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Frank Zappa

Frank Zappa Books

Musician

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“Schools train you to be ignorant with style [...] they prepare you to be a usable victim for a military industrial complex that needs manpower. As long as you're just smart enough to do a job and just dumb enough to swallow what they feed you, you're going to be alright [...] So I believe that schools mechanically and very specifically try and breed out any hint of creative thought in the kids that are coming up.”

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“The really big news of the eighties is the stampede to regurgitate mildly camouflaged musical styles of previous decades, in ever-shrinking cycles of 'nostalgia. (It isn't necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice—there are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia. When you compute the length of time between The Event and The Nostalgia For The Event, the span seems to be about a year less in each cycle. Eventually within the next quarter of a century, the nostalgia cycles will be so close together that people will not be able to take a step without being nostalgic for the one they just took. At that point, everything stops. Death by Nostalgia.)”

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Book:The Real Frank Zappa Book
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“Failure is one of those things that 'serious people' dread. Invariably, the persons most likely to be crippled by this fear are people who have convinced themselves that they are SO bitchen they shouldn't ever be placed in a situation where they might fail. Failure is nothing to get upset about. It's a fairly normal condition; an inevitability in ninety-nine percent of all human undertakings. Success is rare—that's why people get so cranked up about it.”

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Book:The Real Frank Zappa Book
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“If any of my kids ever asked me that question, the answer would have to be: "What I do is composition." I just happen to use material other than notes for the pieces. Composition is a process of organization, very much like architecture. As long as you can conceptualize what that organizational process is, you can be a ‘composer’ — in any medium you want. You can be a ‘video composer’, ‘film composer’, a ‘choreography composer’, a ‘social engineering’ composer — whatever. Just give me some stuff, and I'll organize it for you. That's what I do.”

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“Alright. Let's get realistic now. You know and I know that the function of that number was just to provide some sort of warm-up trash before we do something HEAVY. Something a little bit harder to listen to, but which is probably better for you in the LONG RUN. The item in this instance, which will be better for you in the LONG RUN, and if we only had a little more space up here we could make it visual for you, is "Some Ballet Music," which we've played at most of our concert series in Europe. Generally in halls where we had a little bit more space and Motorhead and Kansas could actually fling themselves across the stage, and give you their teenage interpretation of the art of The Ballet. I don't think it's too safe to do it here, maybe they can just hug each other a little bit and do some calisthenics in the middle of the stage.”

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“The essence of Christianity is told us in the Garden of Eden history. The fruit that was forbidden was on the tree of knowledge. The subtext is, 'All the suffering you have is because you wanted to find out what was going on. You could be in the Garden of Eden if you had just kept your fucking mouth shut and hadn't asked any questions.”

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“It's fairly obvious, since Richard Nixon, that there is no such thing as a fair deal for any voter in the United States -- You're just not gonna get it. It's a joke -- the people that you vote for, they're the next best thing to criminals. But of course they have money for advertising campaigns that make them look a little bit better than they actually are.”

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“We live in a very special time right now. At no other time in history has there been such mass disillusionment in terms of reliance on governing functions. Most people don’t want to come to terms with that. It’s been proven over and over again that the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes, but most people don’t like to look at naked emperors. In the process of turning around to avert their eyes, they saw the discotheques and a few other things and latched onto them.”

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Author:Frank Zappa
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