Ben Watson at The Yellow Snow Festival, Larvik, 11-ii-2012
The
Yellow Snow Festival has been going for three years, the brainchild of the
Po-Jama People, Norway's Frank Zappa fan club. It takes place in Larvik, Norway, the birthplace of
Thor Heyerdahl (rogue anthropologist) and
Arne Nordheim (rogue composer). It welcomes in Frank Zappa fans for a weekend of music and beer-drinking, and takes place in a glitteringly new glass venue named
Bolgen (it caught the sun and winked at me as I flew out courtesy Ryanair), a Kulturhus constructed at the foot of a fjord with breathtaking views of sea, snow and mountains. This is the text I read from the concert stage between sets by Bongo Fury, a Swedish power trio who negotiated the intricacies of 'Echidna's Arf (of You)' with jaw-dropping aplomb. Later on, we heard the Muffin Men demonstrate that Liverpool remains the font of true rock (they played '
I Am the Walrus', credited by Roddie Muffin — of course — to Gerry & the Pacemakers [how very droll - TGE]). Despite the 'language barrier', I got laughs and cheers and all-round encouragement during this lecture, quite a contrast to my last attempt to take Poodle Play to Cambridge University …
Preamble
The title of my lecture this afternoon is
Zappa: Hegel, or, Not Again (Again). When the
Po-Jama People contacted me about this talk in November last year, they asked me if I'd repeat my lecture from 2003 at the Kamp Theater in Bad Doberan at
Zappanale #14. That one was called 'The Phenomenology of One Size Fits All: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Frank Zappa'. Now, according to Heraclitus, the first dialectical thinker in the Western tradition, repetition is strictly impossible: no man steps into the same river twice. That is why James Joyce began
Finnegans Wake with the word "riverrun"; and why in Frank Zappa's oeuvre repetition signifies claustrophobia, repression and death. In
Ruben & the Jets, the harmonic restrictions and rhythmic repetitions of 50s pop music culminate in 'Stuff Up the Cracks', a song of teenage suicide:
"Stuff up the cracks, turn on the gas / I'm going to take my life". In
Zoot Allures, corporate pop strategies culminate in 'Disco Boy', a portrait of a victim of the culture industry (disco department). Despite punters who think a 'real' rock show should sound just like the album, repetition never successfully recreates the living totality of something. Rather, repetition locks the present in a prison-cell derived from the past. Real life — in contrast — is contingent, accident-prone and improvised. So it would be completely wrong to repeat my lecture from 2003 here at the Yellow Snow Festival! We've all changed, what we've said to each other in the intervening years has changed us, nothing remains the same.
Let it Grow
However, I've not stopped thinking about either Hegel or Zappa, so I suppose I could update my talk from 2003, maybe let it grow a bit:
"The vines streak upward, large grotesque pods grow under the leaves and flop off on the ground near the big switches and into the canyon." That was the final sentence of Zappa's science-fiction story in the booklet accompanying
Uncle Meat (1969), by the way. After I'd delivered my lecture on
One Size Fits All at Zappanale #14, Errol Slick — drummer with the Paul Green School of Rock and descendent of West Coast rock royalty — came up to me and said, He'd got what I was saying about the moment in 'Andy' at 3:17 when the tectonic plates of the counter-rhythms slip and you stare into an infinite abyss of rattling bones, ourselves viewed as we now view the dinosaurs, but no-one else in the class had. So, since my original talk wasn't perhaps so easy to understand back then, maybe I should summarise it for you: a whizz version, like playing Elvis Presley's 'Heartbreak Hotel' at 78rpm.
The reason I'd originally decided to talk about Hegel at Zappanale #14 in the first place was this: in
Phenomenology of Spirit (1807, § 486) Hegel says that Enlightenment upsets Religion by bringing into the
"the household of Faith" the
"tools and utensils of this world". Suddenly I understood Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa and their dadaistic play with vacuum cleaners and vegetables and other household objects — not to mention the cosmic floating sofa on the cover of
One Size Fits All. I mean, I'd always liked these 'bizarre' aspects of Beefheart and Zappa, and found them funny and somehow 'correct'. Now I knew why: by using household items to destroy the otherworldly romanticism of commercial pop, they were staging their own budget Enlightenment!
