Frank Zappa > Quotes

“The bassoon is one of my favorite instruments. It has a medieval aroma, like the days when everything used to sound like that. Some people crave baseball...I find this unfathomable, but I can easily understand why a person could get excited about playing the bassoon.”
― Frank Zappa

“There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something we'd all love one another.”
― Frank Zappa

“The more you can escape from how horrible things really are, the less it's going to bother you...and then, the worse things get.”
― Frank Zappa

“For the record, folks; I never took a shit on stage and the closest I ever came to eating shit anywhere was at a Holiday Inn buffet in Fayetteville, North Carolina, in 1973.”
― Frank Zappa, The Real Frank Zappa Book

“Hey, you know something people?
I'm not black
But there's a whole lots a times
I wish I could say I'm not white”
― frank zappa

“The creation and destruction of harmonic and 'statistical' tensions is essential to the maintenance of compositional drama. Any composition (or improvisation) which remains consonant and 'regular' throughout is, for me, equivalent to watching a movie with only 'good guys' in it, or eating cottage cheese.”
― Frank Zappa

“Most people don't bother about their friends in the vegetable kingdom.”
― Frank Zappa

“Suddenly, books are arriving every day! "So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa, Frank Zappa Reader

“Anyone who is disturbed by the idea of newts in a nightclub is potentially dangerous.”
― Frank Zappa

“Politics is the entertainment division of the military industrial complex.”
― Frank Zappa

“All your children are poor unfortunate victims of systems beyond their control”
― Frank Zappa

“I detest love lyrics. I think one of the causes of bad mental health in the United States is that people have been raised on 'love lyrics'.

You're a young kid and you hear all those 'love lyrics', right? Your parents aren't telling you the truth about love, and you can't really learn about it in school. You're getting the bulk of your 'behaviour norms' mapped out for you in the lyrics to some dumb fucking love song. It's a subconscious training that creates desire for an imaginary situation which will never exist for you. People who buy into that mythology go through life feeling that they got cheated out of something.

What I think is very cynical about some rock and roll songs -- especially today -- is the way they say: "Let's make love." What the fuck kind of wussy says shit like that in the real world? You ought to be able to say "Let's go fuck", or at least "Let's go fill-in-the-blank" -- but you gotta say "Let's make love" in order to get on the radio. This creates a semantic corruption, by changing the context in which the word 'love' is used in the song.

When they get into drooling about love as a 'romantic concept' -- especially in the lyrics of sensitive singer/songwriter types -- that's another shove in the direction of bad mental health.

Fortunately, lyrics over the last five or six years have gotten to be less and less important, with 'art rock groups' and new wavers specializing in 'nonjudgemental' or 'purposely inconsequential' lyrics. People have stopped listening to the lyrics -- they are now only 'pitched mouth noises'.”
― Frank Zappa, The Real Frank Zappa Book

“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.”
― Frank Zappa, Zappa: A Biography

“Books Are Good For Lots Of Uses, Not For Dropping In The Toilet.”
― Frank Zappa

“So, if music is the best, what is music? Anything can be music, but it doesn't become music until someone wills it to be music, and the audience listening to it decides to perceive it as music.

Most people can't deal with that abstraction -- or don't want to. They say: "Gimme the tune. Do I like this tune? Does it sound like another tune that I like? The more familiar it is, the better I like it. Hear those three notes there? Those are the three notes I can sing along with. I like those notes very, very much. Give me a beat. Not a fancy one. Give me a GOOD BEAT -- something I can dance to. It has to go boom-bap, boom-boom-BAP. If it doesn't, I will hate it very, very much. Also, I want it right away -- and then, write me some more songs like that -- over and over and over again, because I'm really into music.”
― Frank Zappa

“Everybody believes in something and everybody, by virtue of the fact that they believe in something, uses that something to support their own existence.”
― Frank Zappa

“behind each breakaway movement is a breakaway demagogue who will set up his breakaway demagogue government.”
― Frank Zappa

“who are the brain police?”
― Frank Zappa

“I feel a lot of people don't know what high school is - including those who are in it. My material is provided to give them some perspective. People are stupid. They never stop to question things. They just accept. Can you imagine a nation who never questions the validity of cheerleaders and pom-poms?”
― Frank Zappa

“I think that if a person doesn't feel cynical then they're out of phase with the 20th century. Being cynical is the only way to deal with modern civilization — you can't just swallow it whole.”
― Frank Zappa

“Love lyrics have contributed to the general aura of bad mental health in America.”
― Frank Zappa

“The Ultimate Rule ought to be: 'If it sounds GOOD to you, it's bitchin'; if it sounds BAD to YOU, it's shitty. The more your musical experience, the easier it is to define for yourself what you like and what you don't like.”
― Frank Zappa

“Without "Louie Louie" a symphony is not quite so grand.”
― Frank Zappa

“Music without the ebb and flow would be like "watching a film with only good guys in it".”
― Frank Zappa

“Their stupidity does not amaze me, its when they're smart that amazes me. It's baffling whenever you find someone who's smart — incredible. Soon you'll have zoos for such things.”
― Frank Zappa

“The mind is like a parachute - it doesn't work if it's not open.”
― Frank Zappa

“It's amazing that schools still offer courses in musical composition. What a useless thing to spend money on -- to take a course in college to learn how to be a modern composer! No matter how good the course is, when you get out, what the fuck will you do for a living? (The easiest thing to do is become a composition teacher yourself, spreading 'the disease' to the next generation.)

One of the things that determines the curriculum in music schools is: which of the current fashions in modern music gets the most grant money from the mysterious benefactors in Foundation-Land. For a while there, unless you were doing serial music (in which the pitches have numbers, the dynamics have numbers, the vertical densities have numbers, etc) -- if it didn't have a pedigree like that, it wasn't a good piece of music. Critics and academicians stood by, waiting to tell you what a piece of shit your opus was if your numbers didn't add up. (Forget what it sounded like, or whether it moved anybody, or what it was about. The most important thing was the numbers.”
― Frank Zappa

“Sometimes a radio station will get ONE phone call from ONE person who screams that he is going to complain to the FCC. Instead of the guy at the stating thinking about how many listeners love the song, want to hear it again, and will support the station for playing it, usually the guy panics -- and takes my records off the air. I object that.

It has never mattered to me that thirty million people might think 'I'm wrong.' The number of people who thought Hitler was 'right' did not make him 'right.' The same principle should be applied to anyone who has an individualistic attitude. Why do you necessarily have to be wrong just because a few million people think you are?”
― Frank Zappa

“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.”
― Frank Zappa

“Certification from one source or another seems to be the most important thing to people all over the world. A piece of paper from a school that says you’re smart, a pat on the head from your parents that says you’re good or some reinforcement from your peers that makes you think what you’re doing is worthwhile. People are just waiting around to get certified.”
― Frank Zappa