Talk:Audience Participation

Zappa's classic line about this is: "...if there's one thing I like it's, uh, audience participation"

Zappa's whole project is about activating the audience in some way, engaging the audience. He even talks in an early interview (original Mothers of course) about bringing out audience hostility on purpose, hoping to then 'polarize' that feeling. It's really quite brilliant. So, Zappa is using ironic understatement there, as so often. In fact, the idea that an audience *doesn't* participate in their own entertainment is what's strange, although that is kind of a typical industrial/American approach to it - passivity; music and other entertainments as mere marketing hooks or markers for 'lifestyle'. Audience participation is something else, and it doesn't have to include being at a concert,