
this context, Zappa seems less pessimistic than Adorno, when the latter thinks that
art can only go into hibernation under the culture industry. While Zappa can be
held to go along with Adornos view on entertainment, his adoption of collage/
montage techniques suggests a more direct engagement with life praxis through
semiotic interruptions of normative experience.
The other key gure in this context is, of course, Brecht. Burger distinguishes
between Brecht and Hearteld on the grounds that Brecht wants to hold on to the
category of art (as theatre). But in producing non-organic (non-autonomous) art,
he is also working on the (theatrical) signs of bourgeois perception, and hence on
the role of art in the lifeworld. When Brecht develops a concept that entails a
change of function [in theatre] and sticks to what is concretely available (Burger
1984, p. 89), he, like Zappa, does not look for the abolition of art; an attack on art
in concrete social circumstances is not an attack on art per se. Zappas use of his
audience as part of the project/object serves to alert that audience to its own place
in the production of artistic experience. The correct response to a Zappa concert
(for example, one featuring the guitar solos previously discussed) would involve
an identication of Zappas staging of the popular concert experience as a reection on its existence in the networks of commodied production. (To what extent
reception can escape commodication leads us again to the AdornoBenjamin
debate, and subsequent reworkings such as that by Gendron.) The correct audience response would therefore occur as a critical reection on the production of
signs taking place on a stage. (The performance is staged in a doubled sense.) A
late example of Zappas Brechtian inclinations occurs with his introduction to the
performance of his serious compositions by the Ensemble Modern, released as The
Yellow Shark in November 1993. Repeated use of the word ne (the Ensemble, the
performances, the conductor) situates the audience as part of the context of serious
music production. Even before the music commences, the audience (and the listener
at home) becomes aware that the occasion of Zappas serious compositions has
been foregrounded. His initial target is the decontextualised aesthetic response of
the high-art audience of classical music. This raised an interesting problem for

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consumers at Frankfurt: if Zappas music lined up with post-symphonic traditions,

were they to observe the protocols of a modern(ist) music concert with its specically critical relationship to bourgeois classical music (Boulezs conducting of
pieces on The Perfect Stranger is relevant here), or could they treat Zappas serious
pieces to the more exuberant and collective response of a rock audience? Should
members of the audience continue to behave as individually discriminating spectators, or were they part of the evenings entertainment en masse? The blurring of
boundaries between serious and popular continues the strategy begun with the
early Mothers albums.
* * *
In this short essay my analysis of Zappas individual works is necessarily
limited. Yet a number of the processes described by Watson are compatible with
my view that a crucial feature of Zappas attitude to entertainment can be found in
his foregrounding of music as sociology, even when this may not be immediately
obvious. For example, what Zappa calls xenochronicity and resynchronisation
(the bringing together in the recording studio of musical elements originating in
different times and places) is relevant to Burgers view of Hearteld, and to the
AdornoBenjamin debate. Equally apposite would be those moments when a
pointer to the constructed nature of the musical sign is disguised within the composition, as in the increasingly stripped down instrumentation in Tink Walks
Amok on The Man from Utopia. (Rock music is traditionally mixed from bass and
drums up.) Since Watson has now done the essential job of connecting up many of
the critical processes in Zappas work, I can at this point move towards a discussion
of how to view Zappas position as an avant-gardist who works from within the
culture industry.
Zappas technological base, then, was the multitrack recording studio, where
signs could be manipulated into new combinations. As several theorists have noted
(e.g. Mowitt 1989; Middleton 1990), Walter Benjamins disagreements with Adorno
on the critical potential of lm are relevant to developments in the technologies
used to produce popular music. The key essay is, of course, The work of art in
the age of mechanical reproduction of 1936 (Benjamin 1992). In claiming that lm
destroys the aura of bourgeois high art and thereby enables a distantiated and
critically progressive spectator, Benjamins view of technological progress is more
optimistic than Adornos. Mass production does indeed create a kind of mechanised
prison (one thinks immediately of Taylorism and the Fordist production line). But
lm rescues rationalisation from itself, as it were, through its ability as technology
to intervene in the production of the social sign. Film uses montage as an interruption in habits of seeing, and because it does this for group experience, it is also
capable of fostering collective awareness what John Mowitt describes as the
increasingly politicized intervention of regional hermeneutic interests within the
cultural sphere (Mowitt 1989, pp. 1845). With Adornos reply to Benjamin in mind,
the situation of lm under Hollywood needs no further comment. But again, while
noting that in some respects Adorno is empirically correct (see also Gendron above),
his emphasis on the wasteland of social and cultural modernity in the USA leaves
no room to breathe. In playing off Adorno against Benjamin, Middleton draws
attention to the contested sign: alongside an increase in centralized control has been
persistent dissent; domination social, economic and ideological has been maintained only through struggle (Middleton 1990, p. 37). Adornos culture industry,

