Interview by Bob Marshall - Revision history

Spider of Destiny at 22:06, 6 August 2026

2026-08-06T22:06:26Z

Spider of Destiny at 21:08, 13 June 2026

2026-06-13T21:08:56Z

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

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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 [[Wikipedia:Yuppie|Yuppie]] culture was a natural product of the [[Hippies|Hippie]] culture?<br>
+'''Would you say that the [[Yuppies|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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 '''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 [[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.
+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|Yuppies]] and the stuff that they were interested in, there will be one 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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 '''Oh, I see. It's not imposed. It adapts to everything.<br>
-"Impose" is the wrong word. It exists and you can consider the Universe an imposition if you're truly arrogant, or you can just deal with it the way it is. Here, it's a universe of rates. You have molecular rates. You have large-scale rates. You have the expansion of the Universe rate. You have the rate of atomic decay. You have the rate of aging. You have all these rates. So, it's a world of rates, and rates are time. Just so you really understand it, the rate is the difference between when it starts and when it ends. That's the rate. These are cycles. A cycle is the way it goes up, the way it goes down. That's one cycle. You know, it's pretty consistent the way I look at stuff. But I seldom do interviews with people where they ask me about any of these kind of things. They usually want to know, "Well what about that Tipper Gore?"
+"Impose" is the wrong word. It exists and you can consider the Universe an imposition if you're truly arrogant, or you can just deal with it the way it is. Here, it's a universe of rates. You have molecular rates. You have large-scale rates. You have the expansion of the Universe rate. You have the rate of atomic decay. You have the rate of aging. You have all these rates. So, it's a world of rates, and rates are time. Just so you really understand it, the rate is the difference between when it starts and when it ends. That's the rate. These are cycles. A cycle is the way it goes up, the way it goes down. That's one cycle. You know, it's pretty consistent the way I look at stuff. But I seldom do interviews with people where they ask me about any of these kind of things. They usually want to know, "Well what about that [[Tipper Gore]]?"
 '''Yeah, I haven't heard you explain the Big Note before. So it's coming out now because it's been evoked.<br>

← 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>

@@ Line 678: / Line 678: @@
 '''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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 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.

@@ Line 491: / Line 491: @@
 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.