Um, based on the empirical evidence of his naming his kids Dweezel and Moon Unit, you may wish to reconsider your assessment. I’ll grant that Frank Zappa has a tremendous musical talent – as evidenced by the ever-popular classics “Don’t eat the yellow snow” and “Don’t you ever wash that thing?”. The Beatles were mere musical pygmies compared to him.
Put it this way – anyone who is more intelligent than me can only be an upper-grade genius, and Frank Zappa was beyond the shadow of a doubt more intelligent than me!
I thought he was dead, so I looked him up on Wikipedia. Sure enough Frank passed away on December 4, 1993.
So wherever the “You Tube” post came from, it is at least 20 years old.
Here’s a “You Tube” comment from 5 years ago:
jkoff76
5 years ago
Maybe I need to give people a little bit of background about the commercial. In the late eighties and early nineties, PG&E was running a series of advertisements to promote solar energy and energy conservation. (Remember folks, Portland is a hippie town and VERY Environmentally friendly) A number of similar ads were shown with famous people, not just Zappa. Andthe commercial has been cropped. It was a bit longer than the one here. The PGE ad slogan was after Zappa’s pitch. Hope this helps.
Frank Zappa is simply unclassifiable. More than anything, he stands out as an individual, intellectual, and non-conformist. His music was strange, sometimes discordant, sometimes hauntingly beautiful, never dull. It is often that way with great minds. His life testifies to his great love of music and his interest in society. In other times, he might have been considered a philosopher. He had complex ideas about society and expressed them in satire and lyric. His caustic lyrical style attracted and repelled listeners, and left few on the sidelines, probably intentionally so. It is this characteristic that vaulted him to stardom in Soviet Eastern Europe, where goons would say they would “beat the Zappa” out of them. An example of philosophy expressed through satire:
“Eventually it was discovered, that God did not want us to be all the same. This was Bad News for the Governments of The World, as it seemed contrary to the doctrine of Portion Controlled Servings. Mankind must be made more uniformly if The Future was going to work. Various ways were sought to bind us all together, but, alas, same-ness was unenforceable. It was about this time, that someone came up with the idea of Total Criminalization. Based on the principle, that if we were all crooks, we could at last be uniform to some degree in the eyes of The Law. […] Total Criminalization was the greatest idea of its time and was vastly popular except with those people, who didn’t want to be crooks or outlaws, so, of course, they had to be Tricked Into It… which is one of the reasons, why music was eventually made Illegal.”
– Joe’s Garage Acts II & III liner notes, 1979.
I used to rock Joe’s Garage out on long car trips in the mid 90’s, like between Morgantown (college) and Charleston (home) on the weekends. I never paid attention to the political notions; i just liked that the whole album told a story, and that the story was quite variant from the the main stream pop music.
Weird indeed!
Frank Zappa was a genius, and not only a musical genius.
Um, based on the empirical evidence of his naming his kids Dweezel and Moon Unit, you may wish to reconsider your assessment. I’ll grant that Frank Zappa has a tremendous musical talent – as evidenced by the ever-popular classics “Don’t eat the yellow snow” and “Don’t you ever wash that thing?”. The Beatles were mere musical pygmies compared to him.
Put it this way – anyone who is more intelligent than me can only be an upper-grade genius, and Frank Zappa was beyond the shadow of a doubt more intelligent than me!
http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/22302.Frank_Zappa
I thought he was dead, so I looked him up on Wikipedia. Sure enough Frank passed away on December 4, 1993.
So wherever the “You Tube” post came from, it is at least 20 years old.
Here’s a “You Tube” comment from 5 years ago:
jkoff76
5 years ago
Maybe I need to give people a little bit of background about the commercial. In the late eighties and early nineties, PG&E was running a series of advertisements to promote solar energy and energy conservation. (Remember folks, Portland is a hippie town and VERY Environmentally friendly) A number of similar ads were shown with famous people, not just Zappa. Andthe commercial has been cropped. It was a bit longer than the one here. The PGE ad slogan was after Zappa’s pitch. Hope this helps.
Frank Zappa is simply unclassifiable. More than anything, he stands out as an individual, intellectual, and non-conformist. His music was strange, sometimes discordant, sometimes hauntingly beautiful, never dull. It is often that way with great minds. His life testifies to his great love of music and his interest in society. In other times, he might have been considered a philosopher. He had complex ideas about society and expressed them in satire and lyric. His caustic lyrical style attracted and repelled listeners, and left few on the sidelines, probably intentionally so. It is this characteristic that vaulted him to stardom in Soviet Eastern Europe, where goons would say they would “beat the Zappa” out of them. An example of philosophy expressed through satire:
“Eventually it was discovered, that God did not want us to be all the same. This was Bad News for the Governments of The World, as it seemed contrary to the doctrine of Portion Controlled Servings. Mankind must be made more uniformly if The Future was going to work. Various ways were sought to bind us all together, but, alas, same-ness was unenforceable. It was about this time, that someone came up with the idea of Total Criminalization. Based on the principle, that if we were all crooks, we could at last be uniform to some degree in the eyes of The Law. […] Total Criminalization was the greatest idea of its time and was vastly popular except with those people, who didn’t want to be crooks or outlaws, so, of course, they had to be Tricked Into It… which is one of the reasons, why music was eventually made Illegal.”
– Joe’s Garage Acts II & III liner notes, 1979.
I used to rock Joe’s Garage out on long car trips in the mid 90’s, like between Morgantown (college) and Charleston (home) on the weekends. I never paid attention to the political notions; i just liked that the whole album told a story, and that the story was quite variant from the the main stream pop music.
Zappa wrote a soundtrack for a Luden’s cough drops television commercial with Ed Seeman…..http://frankzapppa.blogspot.com/2014/02/zappas-soundtrack-for-tv-commercial.html