But this Freak Enlightenment has a dialectic, it's arrived at through invention, spontaneity and play. It's not the imposition of a single law, of a rationality emanating from a single source, like light from the sun or a Gold Standard for national currencies. It doesn't destroy the fun, or reduce variety to a monotone. Quite the opposite, in fact. For commercial reasons, Zappa ended up centering his production on himself, using his own face and moustache as a logo. Nevertheless, his oeuvre is a mesh of other people, dehusked from inhibition by the zappological process, thrown into extreme states, whisked into unheard omelettes. Of all these dehusked people the most crucial was Captain Beefheart. As teenagers, Beefheart and Zappa listened to black R&B together. They decided R&B was a blueprint, a plan, a manifesto for total social transformation: a merging of life and art so vital and compulsive, it made the claims of the high-art avantgarde to
"supersede the gap between life and art" look pale and unreal. Beefheart and Zappa emerged from a common experience, a common response to R&B, but the beauty of their relationship was based on a knowing antagonism. They competed with each other and in the early 70s dissed each other in interviews, but they were working out two poles of a single dialectic.
Zappa loved to shock music-press interviewers by talking about his devotion to 'duty' and 'work', taboo concepts for the flower-power mindset. Beefheart argued the opposite. His creative impulse sprang from 'play', not work. Beefheart and Zappa disagreed about work and play, love and marketing, time and song-length — everything. On
Unconditionally Guaranteed in 1972, Beefheart sang:
She said, Baby, how long is your song?
I said, Baby, as long as you want it to be
On Overnite Sensation in 1973, as if replying, Ricky Lancelotti sang:
I have take your time
I have sung you my song
Ain't no great revelation
But it wasn't too long
Lancelotti opens 'Fifty-Fifty' with:
Ain't gonna sing you no love song
whereas Beefheart's track was actually named 'Happy Love Song'.
Having bad-mouthed each other in the music press throughout 1974, a sound commercial ploy for attracting attention, Beefheart and Zappa went on tour together and cut an album:
Bongo Fury, which Vaclav Havel told Zappa was his
"favourite". Havel's enthusiasm contrasts with
Bongo Fury's reception in America and England:
Rolling Stone and
New Musical Express panned it. It wasn't as good as
Trout Mask Replica, the pair had run out of steam, the record was boring and self-indulgent. Actually, the opposing personalities of Beefheart and Zappa created a vortex:
Bongo Fury is a lesson in the dialectical unity of opposites. Captain Beefheart's beat-poet sincerity and abjection run in the opposite direction to Zappa's control-freak cartoonery. This crash-course of opposites also occurs on the LP cover. At first, the cover image looks quite straightforward, especially in comparison to the elaborate artwork Cal Schenkel concocted for
One Size Fits All.
Bongo Fury's cover shows a snapshot of Zappa and Beefheart in a sordid diner, evoking the sorry picture of America outlined in '200 Years Old'. But look again.
In 2010, Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf Verlag in Berlin published a massive book by Frank Wonneberg called
Grand Zappa: Internationale Frank Zappa Discology. It's a work of adoration, scholarship and fan-obsession bordering on madness. Here you will find photographs of the covers and inner labels and vinyl grooves of every Frank Zappa LP release on the terrestrial globe: the Argentinian
Hot Rats, the Israeli
Sleep Dirt, the Czechoslovakian
Broadway the Hard Way. Wonneberg is a designer, so the book is a tour-de-force of data presentation. On top of that, he writes fascinating notes on the albums because he looks them as 'designed objects' rather than emanations of some presumed 'Zappa' in the sky. The information Wonneberg supplies about Bongo Fury is especially pertinent.
In the German release of
Bongo Fury, the cover photo wasn't cropped quite so closely along the upper edge as it was in other countries. We can therefore read some words printed on a mirror on the wall of the diner:
"chocolate sundae". But they are reversed, in 'mirror', what Wonneberg calls
"spiegelbildlich verwendet". The cover used a reverse-print of the photographic negative - what we call a 'flip horizontal' in image processing. I showed a copy of
Bongo Fury to Simon Prentis, who visited Zappa regularly in his last ten years.
"Anything strange about this photo?" I asked. He stared at it.
"Is the photo reversed?" he asked,
"Frank's face doesn't look quite right".
If the photo hadn't been reversed, Befheart would have been on the left and Zappa on the right. He would have been the 'first' figure you looked at, assuming you read a picture like Latin alphabetic text, left to write. So it's as if Zappa had the transparency reversed in order to place himself before his rival. If you look at the cover of
We're Only In It for the Money, you'll see that when re-enacting the innerfold band photograph of Sgnt. Pepper, Zappa placed himself far left. This means he's not actually on the cover, he's on the back. Since Jimmy Carl Black was the only Mother with a 'Zappa moustache' on the cover which faces you in a record shop, many new fans assumed he was Zappa. But when it comes to listing the Mothers in the sleeve notes ('left to right'), Zappa's position on the far left means he's listed first.
