Talk:Frank Zappa

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Crossfire

I added a quote from Zappa's 1986 appearance on the tv show Crossfire [1]. --Dejitarob 07:57, 11 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Groupings?

Anybody mind if I group the attributed section into groups? Like Music, Politics, drugs, etc? Sveden 17:05, 4 August 2005 (UTC)

Be bold. Your work would probably be appreciated. iddo999 17:31, 4 August 2005 (UTC)

This seemed like a good idea, so I started doing this. But there are still lots of quotes to be classifed, and still more categories to be created, so please Be bold. DougHill 23:20, 6 May 2011 (UTC)

Please don't. The standard format of people articles uses chronological order. In large part this is because subject groupings tend to be subjective and can lead to problems of interpretation and non-neutral point of view. (For songwriters it is accepted practice to put lyrics in a separate section from other quotes.) ~ Ningauble 15:53, 7 May 2011 (UTC)

Articles arranged in sections for subjective subject headings rather than section headings for chronological presentation of quotes and distinct works by an author have been rejected as inappropriate here at Wikiquote. There should probably be far more emphasis on this aspect of the page layout, as I believe this has generally been agreed to at several points in Wikiquote history, though there remain some pages where this hasn't yet been applied, and some new pages occasionally get created along such lines. ~ Kalki (talk · contributions) 17:01, 7 May 2011 (UTC)

I had intended to do a major cleanup on this article at various times in the past — but I finally got around to it today — quotes arranged chronologically by source, with some major sources given their own sections also arranged chronologically. ~ Kalki (talk · contributions) 23:30, 7 May 2011 (UTC)

Comment

But cottage cheese tastes good! --Me —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 216.159.27.1 (talk • contribs) 03:00, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

Attributed

Moved a quote on drugs from attributed to the main section; it's from The Real Frank Zappa Book. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 75.3.127.242 (talk • contribs) 23:58, 20 September 2006 (UTC)

• Why was this quote remooved? "American radio listeners, raised on a diet of _____ (fill in the blank), have experienced a musical universe so small they cannot begin to know what they like."? This is also from The Real Frank Zappa Book. 97.113.84.134 01:57, 5 July 2022 (UTC)

YouTube

Most of the YouTube videos have been removed. The page should be updated to reflect this.

Unsourced

These should be provided with sources before being moved back into the article.

• Regarding the quote "I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Politics Is the Entertainment Branch of Industry. C-SPAN’s coverage of governmental proceedings is wonderful. Caution! Buffoons on the Hill! Wallowing in blabber and spew, regiments of ex-lawyers and used-car salesmen attempt to distract us from the naughty little surprises served up by deregulated corporate America." I'm holding a first edition hardcover (1989) of "The Real Frank Zappa Book" written by Frank Zappa, and the citation on the front page here is precisely correct (the quote is found on page 322 in the book). Note that if you have a different edition (softcover, Audible, etc.) the quote is found in the middle of chapter 17 ("Practical Conservatism"). Will someone please double-verify this and remove the quote from the "disputed" list? Thanks! 97.126.26.120 23:17, 2 June 2024 (UTC)

• 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.
  • Interview, previously on http://youtube.com/watch?v=sZGFP23DIMo taken down because of © claims of WMG no date or other identification of original sources were previously provided.

• May your shit come to life and kiss you on the face.
  • To Tipper Gore about parental advisory labels on album covers

• A mind is like a parachute. It doesn't work if it's not open.
  • Your mind is like a parachute: it works better when opened.

• The idea of people sticking things up their nose in order to be groovy is really repulsive.

• My theory is that music is good, it's the only religion that delivers the goods. And anybody who wants to hear any kind of music is entitled to hear that music because it's good for you – it makes you feel good. If you like it, go for it. Just because I don't like it doesn't mean anything – it's a matter of personal taste.

• I've been in discos around the world. I've made a very thorough sociological study of discos ... As long as people want to get laid, there will be something like a disco — because that's the main social function of a discoteque.

• Basically I'm in the idea business — whether it's a musical idea or a spoken idea ... If you wind up with a political system that wants to put idea men out of business, then you have worry on your hands.

• The United States is a nation of laws: badly written and randomly enforced.

• The computer can't tell you the emotional story. It can give you the exact mathematical design, but what's missing is the eyebrows.

Arcana

• Arf, she said.

• Love is not the end of the world, love is the beginning of the world. Many people write about the subject of love as if that was some ultimate attainment to aspire to …you can have love but you can go beyond that, into realms that are even more interesting.

• The poodle bites, the poodle chews it.

• You have just destroyed one model XQJ-37 nuclear powered pansexual roto-plooker....and you're gonna have to pay for it.

• The meek shall inherit nothing.

• The Quality of Our Lives (if we think of this matter in terms of "How much of what we individually consider to be Beautiful are we able to experience every day?") seems an irrelevant matter, now that all decisions regarding the creation and distribution of Works of Art must first pass under the limbo bar (a.k.a "The Bottom Line"), along with things like Taste and The Public Interest, all tied like a tin can to the wagging tail of the sacred Prime Rate Poodle. The aforementioned festering poot is coming your way at a theatre or drive-in near you. It wakes you up every morning as it droozles out of your digital clock radio. An arts council somewhere is getting a special batch ready with little tuxedos on it so you can think it's precious.

• Is that a real poncho, I mean is that a Mexican poncho or a Sears poncho?

• Beauty is a French phonetic corruption of a short, cloth neck ornament, currently in resurgence.

• Help I'm a rock!