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like Althussers interpellated subject of ideology, or Foucaults panopticism, is

grounded in the homogenising force of a dominant culture. Yet because its representations are acted on in specic contexts, domination is actually fragmented at
the point of reception. Benjamin remains valuable for two reasons. Firstly, as
Middleton points out, his work nds a new context when modern recording technologies can be used for both domination and dissent (Ibid., Chapter 3). Secondly,
Zappas own practice of using the recording studio to (re)compose pre-given materials indicates how reception can intervene in entertainment. While insisting on
entertainments pervasiveness, Zappa brings together critical principles drawn from
Dada, Brecht and Benjamin. In so doing, his work actually exemplies a tension
between the closures of Adorno on production and the critical possibilities of reception. Indeed, Zappas own commitment to a tightly controlled form of market capitalism as a form of dissent indicates a contradiction in his own practice. The highly
rationalised business empire, the famous work ethic, the retinue of employees, the
disciplinarian demands on his musicians and support staff, his control over bootlegging and his zealous pursuit of copyright all testify to a critical practice provocatively at odds with itself.
It is at this point that my analysis of Zappas situation goes beyond those
provided by Paddison and Watson. I agree with Watson that what Zappas work
achieves on the level of representation [re-presentation] provides convincing grist
for radical thought (Watson 1994, p. xiii, original emphasis). Yet the more one
considers his use of entertainment as the ideological horizon of late capitalist
culture, the more a dadaist denunciation of standardization (Watson 1997, p. 188)
becomes complicated by a deeper reexive dimension. In No Commercial Potential,
David Walley has already hinted at the problems involved:
Satire is a wonderful weapon it uses cultures sexual, philosophical, or technological artifacts as a reecting mirror. Good satire provides enlightenment, but poor satire degenerates
into cant, ultimately leading to a bleakness of visions, cynicism for cynicisms sake . . . No
heroes here, only victims or casualties. The vision of horror is never transforming, just
ugly . . . Maybe we could say that the direction Franks career has taken is inseparable from
the Music Business, which is a convenient and contemporary metaphor for human greed . . .
on the whole, all that magnicent [musical] structure gets buried way back in the mix while
in the foreground multitracked voices are shrieking Broken hearts are for ass-holes. (Walley
1996, pp. 1778)

Zappas problem is bound up with what one might describe as a performative

contradiction in the project/object itself. The relevant theoretical context here is
Habermass critique of Adornos totalising view of reason under Enlightenment.
In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer show how emancipatory
reason has been perverted under the instrumentalised rationality of means-end
thinking. But since the critique of rationality is itself enabled by Enlightenment, the
diagnosis of reasons corruption would appear to cut away the ground from under
its own feet. The instatement of Enlightenment in its original form is impossible
when Webers iron cage has no window on to the outside. Hence Jamesons struggle to work with Adornos negative dialectics in Late Marxism when, The question
about poetry after Auschwitz has been replaced with that of whether you could
bear to read Adorno and Horkheimer next to the pool. (Jameson 1990, p. 248) For
Lambert Zuidervaart, Jamesons attempt in The Political Unconscious to envisage a
lifeworld beyond the connes of reication was actually a mapping exercise for the
preconditions of such a vision. In his Foreword to Burgers text, Jochen Schulte-Sasse

Or any art at all?