On the cover of
Bongo Fury, switching left and right means Zappa, right-handed, is holding his ice cream in his left hand whereas Beefheart, who had been holding his drink in his left hand, is now holding it with his right. Beefheart's face is hidden beneath his hat brim, and he casts a shadow on the wall; Zappa is staring straight at the camera. Zappa is the sun, Beefheart is the moon. A purely single-source, solar Enlightenment is not enough; the Dialectic of Enlightenment requires reflected light, a moon. Once you see that the negative transparency was reversed, you twirl the photo around a central axis in your mind; the pair are now whirled together, dark and light in a single vortex. This is how their opposite yet complimentary arts should be conceived. The real world as a confabulation of direct and reflected light, which it is. (We're not dualists, though. Even though we don't think direct light can be understood except through its reflection off non-illuming bodies, we don't see "darkness" as a principle.)
So, to Hegel, who more than anyone in the western tradition took seriously the dark/light lore of Oriental philosophy. Any more news from him? Well, yes. My worthy constituent, Kjeld-Willy from the
Po-Jama People, declares that he prefers Schopenhauer and Nietzsche to Hegel. Well, I haven't come this far North to dismiss the amazing contribution Northern Individualism has made to world philosophy, and how its insistence on interior truth begs all kinds of questions about a false religion, society or totality, howsoever you care to name the big drool of bothersome bonkers boredom which Zappa fans have to deal with every day comin' at them down the mas-media chute, or at least on the days we don't spend at the
Zappanale or here at the Yellow Snow Festival.
But, pace such pertinent Protestant individualism, Frank Zappa — and James Joyce before him — are fundamentally Catholic artists, recognising reality as social before it is individual; but they are also rebel Catholics, in other words they established new churches, towering edifices of technocratic artstuff from which to view the clash of ignorant armies in the easy valleys of preconception. After all, the Catholic/Protestant difference on society and individual is really just a matter of emphasis, articulating contradictions in the capitalist order, which is proved by the fact that they have become competing explanations of identical societies. Hegel, on the other hand, is neither Catholic or Protestant, Christian or Buddhist: his recovery of the dialectic allows him to explain stuff, even to Zappa fans.
Near the beginning of the shorter
Logic Hegel wrote in 1830 as an introduction to his
Encyclopedia (§12), Hegel says
"thinking is always the negation of what we have immediately before us". I am currently embroiled in a debate with Zappologist and guitarist Marco Maurizi. The ostensible debate is about animals and Marxism, but one bone of contention is that I like to quote something Marco said ages ago:
"Modern art is the interruption of mediation by immediacy". Unfortunately, Marco's now elevated himself above such crudeness and calls me a
"vulgar materialist" for reminding him of his statement. I liked Marco's earlier work, his contribution to Academy Zappa and his
I Was a Teenage Critical Theorist, a treatment of mass-culture 'trash': The X-Files; Go Nagai's animations for children's TV (Mazinger Z, Grendizer and Devilman); the Zombie films of George Romero; and Frank Zappa's music. Marco appears to have moved on from Zappology to Adornoism, seeking to spin an animal liberation politics out of the fine strands of
Dialectic of Enlightenment. He's now a 'political animal':
"Please read this," he said, responding to an attempt at dialogue by emailing me an academic paper,
"It is my personal contribution to a proper (i.e. political) understanding of the ‘animal’ question." I remain unmoved by either 'proper politics' or the politics of property. Why? I'm a trash hound!
Why am I a trash hound? Because the 'thinking' Hegel called for has been fully absorbed into an institutionalised racket where its one requirement is not truth or scholarship or logic, but remaining incomprehensible to non-professionals. For this obfuscation, the wackier your politics the better: Marco's 'animal liberation + Frankfurt School' is perfect. With Zappa, I encounter dialectical statements anyone can understand: not by 'dumbing down' philosophical concepts, but by rending the very materials of mass culture, so that they speak awkward and scandalous truths. Mass media have ensured that we live in a tissue of mediations: it's the duty of a properly political art — oh fuck that, I mean any decent response! — to tear into this tissue, and give us a sober view of ourselves and our relations to our kind. When Hegel talks of denying what is immediately in front of us, he was talking of a relatively unmediated world of tables and chairs and carts and horses, in which the arrival of a newspaper was perhaps a wonderful thing. Now, we are forced to live in a newspaper world, moulded by ideological experts. You can't lift a carrot and sniff it to see if it's worth eating, you must read the packaging's claims about organic and ethical farming, learn about some celebrity's decision to 'create' a range of pickled onions. Visit a supermarket, and your head reels: as Captain Beefheart used to say,
You've had too much to think.
Zappa fights back the thought police by making us look at what's immediately in front of us.
"Where do you get all the great ideas for his songs?" asked an especially inane TV interviewer.
