kagablog

Joe’s garage prenotes: act 2. by mick raubenheimer
 
 
chapter –1: the ugliness aesthetic.
 
 
Zappa’s apparently infantile attraction to the icon of Ugly runs amuck throughout Joe’s midi-tragic pseudo-demise:
Moustached Catholic hornies; unpronounceable itches; Don’s big dumb “I’ll take care o da faggot” cock; compromised wet titties (and big ‘uns..); gay robots ‘plooked’ to death; Sales Execs suckin oneother off to da beat of Grim-hole; Journalists squattin on da (revolvin’) cosmic-utensilled pensil, et al..
and yet echoeing along these sordid symbol-scapes a painfully melancholic watermelon croons its ballad:
Almost each of Zappa’s cruddy poems are submerged in rare, intricate and idiosyncratically wonderful instrumental patterns (or, abstract communications)- on ‘Joe’s garage’ these sublime and dark beauts perpetuate the entire audio-script.., ripe examples: the Pink intrusion in “Fembot in a wet T-shirt”, the resolution to “Keep it Greasy”, the completely ‘unrelated’ instrumental description of the emotional/psychological state “On the bus” (:y’know, Mary squished thru multiple muso/roadie appreciation into seat 33 etc)..
 
For Zappa sucking cock, lechering voyeurism, dark desires, dirty love et al are not images of ethically compromising physical situations:
The elements involved are symbolic.. and symbolic of that much-censored drive toward communication of self: sexual desire as symbolic of the urgent drive in individuals to communicate the self: that which you are, your consequentiality/meaning..
This of course also one of the underlying meanings of art – Communication of the special self, the unique, the individual, and its experience of reality.
 
Note that sucking cock, lecherous voyeurism, dark desires and yes even dirty love are only compromising and sad (:ugly) in contexts that suppress the original impulse.
In a healthy Sunshine the above become nubile, virile expressions
of Life (:pretty)
:Dirty love becomes naughty toight positions, Dark desires become passionate motivations, Lechering voyeurism becomes the moment preceding coy consent and sucking cock becomes.. well, Sucking cock.
 
Alchemy: ugly as beautiful.
     
Joe’s garage is ultimately concerned with the nihilism of censorship, and its ethical guise: “We suppress what is wrong (for the undifferentiated masses), in order to preserve the quality of life of the (dead-eyed, molded, undifferentiated) masses.”
For Zappa reality only has meaning through the individual.
Any social reality bred in the dogmatic soil of some ideologically fixed/set Governing body is worthless – an exercise in the anti-human. Artless, void of aesthetics: minus cock and absent pussy.
 
Two things capture the individual-as-concept for Zappa: sex and art. What conjoins the two is passionate frustration towards communication of the individual self: art being sex’s abstract incestuous sibling. This why Zappa’s art (ahem) is so saturated with sexual (ahem) imagery..
 
Zappa relishes in the unsayable, in the aesthetic possibilities lurking behind iron curtains:
Sweet devoted catholic girls (all light pinks and golden halo..) sucking mean fat hairy cock in the Confessional acquire potent down on the ol’ upper lip, signifying growth, evolution.
Zappa is all about erectile tissue..
When scolding studio muso’s on their ‘to-the-note’ translations of tablature (ie. their sterile renditions of fertile ink) Zappa says: “Give it eye-brows!” (he might as well have exclaimed- “give it beard”, for here eye-brows refer to the arsenalizing of the latent brow.. making it say something.):
In the album ‘Uncle Meat’ a mad professor invents a gargantaun machine which emits powerful beams reducing bland innocent victims to a palpitating paralyzed state swooning in wild sexual fantasies; the ‘affected’ individuals stand up (a good palpitation later) markedly different in two respects – strange eyes and hugely elongated noses:
the noses have grown in order to accommodate the subjects’ newly amplified grey matter (are also phallic – representing potent new patterns bent on fertilization, on spreading the new word..), the eyes represent, of course, new sight, new vision –
new values… 
 
The Unsayable is then, for Zappa, the crucial, the potentially defining: For the unsayable is either that which is suppressed (because it is dangerous, ie. potentially disruptive of an established system, ie. potent), or that which hasn’t been found (the unconceptualizeable, the patterns outside the given awareness..):
 
HERE WE FIND ZAPPA’S AESTHETIC- TO REVEAL THE PRESENCE OR POSSIBILITY OF NEW PATTERNS, AND IMPLICITLY, OF NEW AWARENESS, NEW VALUES.
Art and Sex as evolutionary in concern.
 
For Zappa censorship nihilizes not only new possibilities, but also their attainment: for it not only forbids the new but also that in the self which desires the new.    
 
 
 
 
Chapter two: theme one.
 
 
As model for Zappa’s general aesthetic as well as his more specific socio-ethical concerns Joe goes down a blast – it’s all here:
The political vulgarity, the scatological scenery, the linear assault of various apparently unrelated imagery and sound-patterns, the post-jazz pre-electronica staccato ambience, the eerily and oddly beautiful guitar-solos, the eerie and the odd.
And yes, the odd watermelon.
 
