debutante_daisy wrote:
Batchain1001 wrote:
swiftkicknow wrote:
Jakeobs wrote:
What were FZ's views on feminism?
Refer to "Planet Of The Baritone Women"
But that was a commentary on the ridiculousness of women feeling that to be on an equal footing with men they had to take on the mannish appearance of what would be seen as throngs of stomping bull dykes. (
"A slightly more voluptuous version of fucking somebody's father!" -- "Harry-as-a-boy".)
--Bat
Batty, I was just thinking about you when I was pondering my thoughts on the state of the Forum.
Anyway...back to the subject at hand.
It is not like Frank was sexist, he was just writing songs based in reality, not some romantic dreamland like every other artist under the sun.
I know many of my "girl friends" did find a lot of his music shocking. Trust me, they were forced to listen to it if they wanted to hang out with me. I likened turning people on to his music in the same way i would regard hiding in the closet to look at
National Lampoon or reading
Everything You Need to Know About Sex But are Afraid to Ask.
Songs like
Dinah-Moe-Hum,
Bobby Brown,
Jewish Princess,
Keep It Greasy,
I Have Been In You are not necessarily easy to relate to when you are in you are a young girl in your teens. At least that is they way it was when I was growing up **born in 1967**. I had older brothers who listened to Frank and many other fine artists so I was predisposed at an unusually young age for the time. I was the exception and still remain the exception seeing that the vast majority of Zappa fans are men. My guess is that every show there are 95% men. Of the 5% of women that are there 3% of them are girlfriends that are obliged to be there and 2% of us are actual FZ fans.
Now that there are old Zappa fans having kids who are also exposed to his music at a young age, I imagine things are completely different? The content young viewers are able to see on tv/internet/cable puts an entirely new spin on what is real today vs. what seemed real 30 years ago. That, coupled with the fact that girls are having sex at an earlier age, are more aware of reality at a younger age, perhaps they can relate to his music better and not be so shocked by it. Hell, the music by itself is shocking enough!!

Deb,
What surprised me was how disquieted, ill-at-ease and uncomfortable guys became if I played
"that fuckin' sick shit" such as "Penis Dimension", "Shove It Right In" or "B'wana Dik" at 15 and wondered, "What's with these guys? All they ever talk about is 'fucking', 'pussies', 'tits' and 'having big cocks' -- why do they nearly shit themselves when it's in a song that's cleaver and funny?" I was very glad that
someone was consistently not writing more
silly love songs and I could depend on that!
Oh, the strictly
musical portion was just "crazy sounding noise" done by "some crazy guy joke music" whether it was "Little House I Used To Live In", "Willy ThePimp" or "King Kong". It was all just summarily dismissed as "sick shit" with no room for disagreement, case closed. So it's still a minority even of the male population who'd ever be open to Zappa at all on any level. Even
I was different. Hah! I'm sure that if there was something just about roundly understood as
weird by the conventional majority anyone who knew me from day one would just roll their eyes and think, "Figures!", if I took an interest in it. I was "incorrigible", as I so often heard the word.
Now, as for
girls, not a one would ever so much as give that "Zappa-horror" a tiny fraction of one second of a listen -- and I've always had the sneaking suspicion that it was not what they'd heard Zappa do, but largely fecause they were
warned by friends, most of whom had never heard a single note directly from Zappa! It was later that I found a few who would listen and two who actually went to the '84 and '88 FZ concerts! I know there was a minor female attendance at those concerts but I swear that nine-out-of-ten were zonked on street drugs and going primarily because of their boyfriends and husbands and just didn't care where they were as long as it was a concert and somebody was performing live.
(A glaring exception I know personally is a friend of one of my sister's for whom I burnt a "YCDTOSA" CD, but she plays albums the way most people read paperback books: listen, enjoy, and store away until 'whenever' if 'whenever' comes. The book: I read it, liked it and tossed it on the pile; the album: I heard it, liked it and tossed it on the pile.)
One who passed by me in '88 was so excited about the number of concerts she had lined up for that week shrieked, "I can't believe this! Zappa tonight and Terrence-Trent Darby tomorrow night! That's just totally un-fucking-believable!" Someone who was with me looked at me and said, "She probably doesn't care where she is so long as she's wasted out of her skull and there's somebody onstage playing something, but to go from Zappa to Terrence-Trent Darby sounds really strange."
But the cry that, "Girls are so young today when they start having sex!", was loudly and clearly heard 30 years ago as much as it is today. As absurd as it is from the laughably ridiculous basis from which it was concocted by the CDC (CDC&P) and trumpeted recently by the hungry media's stenographers concerning how "1-of-every-4 teenage girls has a sexually transmitted disease!", they still never learn how their credibility sinks lower.
What's different today is just a whole pile of visual nonsense right up front with just an incidental musical background going on. "It's not a song unless it has a video!", I remember one girl about 14 saying to a news reporter over 15 years ago when the local news was covering an appearance by some big-name with a month-long career at long-defunct local Tower Records and Video.
It's very hard to shock a lot of kids today because they're ore like their moms and dads at earlier ages and that's not as astonishing as we might think when we look back in history and find the average life expectancy to be around 35 to 40 years and having kids actually was done as fast as biologically possible.
What's warped today is the ever-accelerating telecommunications and the inability to process that information, just ingest it. ("I just realized my professor is full of shit but if I tell him that and why he is he'll ruin my chances at having a career!") Entertainment? "Who's the
hottie?", has become the largest factor.
--Batty