Frank Zappa, American composer and musician: Difference between revisions

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'''Artist:''' Frank Zappa

(Quote from Zappa! magazine; interview by editor Don Menn.) <P>

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'''The Incident:''' During a Dutch music awards ceremony in 1968 (for the LP "We're Only In It for the Money") Zappa heard the album for the first time since he turned it into the record company. "I noticed that whole chunks of songs were missing. Someone at MGM had been offended by the lyrics and had arbitrarily chopped portions of them out.  On September 19, 1985, Zappa appeared before a Congressional hearing on explicit lyrics in popular music. The hearing was called at the behest of Top Government Officials whose wives included Susan Baker and Tipper Gore, founders of the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC), which eventually waged a campaign of lies and pressure that forced the record industry to agree to "Warning Parental Advisory" stickers on certain albums. <P>

"If the goal here is total verbal/moral safety, there is only one way to achieve it: watch no TV, read no books, see no movies, listen to only instrumental music or buy no music at all." Ironically, one of Zappa's instrumental albums was stickered by a retail chain, many of which have strict "18 to buy" regulations on albums with "Tipper stickers." <P>

There are many, many more censorship cases in Zappa's history, involving record companies, radio stations, TV stations, governments and retail stores.  <P>

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'''Results of Incident:''' Frank Zappa died December 4, 1993, of complications resulting from prostate cancer. He remains one of America's most respected contemporary musicians and free speech soldiers. "Zappa was dealing with questions that [George] Orwell dealt with in another era -- questions about conformity and the flow of information in a free society," music journalist Bill Paige told the Madison, Wisc., Capital Times following Zappa's death. "I can't think of any artist today who so truly carried on in that tradition of social satirism. You'd be hard pressed to find someone who spoke so much truth about what was wrong in society, in government, in the music industry itself."  <P>

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'''Source:''' Bill Paige

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[[Category:Explicit Sexuality]]

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[[Category:Frank Zappa]]

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