Interview by Bob Marshall - Revision history

Jason.Kreitzer at 15:58, 14 December 2021

2021-12-14T15:58:55Z

Jason.Kreitzer at 13:20, 29 September 2021

2021-09-29T13:20:08Z

Jason.Kreitzer at 13:01, 29 September 2021

2021-09-29T13:01:41Z

Jason.Kreitzer at 17:31, 10 September 2021

2021-09-10T17:31:04Z

Jason.Kreitzer at 17:30, 10 September 2021

2021-09-10T17:30:24Z

Jason.Kreitzer: Google offers nothing and there's nothing on afka.net either.

2021-09-03T14:49:05Z

Google offers nothing and there's nothing on afka.net either.

Jason.Kreitzer at 18:22, 11 August 2021

2021-08-11T18:22:07Z

Jason.Kreitzer at 15:59, 30 July 2021

2021-07-30T15:59:00Z

Duncan at 09:15, 24 July 2021

2021-07-24T09:15:43Z

Jason.Kreitzer at 01:24, 24 July 2021

2021-07-24T01:24:42Z

← Older revision		Revision as of 15:58, 14 December 2021
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−	This interview took place during a 7-hour visit with the very hospitable [[Biography\|Frank Zappa]] at his home between 8:00P.M., Oct.21 and 3:00 A.M., Oct.22, 1988. Dr. Carolyn Dean and Gerald Fialka assisted Bob Marshall in conducting the interview. We thank Loren Gagnon for transcribing the original audio tapes.	+	This interview took place during a 7-hour visit with the very hospitable [[Biography\|Frank Zappa]] at his home between 8:00P.M., Oct.21 and 3:00 A.M., Oct.22, 1988. Dr. Carolyn Dean and [[Gerry Fialka\|Gerald Fialka]] assisted Bob Marshall in conducting the interview. We thank Loren Gagnon for transcribing the original audio tapes.

	'''In your mini-manifesto on [[Joe's Garage Acts II & III\|Joe's Garage]] where you say "Information is not knowledge, Knowledge is not wisdom, ... etc.", at the end you say "Music is THE BEST". What is Music?<br>		'''In your mini-manifesto on [[Joe's Garage Acts II & III\|Joe's Garage]] where you say "Information is not knowledge, Knowledge is not wisdom, ... etc.", at the end you say "Music is THE BEST". What is Music?<br>

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 '''And in that information flood, I can see the phrase "the medium is the message" helps you point out that there's a technical effect that's going in, aside from all the confetti or baby powder that's getting in your face through all the different media as information.<br>
-Yeah. You have to understand that the medium that brings you the message taints the message. It spins the message. In other words, the same factoid presented on CNN, if you took that same piece of data and put it in USA Today, as opposed to the [Wikipedia:The Wall Street Journal|Wall Street Journal]] or the Journal of The American Medical Association or the Encyclopedia Britannica. Now, if the same factoid was everywhere, which one would you say would reinforce all the rest of them? If the thing is in the Encyclopedia, it looks a little more like a real fact than it does if it's on CNN. CNN is really not a reliable source of news. It's a fountain of disinformation. It is probably the most biased, most spin-encrusted, totally unreliable source of information that you can lay your eyes on, but I watch it all the time because it gives me a great thing to compare other stuff to. And most people don't do that. Most people won't compare. They;ll just hear the news report and buy it right away and it's done. It's plugged into their memory bank, and when it's time to process information, that's the erroneous fact that they're operating on. Like people who have absorbed the latest polls, when it's time to figure out what they're going to do about the election, they're saturated with polls to tell them that all is lost.
+Yeah. You have to understand that the medium that brings you the message taints the message. It spins the message. In other words, the same factoid presented on CNN, if you took that same piece of data and put it in USA Today, as opposed to the [[Wall Street Journal]] or the Journal of The American Medical Association or the Encyclopedia Britannica. Now, if the same factoid was everywhere, which one would you say would reinforce all the rest of them? If the thing is in the Encyclopedia, it looks a little more like a real fact than it does if it's on CNN. CNN is really not a reliable source of news. It's a fountain of disinformation. It is probably the most biased, most spin-encrusted, totally unreliable source of information that you can lay your eyes on, but I watch it all the time because it gives me a great thing to compare other stuff to. And most people don't do that. Most people won't compare. They;ll just hear the news report and buy it right away and it's done. It's plugged into their memory bank, and when it's time to process information, that's the erroneous fact that they're operating on. Like people who have absorbed the latest polls, when it's time to figure out what they're going to do about the election, they're saturated with polls to tell them that all is lost.
 '''In your work with "xenochrony", are you satirizing editing, the way you put things together, besides the technical innovation of doing it?<br>