217

reminds us that Adornos philosophical pessimism arose when he was unable to

name an agency for the lifeworlds transformation (Schulte-Sasse 1984, p. xviii). The
empty chair of the future arises when Jameson, under the inuence of Adorno,
calls for a new political culture while declaring it all but impossible (Zuidervaart
1991, p. 263). Jameson appears to accept Adornos view of the culture industrys
saturation of the lifeworld while paradoxically holding out for reason as a steward
awaiting the return of itself. Once the ground of Jamesons Marxism starts to subside, he can only nd resistance in difference (e.g. feminism, black politics, his own
de-centred Marxism), which blocks an analysis of the totality. Jameson nds himself
within postmodernism at the same time that he wishes to transcend the effects of
its consumerist society. The retreat into theoretical complexity on the part of
Adorno and Jameson is clearly a further aspect of this problem.
Since Zappas detached critique of the culture industry occurs from within its
horizon, his sense of entertainment is similarly paradoxical, in the sense that it is
difcult to see how he can be both the object of the culture industry and the agent
of its potential transformation. The most appropriate word to describe his situation
is not satire (in the sense that this denotes a detachment from, and thus control
over, the thing being satirised), but irony. Though Alan Wilde does not mention
Adorno in Horizons of Assent, his denition of mediate irony seems promising with
respect to the problem of Enlightenment modernity. Mediate irony serves to
mediate a fundamentally satiric vision; it imagines a world lapsed from a recoverable norm . . . The ideal, in other words, is one of recovery, an ideal of harmony,
integration, and coherence. (Wilde 1987, pp. 910) Mediate irony is one of the ironies of modernity which generally translate the gaps and discontinuities in experience, that stress the broken edges and sharp corners, the scars of division and palpable traces of absence (Ibid., p. 30). The following remark from Zappa might, I
suppose, be interpreted accordingly: . . . my entire life has been one massive
failure . . . Once you realize what your limitations are and realize that even if you
achieve something it doesnt make a fucking bit of difference anyway, then you
can be okay. (Friedman and Lyons 1997, p. 218) From this perspective, Watsons
approval of the serious Zappa with a bright future, whose works are being taken
up by progressive gures like pianist Joanna MacGregor . . . (Watson 1997, p. 180),
seems theoretically disingenuous. (MacGregor is only one artist whose glamorous
image and mould-breaking activities have been indeed must be used to market
the avant-garde within the classical music machine). Watsons problem lies in
trying to locate some sort of authenticity in Zappa when authenticity comes in
scare-quotes. On this basis, the demonstrative aspects of the project/object cannot
readily be separated out from its sociology; conceptual continuity is both selfsustaining and self-consuming. This is quite different from the classical modernist
detachment of T.S. Eliot, or the Vorticist Wyndham Lewis who warned in BLAST
(1914) against the artist getting too close to life (Lewis 1992, p. 134).
Lewiss Enlightenment desire to unmask the truth of modernity is located at
the still point of the vortex, where detachment remains an option. The kind of
postmodernism I have in mind here can perhaps be illustrated by a brief look at the
work of Jeff Koons. Like Zappa, Koons work lives in the shadow of Dada. His
representations of ready-made sculpture transmute Duchamps deconstruction of
the boundary between art and life into blatant self-promotion. The vacuum cleaners
and oor polishers (e.g. New Shelton Wet/Dry Triple Decker, 19816; New Hoover
Shampoo Polishers, 19806) rehearse the now historical situation in which an ordinary

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David Wragg

mass-produced object interferes with the spectators bourgeois expectations of

what counts as art. But it is the self-promotional attitude to commodication (partly
learned from his days as a Wall Street broker) which made Koons his millions from
art. When read from the perspective of virtuous aesthetic activity, his work generates only weary acceptance or horried denial. Harrison and Woods comment that
Representations of engulfment, may just come up for the count as strategies for
gaining a little space (Harrison and Wood 1993, p. 243) occurs in the wake of
Clement Greenbergs paradigmatic sense of modernism, in which paintings attention to its own means (an increasing emphasis on the two-dimensional surface of
the canvas from Manet to post-painterly abstraction, allied to an expressive
originality) ke[pt] culture moving (Greenberg 1992, p. 531) when menaced by the
rise of kitsch and entertainment as therapy (Ibid., p. 755). Michael Frieds claim
that the contemplation of an Abstract Expressionist canvas could encourage a state
of continuous intellectual and moral alertness (Fried 1992, p. 773) looks naive from
Koons perspective once modernism became absorbed into the market. Koons
remarked: Artists [and, one might add, critics] somehow develop this moral crisis
where we are fearful of being effective in the world . . . We set up these inside
games; we develop all these esthetics and all this formalism. (Koons 1996, p. 383)
Drawing on Peter Sloterdijks argument, Hal Foster has described Koons
alternative to formalism as an example of cynical reason or enlightened false
consciousness (Foster 1996, p. 118). Here, the artist protects himself from the
pressures of contradictory forces the im/possibility of art under commodication by simultaneously avowing and disavowing his works critical existence.
Foster distinguishes between an engaged avant-gardism which holds off
engulfment, and the kind of manipulative self-consciousness emerging in Koons.
The avant-gardes critical dependency on bourgeois culture gives way to a metacritical accommodation: Engagement of the dominant culture became a near
embrace, and identication with patrons seemed all but total. (Ibid., p. 122)
Koons intentional complicity with the art-marketing machine signies arts ironic
submission to commodication, through which it supposedly cries out against
that same situation. In the Made in Heaven series of installation photographs
(1991) the idea of modernist painterly self-expression is played off against the
stereotypes of pornography. The sexually explicit photographs of Koons and
erstwhile porn-star wife Ilona Staller represent both the artists desire to reconnect art with a broad public, and a quasi-Warholian critique of that publics
indifference to the critical claims of high art. The conjunction of creative contexts in Koons photographs (the artists studio in Silver Shoes; the buttery
kitschiness of Ilona on Top or Hand on Breast; the Made in Heaven billboard) puts
pornography into scare-quotes, which are then further scare-quoted as critique
collapses back into its object: I demand the right to express my own sexuality.
I believe artists must exploit themselves and take responsibility to exploit their
viewers. (Quoted in Muthesius 1992, p. 126) In Banality (19889), one of a series
of Art Magazine Ads (in this case for Artforum), Koons is shown in the position
of smiling teacher holding a piece of chalk, in front of a class of children, some
with raised hands. On the blackboard behind is written Exploit the Masses
and Banality as Saviour (see Muthesius 1992 for reproductions).
In their different ways, Koons and Zappa question the extent to which Sloterdijks distinction between the homeopathy of kynical irony, whereby individual
degradation is pushed to the point of social indictment, and cynical reason,