"From the autocue, where you get them," Zappa replied, answering her question by exposing what was immediately in front of them. Zappa's 'bizarre' song titles do not drop down from some groovy surreal heaven, they stem by noticing what's immediately in front of us: 'Crush All Boxes', 'While You Were Out', 'Poofters Froth, Wyoming' - these signs were all out there in the mundane world. We only realised how bizarre and suggestive they were after Zappa cut these phrases out of everyday reality and framed them in pop songs.
Real thinking does not occur in the smooth gear-changes of academic philosophy, Marco, which rehearses a known vocabulary in order to remove the bumps and warts which bespot the rugged classics. Real thinking is like a Zappa tune, and plummets you into unexpected zones, ruins your cool, shrivels your professionalism, powders your pre-prepared responses into dust. A Zappa tune is thinking, but thinking with the whole body rather than with the specialised 0.05% they call the 'conscious mind' and which sorts and reorders concepts like checkers on a board.
Conclusion
In conclusion I'm going to say a few words about two sons of Larvik, and why they make it most appropriate to hold a Frank Zappa Festival here: Thor Heyerdahl and Arne Nordheim. Two originals! Heyerdahl's trip across the Pacific in the Kon-Tiki made him world famous, but I want to talk about another incident. Ever keen to practically demonstrate a possibility, Heyerdahl built a reed boat called the Tigris to demonstrate that trade and the migration of peoples could have linked Ancient Mesopotamia with the Indus Valley Civilization in what is now modern-day Pakistan. It was built in Iraq at the end of 1977, named after the Tigris River and sailed with its international crew through the Persian Gulf. In April 1978, the boat was still sea-worthy, yet Heyerdahl burnt it in Djibouti. The reason? To protest the wars raging on every side of the Red Sea and the Horn of Africa. He explained his reasons in an Open Letter to the UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim
Today we burn our proud ship... to protest against inhuman elements in the world of 1978... Now we are forced to stop at the entrance to the Red Sea. Surrounded by military airplanes and warships from the world's most civilized and developed nations, we have been denied permission by friendly governments, for reasons of security, to land anywhere, but in the tiny, and still neutral, Republic of Djibouti. Elsewhere around us, brothers and neighbors are engaged in homicide with means made available to them by those who lead humanity on our joint road into the third millennium. To the innocent masses in all industrialized countries, we direct our appeal. We must wake up to the insane reality of our time.... We are all irresponsible, unless we demand from the responsible decision makers that modern armaments must no longer be made available.
Thor Heyerdahl's theories have not always been acceptable in anthropology, but his basic premise - that civilization is created by trade and migration and the mixing of peoples - was progressive. And it was shared by Zappa. When the Chieftains and the Tuvan throat singers were playing together in Zappa's basement towards the end of his life, Paddy Moloney wondered how it could be that a Tuvan melody was identical to an old Irish jig.
"Sailors!" whispered Zappa and everyone laughed. But this is a genuine cultural politics, and it works against the petty nationalisms stoked by the imperial powers and their arms sellers. If you took a trip along the Mediterranean coast, you'd find the folk music you hear in port bars and the way people live their lives is a continuum. The national and religious 'divisions' mean little. I don't need to be saying this in Larvik, of course, since Norway has a long maritime history.
Like Heyerdahl, Arne Nordheim was a fearless and independent thinker and his music - bright, flowing and beautiful - had a big influence on Zappa in the
Roxy and Elsewhere period. They met in Denmark and became friends, and Zappa always visited him on his Norwegian tours. Nordheim's internationalist politics would have appealed to Zappa too. At the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lilhammer, Nordheim proposed a vast concerto mondiale for musicians on each of the Olympic continents linked by satellite relays.
"For a time," he said,
"the world would have stopped hating and killing, to make and listen to music". That's Zappa: music as a force for good in the world. I think I'll stop there.
Post-note 15-ii-2012
Talk to a Frank Zappa Festival audience while the beer is flowing, and you'll garner passionate but maybe incomplete responses. One member of the audience came up to me afterwards, outraged I'd talked about Heyerdahl: Didn't I know he ended up in Siberia looking for Woden, the guy was out of his mind? You're at a Zappa Festival and being out of your mind is a bad thing?? On reflection, I think the outrage was probably because Heyerdahl's Nordic madness was being understood as a premonition of Breivik's massacre (I got a similar response in Hamburg when I declared myself a follower of Asger Jorn: his theories of the Nordic condemn him as a Nazi, apparently). But that is precisely where the AMM stands: if all questioning of liberal logic (following
Pashukanis, we see liberal logic as commodity-based) is dismissed as fascist, that's because the very idea of workers' revolution has been unthought, reforgotten, cancelled. We are for a brave and unblinking look at our 'mad' impulses and desires; a Left for once not outrun by religious, commercial or fascist myths and propaganda. You with us? Then join us!!