On the surface ‘Joe’s garage’ is just another crude vehicle for mr Z to release more of his vulgar music and overlong guitar indulgences.. look carefully however and you’ll notice that ‘Joe’ has no surface; that is, in sync with all his albums ‘Joe’s garage’ has no surface value as such – in Zappa’s world every element is connected to every other element, forms an intrinsic cue to the all-arching tapestry and its secret design..: Surface as nothing but Content in a specific position.. Conceptual Continuity ladies n gennlmen.
Zappa, then, exists only for the initiated, or rather, the initiating (for there is no consummate conclusion, no set point of pregnant recognition): the uninitiated forever misread, don’t sense the presence of Zappa’s personal language, the subtle or violent perversions of extant meaning that permeate his tongue, his riddled code..
 
To follow Zappa on his delighted madcap venture into unknowns one must learn his language, one must experience his attitude, his ontological mood. This is what we intend to extract from Joe’s central sneer – this piece herefore attempts to unveil Zappa’s aesthetic, his conceptual code ladies n gents, but through that wondrous perspective, that idiosyncratic nook of vision: ‘Joe’s garage’.
 
 
Chorus one resurfaced: Art vs. limbo.
(or, fucking vs unloading)
 
The white zone.
 
Zappa’s art can be pigeon-holed. Yes it’s true. From a socio-ethical vantage Zappa’s art is nothing more than a positivistic exercise against censorship. Ranging from the universal (ethical censorship) to the specific (aesthetic censorship) Zappa’s art is defined as an assertion of beauty and value behind conceptual iron curtains, and moreover as the lewd idea that essential human beauty thrives exactly there where various dust-smitten configurations of censorship forbid experience, sensation,
and yes even
presence.. 
 
‘Joe’s garage’ serves as a prime model for the elucidation of both poles:
Ethically it protests (in trademark idiosyncratic complexity) the ever-looming atmosphere of sociological censorship – individual acts (expressions of experience) as virtuous only if they promote the dogma-hewn mass.. ie. if they aren’t individual;
Aesthetically it sneeringly ignores musical/genre prescriptions and casually asserts Zappa’s musical language – a random and carefree collage of genre-affections boilt in a signature froth of underlying musiaesthetic dimensions: music ultimately as audio function of tension and harmony.. Zappa’s aesthetic essentially concerned with amongst others the challenge of creating harmony between apparently irreconcilable patterns/ sound-units..   music to infect the
 
white zone is for loading and unloading only.. if you have to load, or unload, go to the white zone.. you’ll love it, it’s a way of life..
 
 
Compositional frame: the stupid story
 
 
‘Joe’s garage’ is a silly story about how the Powers-that-be convert society into a neat package made up of cute little units (’individuals’) moved around by cute little forces (the current needs of the mass body).
Along the way ‘Joe’s garage’ comments on many questions including art, sex, beauty, religion, the Combine, plooking homo-bots to death, and the strands that connect them.  
 
The basic satirical message is self-explanatory: The central character is a teen-next-door whose sole and innocent aim is self-expression, represented by his musical and romantic ambitions – art and sex being essentially expressions of individual Self.
His aspirations are common and modest, never develop beyond the teenage dreams of fronting a band and going steady, making Joe a representative of individual man (with stress on individuality:
unlike common man Joe never compromises his individual self by “getting a good job”, by falling in line with the
white zone is for loading and unloading only, if you have to load or unload, go to the white zone, you’ll love it, it’s a way of life..)
Invariably these innocent pursuits, and specifically their passionate insistence, become threatening to his monochromatic social superstructure, the pristine grey-scape home to the Central scrutinizer.. and the Law gets called in.
Joe gets shipped off to a correctional facility where those most basic and effective techniques of correcting are applied – violation of the independent/ threatening self through violent removal of his freedom, his self, and complimentary violent assertion of the prescribed values.
 
Upon release, however, Joe has transcended the Orwellian society’s ethical/aesthetic restrictions and succeeds in expressing his soul through the abstract language of music, able to create sublime beauty fed only with the monochrome melody of the
 
white zone is for loading and unloading only, if you want to load or unload go to the        ….
 
Joe’s transcendence, however, comes at a price: Having no society with which to interact Joe retreats into an isolated madness – his expressions have value only for himself, are seemingly bereft of potency: Joe’s music is imaginary.
But not for Zappa – for Zappa art can never be sterilized, and so, in a parallell universe, Joe ends up tweaking nobs in the Utility Muffin Research Kitchen, releasing his idiosyncratic compositions into the minds of thousands who can but grin and bear the beauty of it all.
 
 
Philosophical signature 1: assaults on linearity
or: the what determined by the when.
 
 
One of Zappa’s key artistic characteristics is his unconventional use of rhythm, Neptunian, as Steve Vai coined it. In fact, it can be reasonably argued that a fascination with time (as the experiential medium of human perception) underscores and motivates all of Zappa’s compositional output, and that his musical legacy would be the sheer inventiveness of his use of rhythm, ‘time’, in composing.
 