Or any art at all?

219

whereby the subject accepts this degradation for protection and/or prot, can be
sustained (Foster 1996, p. 160). Its certainly a thin line. The qualiers in Fosters
statement in the previous paragraph (a near embrace; seemed all but total) hedge
the matter round with inevitable qualications if we want to preserve at least the
vestige of an ironic critique. Having introduced Greenberg and Fried, one could
state this problem another way: What, if anything, can be put over against the
commodied lifeworld? Does the retention of art as a critical practice assume the
other of commodication, or is it that because art now knows itself to be commodied, it can only cry out in the pain of self-mutilation when otherness is just a
disguise? Or is self-mutilation now scare-quoted? Simply posing these questions
reminds us of Adornos continuing relevance. It is not just that Zappas identication of the realities of the capitalist market place puts into question . . . the
afrmative accounts of popular music by fashionable radicals; in doing this it also
challenges any afrmative account of his career which fails to give due weight to
the contradictions involved. For while one might argue that the Benjaminian
Zappa the Zappa whose reception of pre-given signs functions as a bulwark
against the overbearing forces of production serves to satisfy one side of Middletons equation, one is still left with the problem of the embeddedness of his critique
in Adornos performative contradiction, with all its Enlightenment ramications.
Afrmative postmodernists cannot realistically ignore the fact that the lifeworld
remains in thrall to commodication (see, for example, Lawrence Grossbergs chapter Postmodernism and Authenticity in We Gotta Get Out of This Place, 1992). The
question therefore remains one of how Zappas sense of popular music could formulate new critiques when his work is so riddled by irony.
Zappas work, framed by the project/object, seems to conclude that avantgarde cultures in opposition to reied bourgeois consciousness have now all but
drowned in a sea of entertainment this is the problem at the heart of his output.
In this light, two kinds of meeting between Zappa and critical theory seem possible
in the present context. Firstly, and despite the autodeconstructive tendency, Zappas
use of montage techniques as (Benjaminian) reception can be set off against his
own identication of the culture industrys pervasiveness following his rejection of
autonomous art and its political quietism. This places his work squarely within
debates about how production and reception interact under capitalism. If we take
MTV as an example, Ann Kaplan has argued that the channel functions like one
continuous ad . . . [where] the spectator is suspended in a state of unsatised desire
but forever under the illusion of imminent satisfaction through some kind of purchase (Kaplan 1987, p. 12). But for Dan Rubey (1992), the symbiotic nature of the
relationship between MTV and its consumers works against the formers absolute
domination of the market place. Not only can the signs of MTV products be remade
for alternative meanings; the creators of MTV are obliged to follow emerging subcultures to create new market niches. This view sees popular culture as semiautonomous: dependent on a prior structure, but not absolutely beholden to it. It
represents a paradigmatic approach to the academic analysis of popular cultures,
though this carries its own problematic when such analysis is itself increasingly
squeezed in the culture industrys vice. As Berman and DAmico remark, the identication of oppositional cultures runs the risk of overstating the case in the search
for its own consumers. Yet the strategic value of nding possible cracks in the
structure is indispensable if we want to progress beyond Adornos closures. Within
the legacy of Frankfurt School, Habermas has tried to theorise a way in which

