Yuppies
Yuppies were a youth subculture who emerged during the 1980s. Its practioners were youngsters who wore formal suits, wanted to make as much money as possible and supported the conversative economical systems of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. The drug associated with yuppie culture was cocaine.
References to yuppies in Frank Zappa's work
- Any Kind Of Pain: "And all the yuppie boys, they dream they will rape her"
- When Yuppies Go To Hell
Frank Zappa about yuppies
"Much of the creative work I find interesting and amusing has no basis in economic reality. Most decisions relevant to expenditures for what gets produced and distributed are made strictly on a bottom line basis. Nobody makes a move without talking to their accountant first. There will always be people who will take a chance, but their numbers are dwindling. Those who are crazy enough to take the chance on spending money to make some unusual object or event take place are an endangered species. The spirit of adventurousness at any level of American society has been pretty much legislated away. In the eighties, with a repressive Republican, yuppie-oriented administration installed and ready to perpetuate itself with Supreme Court appointments that will keep us in trouble for the next half century, the prognosis is not good for things which differ from the viewpoint of the conservative right." - Frank Zappa in Winter In Amerika, interview by Steve Lyons and Batya Friedman, Option, January/February 1987.
"Radio is consumed like wallpaper is consumed. You don't concentrate on the radio, you turn it on while you're working, you turn it on while you're driving. It's not like the old days when families sat around and looked at it. So the stations are formatted to provide a certain texture and ambience that will be consumed by people who view themselves in a certain way. Are you a yuppie? Well. you're going to listen to a certain texture because that reinforces the viewpoint you have of yourself and the viewpoint you want to project to other people of who and what you are." (...) if you have a nation of people who refuse to face reality about themselves, about the rest of the world, about anything, they want reinforcement for the fantasy that they're living in. And these consulting services that format the station know that. Market research will show you that. So obviously you want to deliver to the public things that will reinforce that. A station loses money when somebody turns it off the air. So as long as your station sounds like the kind of swill that the yuppie needs to consume, you got it." - Frank Zappa in Winter In Amerika, interview by Steve Lyons and Batya Friedman, Option, January/February 1987.
"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. (...) There's no way I would ever dissuade a person who believes in the Rolex mentality from not going after the Rolex. They could care less what I think about them, but it still needs to be said. (...) 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 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." - Frank Zappa in Interview by Bob Marshall, 22 October 1988.
Would you say that the Yuppie culture was a natural product of the Hippie culture?
Frank Zappa: "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." - Frank Zappa in Interview by Bob Marshall, 22 October 1988.
"I think the anti-smoking business is a yuppie invention -- an extension of the concept that "we'll always be young, rich, and healthy." People who would ordinarily be chain-smoking, and loving every minute of it, are now eating salads and jogging till they puke. If they want to live that kind of life, fine -- I have other priorities." - Frank Zappa in The Real Frank Zappa Book, 1989.
"One of the interesting developments of the Reagan economic revolution is this syndrome that exists with yuppies where they can't have sex anymore. There's two dentists that work in this facility that I go to, and the younger partner admitted to me that he was a victim of this syndrome. He had lost all interest in sex because his work had become the most important thing to him. And I think you could easily describe this guy as a yuppie. Perhaps this is nature taking its course, because maybe it's good that the yuppies don't reproduce. (...) I think that there is a function for pornography in this society and considering who needs it the most, I think it's the yuppies." - Frank Zappa in Zappa!, Rockhead, Summer 1990, No. 4, Vol. 17.
What do you think happened in this country?
Frank Zappa: "Well, two important things, and each one of them has only three letters: One was LSD, a chemical which is capable of turning a hippie into a yuppie, one of the most dangerous chemicals known to mankind." - Frank Zappa in The Mother of All Interviews (Part 1), interviewed by Don Menn, 1992.
So in the case of "The Food Gathering In Post-Industrial America," you were trying to create scurrying sounds?
Frank Zappa: "Well, when we did it, the sounds themselves were created just as sounds, but when I listened to it, it seemed to me they conjured up this picture of desperate post-yuppies scrounging just through little, you know, nubs of used Pringles and stuff." - Frank Zappa in The Mother Of All Interviews (Part 2), interviewed by Don Menn, 1992.
