SOUNDTRACK: FRANK ZAPPA-Does Humor Belong in Music? (1995).
Frank Zappa made money and found fame by writing dirty, funny songs. Yet he was really a great guitarist and a serious composer. But hey, when you need the money to make your studio, you write songs about “Penguins in Bondage.” When I was in high school my friend Al introduced me to Shiek Yerbouti, and I was hooked. I’d never heard songs that were so intentionally funny.
So, this live collection is kind of an odd assortment, given the title. I mean the first song is an instrumental (ie. not funny at all except for the title “Zoot Allures”). “Tinseltown Rebellion” however is pretty darn funny. The mockery that goes on (and the call-outs range from The Scorpions to Culture Club and The Tonight Show) is nasty and offensive, but never really wrong. And this is when you find out how good a Zappa stage show was. The band was tight, they could play all kinds of crazy things and, as in this song, they were always in sync even when improvising.
This disc is a collection of songs from a 1984 tour. I rather like this incarnation of the Zappa band (Ike Willis is pretty amazing at any time). And they play tracks from across Zappa’s output. Although there’s times when the disc sounds really abrasive (some of the solos–like on “Bondage”–are really piercing and not very smooth, and the drums can be very electronic sounding).
Of course, that’s the kind of music that Zappa wrote (“What’s new in Baltimore” is very electronic sounding–beautiful but mechanical–which is why it’s so amazing to hear it live–even if it doesn’t sound human, exactly).
And just so you know it’s not only Zappa showing off (although he kind of is since he hired all the musicians) in “Let’s Move to Cleveland,” everyone gets a solo…keybaords, drums…everyone. And the final track “Whipping Post” sees his son Dweezil taking the lead guitar solo (which feels really human and rocks the dickens off the place).
For many of Zappa’s later “live” records, he compiled songs from all over the place (a very common practice for live records). On some of the collections he even mixed a tour from the 70s with one from the 80s. Now the thing that I just recently realized (even though it’s spelled out in the liner notes) is that these songs are cribbed together from different songs (!) (on “Cleveland” the piano solo is from St. Petersburg, the drum solo is from Vancouver, and the guitar solo is from Amherst College…weird, eh? And what about the backing music, where does that come from while the solos are spliced in?)). So, they’re not really live, except they kind of are. And, heck that’s kind of funny too. If you care about things like that it kind of ruins the “authenticity” of the recording. But if you don’t, they sound pretty darn good anyway.
So this is not his funniest stuff, but it’s still an interesting live collection.
[READ: November 12, 2010] More Things Like This
I don’t know where I learned about this book, but I recently found it used for about $4 and I was pretty psyched to both find it and to pay a pittance for it.
As the subtitle indicates, this book is a collection of drawings that have words on them and are funny (but which are not “cartoons” (although some kind of are)). The impetus for the book was a show at apexart of exactly this sort of thing. The book expands on the show and includes many artists who were not in the show (including several very famous artists).
The Foreword by Dave Eggers offer the rationale behind the show & the book: Image + Text (usually referring to the image) + Humor = Good enough for us. And it also asks pertinent questions: Why is it that so many of these artists can’t spell? And why is it that when they screw up a word, instead of starting over, they just cross the word out and write it again? Why is it important to some of the artists that the drawings appear casual, even sloppy?
And more.
The introduction by Michael Kimmelman puts some perspective on these artists and their relations to comics. And the essay by Jesse Nathan explains how he was sort of in charge of getting the artists together for the initial show. Nathan also interviews most of the artists in the book.
In these early pages, the book offer lots of artists who did this sort of this– Magritte’s “This is not a pipe” (actually called “The treachery of images”) for example– as well as all kinds of things by Warhol, and several images by Basquiat and Man Ray. But when the book proper starts, we see the artists from the show.
The artists interviewed in the book (mentioned below) have their work represented very well, but there’s also some other works interspersed: Marcel Dzama, William Wegman (before the Weimaraner), Ralph Steadman (the guy who drew Pink Floyd’s The Wall), Joe Brainard’s great weird co-optings of Nancy from Nancy and Sluggo, Edward Gorey (with a wonderful series called “Menaced Objects” and the wonderful Shel Silverstein.
The artists interviewed here are
Raymond Pettibon
Amy Jean Porter (who has hilarious titles for her collections like: “Birds of North America Misquote Hip Hop and Sometimes Pause for Reflection”
Tucker Nichols
David Berman
Chris Johanson
Quenton Miller
Leanne Shapton
Enrique Chagoya
David Shrigley (one of those artists where people say “My five-year old could do that.”)
Olga Sholten
Peter Saul (whom I’d never heard of but whose paintings are wonderfully lurid and colorful–the one of Castro is pretty shocking)
Nedko Solakov (who does some wonderful ephemeral writings in bathrooms and at a passport control station).
Maira Kalman (some really beautiful works)
and Leonard Cohen (yes, that Leonard Cohen).
The types of questions (and I am really taken with the phrasing of them) are:
What do you like to look at?
Is being funny important to you?
Which comes first, image or text?
Do you make up the texts or find them elsewhere (one artist is quite offended at the question, while others admit they find them all over the place).
Do you do drafts?
Is the handwriting in your drawings your everyday handwriting (probably 90% say no).
It’s a really interesting collection of “funny” drawings and paintings. The interviews are all pretty short (about 2 pages) but the questions are specific and yet open-ended so you get some wonderful answers. And, once all of these works are contextualized, they seem like far more than “just” cartoons.
As with any book of art, there’s bound to be some artists who you don’t like, but I think overall the variety more than makes up for any singular disappointment. It’s a fun project, especially for fans of contemporary art.
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