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subjects can re-think the lifeworld through interpretations of the given: The reected
appropriation of tradition breaks up the nature-like substance of tradition and alters
the position of the subject in it. (Quoted in Callinicos 1989, p. 99: but note reservations about the theory of communicative action/ communicative rationality in
this same text.)
However, a potential response to Zappas own identication of the culture
industry comes from a postmodernist denition of negative critique which also
rejects autonomous art, but which retains the sense of entertainment in Adorno
and Marcuse. Here, the element of artistic self-sacrice, expressed as irony, contains
in its very insistence the im/possibility of real happiness, genuine entertainment.
There is a crucial difference between the critique of the culture industry in the
autonomous artwork, with all its intrinsic difculty and resistance to reception,
and the ironic deployment of popular forms in Zappa which depends for its effect
on the listeners critical re-assimilation of those forms. Yet since it is difcult to
square the listener as Adornos object of entertainment with the semi-autonomous
subject who responds critically to the project/object, we appear to have another
empty chair. In 1982, Max Paddison suggested that Zappas early Mothers music
managed a remarkable balancing act between the spheres of popular and radical
music (Paddison 1982, p. 217) because it uses elements of both to focus the listeners
attention on formal processes. At the same time, he noted the difculty faced by
such music when its structural sophistication threatens to annex its popular appeal.
How can a genuinely popular music stave off the machinations of the culture industry? How could a genuinely avant-garde music reach down to commodied listeners? The pressing question is one of how, or to what extent, the near embrace of
entertainment can reect back on itself as a form of auto-critique, cynical reason
included.
Paddisons remark about Zappas parodic guitar solos turns out to have
critical potential once we connect it with Adornos paradoxical project of ideological demystication. The autodeconstructive aspect of Zappas situation within
popular culture can now be read as the negation of false optimism; as the refusal
to submit to pleasure and happiness through a negative unmasking of their
ideological character. In this way, Zappas more direct attacks on the ideologies
of the music business and its social contexts are actually reinforced when the
utopian element in his thought is so guarded. And having introduced the idea
of deconstruction, it is worth mentioning a connection between Adorno and Paul
de Man. As read by Christopher Norris (1988; 1989), de Mans insistence on the
contingency of language denies the immediacy on which truth claims about its
represented objects depend. Such a rigorous autocritical demystication of the
belief that language can close on its object is akin to Adornos self-denying
commitment to rational critique in the face of means-end thinking. On this basis,
any pleasure in entertainment must interrogate itself as heir to the problems
let loose by Enlightenment it must become enlightened about its own history
as part of the structure of domination. In this way, perhaps Zappas music
withholds the title popular even as that title is asserted; entertainment exists
as both poison and cure. One might describe this situation as the hope of (self-)
negation; Zappas works point to a practice from which they abstain: the creation
of a just life (Adorno 1992, p. 763). With this situation in mind, it seems tting
to conclude with a well-known passage from Adornos Minima Moralia, Fragments
from Damaged Life, as quoted by Norris:

Or any art at all?

221

The only philosophy which can be responsibly practised in the face of despair is the attempt
to contemplate all things as they would appear from the standpoint of redemption . . . Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its
rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light.
(Adorno 1974. p. 16; quoted in Norris 1989, p. 335)

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Discography
By denition, all Zappas output is relevant to the present essay. The list below includes only titles
referred to above. CDs cited above are listed as on Zappa Records. Zappas catalogue was sold to Rykodisc in 1994. Classical compositions were not covered under the purchase . . . These should be the nal,
denitive versions of each title, company president Don Rose told Ice. All the releases had been remastered yet again under Zappas supervision before his death. (Ruhlmann 1997, p. 46)
In date order dates refer to original issues:
Lumpy Gravy/Were Only in It for the Money. CDZAP13. 1967/1968
Ship Arriving Too Late to Save a Drowning Witch. CDZAP42. 1982
The Man from Utopia. CDZAP53. 1983
The Perfect Stranger. CDZAP49. 1984
Thing Fish. CDZAP21. 1984
Frank Zappa Meets the Mothers of Prevention. CDZAP53. 1985
The Yellow Shark. CDZAP57. 1993

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