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 '''And in that information flood, I can see the phrase "the medium is the message" helps you point out that there's a technical effect that's going in, aside from all the confetti or baby powder that's getting in your face through all the different media as information.<br>
-Yeah. You have to understand that the medium that brings you the message taints the message. It spins the message. In other words, the same factoid presented on CNN, if you took that same piece of data and put it in USA Today, as opposed to the [[Wall Street Journal]] or the Journal of The American Medical Association or the Encyclopedia Britannica. Now, if the same factoid was everywhere, which one would you say would reinforce all the rest of them? If the thing is in the Encyclopedia, it looks a little more like a real fact than it does if it's on CNN. CNN is really not a reliable source of news. It's a fountain of disinformation. It is probably the most biased, most spin-encrusted, totally unreliable source of information that you can lay your eyes on, but I watch it all the time because it gives me a great thing to compare other stuff to. And most people don't do that. Most people won't compare. They;ll just hear the news report and buy it right away and it's done. It's plugged into their memory bank, and when it's time to process information, that's the erroneous fact that they're operating on. Like people who have absorbed the latest polls, when it's time to figure out what they're going to do about the election, they're saturated with polls to tell them that all is lost.
+Yeah. You have to understand that the medium that brings you the message taints the message. It spins the message. In other words, the same factoid presented on CNN, if you took that same piece of data and put it in USA Today, as opposed to the [Wikipedia:The Wall Street Journal|Wall Street Journal]] or the Journal of The American Medical Association or the Encyclopedia Britannica. Now, if the same factoid was everywhere, which one would you say would reinforce all the rest of them? If the thing is in the Encyclopedia, it looks a little more like a real fact than it does if it's on CNN. CNN is really not a reliable source of news. It's a fountain of disinformation. It is probably the most biased, most spin-encrusted, totally unreliable source of information that you can lay your eyes on, but I watch it all the time because it gives me a great thing to compare other stuff to. And most people don't do that. Most people won't compare. They;ll just hear the news report and buy it right away and it's done. It's plugged into their memory bank, and when it's time to process information, that's the erroneous fact that they're operating on. Like people who have absorbed the latest polls, when it's time to figure out what they're going to do about the election, they're saturated with polls to tell them that all is lost.
 '''In your work with "xenochrony", are you satirizing editing, the way you put things together, besides the technical innovation of doing it?<br>

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 '''For those who are teetering on consciousness.<br>
-That's right, right on the fucking brink. And the other thing is: maybe twenty years from now, if we're still around, and people look back on those idiot [[Yuppies]] and the stuff that they were interested in, there will be on guy who said, "Take the Rolex and stuff it"> And it's the same thing with [[We're Only In It For The Money]] album. 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.
+That's right, right on the fucking brink. And the other thing is: maybe twenty years from now, if we're still around, and people look back on those idiot [[Wikipedia:Yuppie|Yuppies]] and the stuff that they were interested in, there will be on guy who said, "Take the Rolex and stuff it"> And it's the same thing with [[We're Only In It For The Money]] album. 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.
 '''Maybe that's why you were blacklisted.<br>

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 '''Did you know that before, or did you figure it out with what you went through?<br>
-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.
+The first clues that I had to this were from a book called "The Hidden Persuaders" by [[Wikipedia:Vance Packard|Vance Packard]] which I read a long, long time ago.
 '''That was in high school because it came out in the Fifties, I think? But you read it when you were quite young?<br>
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 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.
-'''Would you say that the [[Yuppies|Yuppie]] culture was a natural product of the [[Hippies|Hippie]] culture?<br>
+'''Would you say that the [[Wikipedia:Yuppie|Yuppie]] culture was a natural product of the [[Hippies|Hippie]] culture?<br>
 I don't know whether it's natural, but I can see that there's a logical continuum because the Hippie culture was not anything divine to begin with. Most of the people who joined that were just chumps looking for a good time just like the people who become Yuppies. The reason they join any kind of a movement, or a culture, is because they're looking for a home, they want to belong to something. Now, a lot of the people who became Hippies, maybe they knew that they didn't look good in Paisley and long hair, with joints dangling out of their mouth. Maybe they knew that was stupid, but they did it anyway because that was the only way they were going to get a blowjob that season. Now the Yuppies have gone beyond that. They have to have a Rolex, they have to have a Porsche, but they don't even care about the blowjob anymore because it's just about the dollars. Now, that's a mutation.

