This is an excerpt from an interview with Frank Zappa published in Progressive Magazine in 1986. See the whole article here.
Frank Zappa, from his own auto-biography, defined himself as a “practical conservative”, but something about the statement below is beautifully libertarian. I guess the two terms are like cousins anyway. Anyway, he’s a hero to me, a champion of the Ayn Rand-type protagonist that deserves my respect.
Frank Zappa: I don’t know how to explain it. I just do it. It’s not based on any academic regulations. If you take a blank piece of paper and pencil and just start sketching, it doesn’t necessarily have to be a house and a tree and a cow. It could just be some kind of scribble, but sometimes those scribbles work and they are the right thing for that blank piece of space and you can enjoy them Or you can say, “That’s not a house, that’s not a cow, that’s not a tree, and so I don’t like it; it’s just a scribble.” It depends on what your viewpoint is.
Lyons / Friedman: Is your view truly as subjective as you are painting it to be? So, if I look at an image and it appeals to me, then all I can say is that it works for me and I can’t say any more about it?
Frank Zappa: What else do you have the right to say? If you go beyond that, you become a critic. Who needs those fuckers?
Lyons / Friedman: Other people might say that there’s something universal, some sort of consensus on what works and what doesn’t.
Frank Zappa: People are free to agree. If you want to join a committee to feel the warmth and reassurance of other people’s opinions to reinforce your own, then go for it. I happen to not care for that. It’s not something that I aspire to, nor do I want to live my life in accordance with that ideal. In fact, I despise it. But it’s okay for other people. There’s no reason why I should inflict my point of view on somebody who enjoys being part of a group consensus.
Lyons / Friedman: What are the relative merits of various human pursuits? For example, do you consider jogging or playing ice hockey to be of equal value to say creating art, on some cosmic scale?
Frank Zappa: No.
Lyons / Friedman: Why? What is the scale?
Frank Zappa: What is it that survives from ancient civilizations that characterizes that civilization? What do you find? Not their jogging! The music doesn’t survive, but things that are related to art do. The beautiful things that the societies do is what survives. Let’s look into the future. Let’s look at the remnants of the American society . . .
Lyons / Friedman: Wait a second, ugly things survive too.
Frank Zappa: Yep. That’s what will survive the American society!
Lyons / Friedman: You seem to admire the raw emotional energy of some music, yet you have little tolerance for emotional love songs.
Frank Zappa: It’s quite a challenge to reach somebody emotionally without using words that have literal connections. To perform expressively on an instrument, I have respect for that. To get to the level of performance where you are no longer thinking about operating a piece of machinery, that is worthy of respect. Writing a song about why somebody left you, that’s stupid. The performers and composers don’t necessarily believe in what they’re saying or what they are doing, but they know that if you write a song about love, it’s got a 3,000 per cent better chance of going on the radio than if you write a song about celery. It’s a buy and a sell. And so the value system builds up from that. What I think of as the emotional content of music is probably a lot different than what you think of. Since I write music, I know what the techniques are. If I wanted to write something that would make you weep, I could do it. There’s ways to do it. It’s a cheap shot.