As mentioned earlier the crude and vulgar lyrical structures in ‘Joe’s garage’ are always complemented by musical beauty, be it the beauty of intricate advanced musicianship or the more conventional beauty of melodic and rhythmic structures themselves. Note here Zappa’s self-revelatory claim that “lyrics exists for those who need them”. This movement will attempt to show that in ‘Joe’s garage’, as in all his work, Zappa’s most incisive and dramatic intellectual statements and gestures are mediated through the music, that is, the instrumental structures and their design, rather than the ’songs’.
As composer Zappa has striven to create a personal aesthetic, a musical signature – a music which derives from and communicates his philosophy, his ontological experience. To achieve this he has systematically broken down and refracted the stylistic influences from which his music was born, arriving at a style so multifariously inflected by existing musical genres as to be foreign to all of them, and eventually concocting out of this complex beast a musical aesthetic suggestive only of itself.. This process in itself demands a book for proper investigation, as such will only be touched on here – the name Zappa has assigned to the contours of this process, and the eventual design of its realization (for the former is subsumed in the latter) is Conceptual Continuity, a notion which informs and defines every aspect, every moment, of Zappa’s art.
 
Expressed as a formula Conceptual Continuity is “the when determining the what”, which is pretty vague, but a helpful cue nonetheless:
 
By reducing music to its abstract foundations, that is, a function of audio harmony and tension, stylistic elements become purely aesthetic manipulations, ie. are stripped of prescriptive force –
Any form of sound or sound-pattern can now be introduced to the linear structure without disrupting it, given that its presence is accounted for compositionally.. Zappa’s challenge here has been the realization of a compositional context which can cope with and absorb any conceivable sound-event into itself.
 
Sub-theme stirring: a musical equivalent to noise.
 
An exemplary and not-too-incongruent model for Zappa’s realized Compositional Context is Noise:
Noise taken as a linear aural event cannot be disrupted by any additional sound-events; within the linear parameters (eg. 2 minutes of noise) it translates any sound into itself – noise as self-improvisational. The reason for noise’s compositional supremacy is the modest fact that it defines itself as it unfolds – no aural event or relation challenges its structure, even absence of sound becomes merely a sly note tucked into its fretboard, its grammar. Noise has no stylistic politics.
As musical analogy noise is nothing other than the audio traces of time doing its thing. And “Composing”, Zappa says, ” is decorating time”, nothing more or less than pinning sound to various points in/of time – music being merely the interrelations between these audiofied moments.
Alchemy: noise as music.
 
In ‘Joe’ Conceptual Continuity rears its beautiful head in the instrumental and improvised sections, with the guitar digesting on and reacting to the various insane and tight melodic and rhythmic cluster-runs. With ‘Joe’ Zappa introduces into his sly compositional repertoire a fitting CC (hereafter abbreviation for conceptium cahntnooty) gimmick coined ‘xenophrany’. ‘Xenophrany’ being that smugly and snugly pseudo improvisational event where eg. a lead solo from a past compositional context is spliced into an APPARENTLY UNRELATED setting. A raising of the stakes ..
 
 
 
*****************
 
 
 
 

 

 
 
 
_{JOE’S GARAGE TAKE 3: VOLUME ONE..
 
 
 
prologue: Zappa and art on the bus.
 
 
Zappa is ugly. Approach him from any angle and you will reel, yes you will gasp and contort and slam your palms over your ears, your eyes, your aura.. too late. The damage is done: ugliness spreads, and whether you like it or not you are the carrier..
Ugliness as aesthetic. Welcome to Zappa’s universe.. no escape, the medium is shared –   tuck yourself into the safest, most ventilated nook of rock and you’re still here:
The universe is what cannot be escaped. Death? Nope: Just a moral trick – ego is a little more complex.. even the ultimate denial does no more than re-introduce you to your place.. the vectors and givens may have been reconfigurated, the essence remains.. and ladies and gentleman the essence is Uggily: Stubborn and a-gloat, carefree and insatiable and forever foreign in ethical design the ugly is what life is really all about: for the imposing dark mass that it is Ugly fosters the grand secret, the great design itself – Beauty. An illusion deeper and more dire than the conceptual trick of self and death and the strands inbetween is the illusion that shovels Ugly and Evil under the same ethicizing carpet. And this is what these electro-magnetic squirms of ink shall attempt to introduce: The notion of Ugly vs. Evil, in short: a reconsideration of Beauty through the tricky lens of Joe’s trivially sad meanderings into selfnessness, and the subsequent revelation of Evil as that very air from which bleak contra-individuals swallow their routine of Safety, Predictability and Security.
 
‘Joe’s garage’ is a pretty little vantage for the more considerable task of absorbing the meaning of Zappa.. we shall investigate then, for full advantage, the dialect through which Joe communicates the greater rhythms of Zappa’s mysterious beat.}