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 It would be harder to put it out now because we're so much farther away. '68 is a lot closer to '58 then it is to '88, and it would be hard to find vocalists. In order to give a convincing rendition of that style of music, you have to have singers who understand the idiom, and they're getting harder and harder to find.
-'''In the book ''"[[Does This Kind of Life Look Interesting To You?]]"'', there's a picture of you from [[Melody Maker]], about '67, under which you wrote, "Here I am, propping up the glitter shortage".<br>
+'''In the book ''"Does This Kind of Life Look Interesting To You?"'', there's a picture of you from [[Melody Maker]], about '67, under which you wrote, "Here I am, propping up the glitter shortage".<br>
 That wasn't my text.

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 No.
-'''But one of the institutes involved in the [[CIA]].'s MKULTRA mind-control program, and this was in '55, was called the Human Ecology Society. They were using the term "ecology", but it was "human" ecology – perhaps in a management sense, not as pollution.<br>
+'''But one of the institutes involved in the [[Central Intelligence Agency|CIA]].'s MKULTRA mind-control program, and this was in '55, was called the Human Ecology Society. They were using the term "ecology", but it was "human" ecology – perhaps in a management sense, not as pollution.<br>
 Human engineering.

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 I wouldn't say a lot. I think I watch more news that I watch movies, but the problem is that my recreational hours are limited. Usually the first thing I do in the morning when I wake up is turn on the news in our bedroom just to get a blast of that before I brush my teeth.
-'''That's [[CNN]] Headline News. You get the repeat.<br>
+'''That's [[Wikipedia:CNN|CNN]] Headline News. You get the repeat.<br>
 I don't get the Headline News, I get the droning long version. They cycle that in one-hour or two-hour blocks.

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 '''"Fortunately and unfortunately".<br>
-That's right, because if you can understand all three specimens, you can communicate with them. You talk to a dog a different way than you talk to a cat, which is a different way than you talk to a goldfish. You have to understand that they do exist, and if you have to communicate with people who are in any one of those levels, or not in those levels, you have to find the language that gets the point across. The difficulty is not inventing the language, the difficulty is finding the medium by which to disseminate the language because a person such as myself does not have access to media. You can't. I tried to get a television show. You saw what happened. There's no way in the world they were going to let me on the air. And I believe, based on a conversation that I had with Michael King, the guy who runs KingWorld, here's how these guys think: For those of you who don't know, KingWorld is a syndicator that does Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy!, and Oprah Winfrey. They make an enormous amount of money. Basically, this man earns his living by providing an alternative to the news because the shows that he puts on the air are things that people watch when they don't want to watch the news. So he's made hundreds of millions of dollars by giving people an alternative to the news. We had a conversation in a restaurant about six months ago. He really didn't like [[Jesse Jackson]], and I don't like Jesse Jackson either, but I said, "Jesse is such a huckster he ought to have his own television show. Give Jesse a talk show". And for a minute the cash register went off in this guy's mind, you know, Jesse Jackson with a talk show. Then he immediately said, "No way, I won't give the man a forum". And as much as they like money, and as much as he knew that if Jesse Jackson had a T.V. talk show he would have high rating, this guy wouldn't put Jesse on the air because he didn't want to give him a forum. And I have a feeling that that same conversation was repeated in certain ways when the topic of my talk show was brought up at networks. So, the problem is not how to say it, it's how you get what you're going to say into the ear of the person who needs to hear it. That's the trick.
+That's right, because if you can understand all three specimens, you can communicate with them. You talk to a dog a different way than you talk to a cat, which is a different way than you talk to a goldfish. You have to understand that they do exist, and if you have to communicate with people who are in any one of those levels, or not in those levels, you have to find the language that gets the point across. The difficulty is not inventing the language, the difficulty is finding the medium by which to disseminate the language because a person such as myself does not have access to media. You can't. I tried to get a television show. You saw what happened. There's no way in the world they were going to let me on the air. And I believe, based on a conversation that I had with Michael King, the guy who runs KingWorld, here's how these guys think: For those of you who don't know, KingWorld is a syndicator that does Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy!, and Oprah Winfrey. They make an enormous amount of money. Basically, this man earns his living by providing an alternative to the news because the shows that he puts on the air are things that people watch when they don't want to watch the news. So he's made hundreds of millions of dollars by giving people an alternative to the news. We had a conversation in a restaurant about six months ago. He really didn't like [[Rhymin'_Man#Notes_About_This_Song|Jesse Jackson]], and I don't like Jesse Jackson either, but I said, "Jesse is such a huckster he ought to have his own television show. Give Jesse a talk show". And for a minute the cash register went off in this guy's mind, you know, Jesse Jackson with a talk show. Then he immediately said, "No way, I won't give the man a forum". And as much as they like money, and as much as he knew that if Jesse Jackson had a T.V. talk show he would have high rating, this guy wouldn't put Jesse on the air because he didn't want to give him a forum. And I have a feeling that that same conversation was repeated in certain ways when the topic of my talk show was brought up at networks. So, the problem is not how to say it, it's how you get what you're going to say into the ear of the person who needs to hear it. That's the trick.
 '''Did you want to categorize the three levels?<br>

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 '''During our break, you mentioned something about George Bush's campaign?<br>
-The thing about [[George Bush|Bush]] is, if in fact he has won the election, then why is he still campaigning? And, if in fact he has won the election, then wasn't there a payment of forty-six million dollars that was either made to him, or split between him and Dukakis, which is part of that fund where everybody checks off a dollar on their income tax – all this campaign money. If he's won the election, then why is he still spending that money? Shouldn't he give it back? I think that if he insists on spending that money, then he's committing some kind of a fraud.
+The thing about [[George H.W. Bush|Bush]] is, if in fact he has won the election, then why is he still campaigning? And, if in fact he has won the election, then wasn't there a payment of forty-six million dollars that was either made to him, or split between him and Dukakis, which is part of that fund where everybody checks off a dollar on their income tax – all this campaign money. If he's won the election, then why is he still spending that money? Shouldn't he give it back? I think that if he insists on spending that money, then he's committing some kind of a fraud.
 '''Did you see the movie called Cover Up?<br>
@@ Line 358: / Line 358: @@
 '''But there are so many people who would express that view. They're quite fed up with the polls. There's a massive sense of frustration.<br>
-The people who are fed up with the polls are the people who are already smart enough to see through the bullshit to begin with. The people who are bamboozled by the polls are the ones that are most likely to vote for [[George Bush|Bush]]. It's the whole idea that Americans think a winner is so terrific, and if you put the little winner's crown on one guy before the election, the day after the election, you want to make sure you voted for the guy who won. Because when you talk to your buddies when they slap each other on the back drinking Miller Lite in the bar after the election, you want to have been on the team. And that's part of the peer pressure to move the votes around.
+The people who are fed up with the polls are the people who are already smart enough to see through the bullshit to begin with. The people who are bamboozled by the polls are the ones that are most likely to vote for [[George H.W. Bush|Bush]]. It's the whole idea that Americans think a winner is so terrific, and if you put the little winner's crown on one guy before the election, the day after the election, you want to make sure you voted for the guy who won. Because when you talk to your buddies when they slap each other on the back drinking Miller Lite in the bar after the election, you want to have been on the team. And that's part of the peer pressure to move the votes around.
 '''But there always seems to be candidates for that level of humanity. Do you expect your criticism could wake one of them up?<br>
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 '''There's where the naivety is, and maybe that's why people are so hypnotized by father images. Because they said, "Well, things are so out of control, we need a tough guy". I mean, this could be a disservice of the television age bringing ... <br>
-Anybody who looks at [[George Bush]] and sees a tough guy has really been mediated.
+Anybody who looks at [[George H.W. Bush]] and sees a tough guy has really been mediated.
 '''"Mediated" – don't they call in the "mediators" during the strikes? That relates to the media.<br>
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 '''So, another way of trying to get people to believe that all time exists now is trying to get them to have an open mind, open senses, to not filter data that's coming in. It's the same thing.<br>
-You've just got to listen to all the stuff that's coming in, good, bad, and indifferent. And hope that you have the educational preparation to be able to sort it. That's one of the problems why people would find what I do difficult for them to adapt to because I got out of the U.S. schoolsystem at a point where you could still learn to readand write, and I don't think that you can do that anymore. I think that the basic education that people receive in this country is so pitiful that they can't. They're not even equipped to sort data. And I don't think it's an accident. I think that the school system has been purposely damaged to keep people from being able to sort data because only a person who can't data will vote for a guy like [[George Bush|Bush]] or [[Ronald Reagan|Reagan]]. You have to be numb.
+You've just got to listen to all the stuff that's coming in, good, bad, and indifferent. And hope that you have the educational preparation to be able to sort it. That's one of the problems why people would find what I do difficult for them to adapt to because I got out of the U.S. schoolsystem at a point where you could still learn to readand write, and I don't think that you can do that anymore. I think that the basic education that people receive in this country is so pitiful that they can't. They're not even equipped to sort data. And I don't think it's an accident. I think that the school system has been purposely damaged to keep people from being able to sort data because only a person who can't data will vote for a guy like [[George H.W. Bush|Bush]] or [[Ronald Reagan|Reagan]]. You have to be numb.
 '''You have to be numb and at the same time, while they're making the school system impoverished, they are increasing the information flood on people with cable, the multi-channels, and fiberoptics. This is the ... <br>