Drugs

• Speed: It will turn you into your parents.

• The taking of drugs is the license to be an asshole, which is the same reason why people drink.

Government/Politics

• The man in the White House ... He's got a conscience as black as sin! There's just one thing I wanna know — How'd that asshole ever manage to get in?'

• We're involved in sort of a low key war against apathy. Most of what we do is designed to annoy people to the point where they might just for a second question enough of their environment to do something about it. As long as they don't feel their environment, they don't worry about it — they're not gonna do anything to change it. Something's gotta be done before America scarfs up the world and shits on it. (1968 - BBC television)

• A lot of things wrong with society today are directly attributable to the fact that the people who make the laws are sexually maladjusted.

• It pays to make the U.S. school system a crock of shit because the dumber the people are that come out, the easier it is to draft them, make them into docile consumers, or, you know, mongo employees. There are plenty of yuppies out there with absolutely nothing upstairs. Graduate airheads with PhDs and everything but they don't know anything. And what do they listen to? Certainly not my records.

• If we can't be free, at least we can be cheap

• Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.

• The person who stands up and says, 'This is stupid,' either is asked to behave or, worse, is greeted with a cheerful 'Yes, we know! Isn't it terrific!'

• You can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline. It helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer.

• Go ahead Senator, I already hold you in contempt.
  • To Sen. Slade Gorton R-WA during the "Tipper Gore Musical Obscenity" Hearings. Gorton had just warned Zappa he might be held in contempt of Congress for his expressions of defiant attitude. Sen Gorton failed his next re-election attempt.

Source: http://www.seattlepi.com/local/connelly/article/Slade-Gorton-The-man-who-took-on-Frank-Zappa-2298912.php Roostertree (talk) 19:40, 13 June 2014 (UTC)

• ...if a million more agree, this ain't no great society, as it applies to you and me, our country isn't free, if all that you could ever be is just a lousy janitor, unless your uncle owns a store...

Music

• I used to think that the only music was love music. I was wrong.

• If people stop copying my music, I should start to worry.

• There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something we'd all love one another.

• Music is the most physically inspiring of all the Arts.
  • From a keynote address to the American Society of University Composers

• You can't always write a chord ugly enough to say what you want to say, so sometimes you have to rely on a giraffe filled with whipped cream.

• I wrote a song about dental floss but did anyone's teeth get cleaner?
  • Senate Hearing on Porn Rock (1985) in response to Tipper Gore's allegations that music incites people towards deviant behavior, or influences their behavior in general (he is referring to his song "Montana".)

• All the good music has already been written by people with wigs and stuff.

• Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.

• Modern music is a sick puppy.

• The disgusting stink of a too loud electric guitar; now that's my idea of a good time.

• Now I know where all the rancid people who used to go to the Fillmore East have moved

• The whole music business in the United States is based on numbers, based on unit sales and not on quality. It's not based on beauty, it's based on hype and it's based on cocaine. It's based on giving presents of large packages of dollars to play records on the air

Religion

• Children are naive — they trust everyone. School is bad enough, but, if you put a child anywhere in the vicinity of a church, you're asking for trouble.

• The other factor that people forget about the southern region is the amount of inter-marriage that has already occurred there, and so there are certain genetic defects come to the fore when you have a large inter-marriage population. That means regression .... And in fact Utah is another state, which is basically owned by the Mormon church, which also has a lot of inter-marriage and because this type of inter-marriage there is a large proportion of blind people in Utah. That's why when you go across the street, instead of just a stop light that you can see, they have stop lights that make a coo-coo noise to tell you when to cross the street- that's true!

• Tax the FUCK out of the churches!

• Fact of the matter is, there is no hip world, there is no straight world. There's a world, you see, which has people in it who believe in a variety of different things. Everybody believes in something and everybody, by virtue of the fact that they believe in something, use that something to support their own existence.

• My best advice to anyone who wants to raise a happy, mentally healthy child is: Keep him or her as far away from a church as you can.

• So, when Adam and Eve were in the Garden of Eden, if you go for all these fairy tales, that "evil" woman convinced the man to eat the apple, but the apple came from the Tree of Knowledge. And the punishment that was then handed down, the woman gets to bleed and the guy's got to go to work, is the result of a man desiring, because his woman suggested that it would be a good idea, that he get all the knowledge that was supposedly the property and domain of God. So, that right away sets up Christianity as an anti-intellectual religion. You never want to be that smart. If you're a woman, it's going to be running down your leg, and if you're a guy, you're going to be in the salt mines for the rest of your life. So, just be a dumb fuck and you'll all go to heaven. That's the subtext of Christianity.

Children's names

• People make a lot of fuss about my kids having such supposedly 'strange names'. But the fact is that no matter what first names I might have given them, it is the last name that is going to get them in trouble. (The Real Frank Zappa Book)

• Consider for a moment any beauty in the name "Ralph".
  • In an interview with Joan Rivers

• Because I wanted to!
  • When asked on The Tonight Show why he gave his children such unusual names.

Philosophy on Life

• It’s better to have something to remember, than nothing to regret.

Has anyone heard this, or something like it?

People are just people, and they are bad.

correct phrase is: "People are people - and they are basically bad."

childhood

I nearly blew my balls off

This is being attributed to Frank Z. on all the social media, but not here.

Does anyone know about this one?... "The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater."

LDixon007 found a source: a defunct music magazine, Nuggets, printed a transcript of an on-air interview with Jim Ladd in their April 1977 edition. Here's a mirror. https://www.afka.net/Articles/1977-04_Nuggets.htm -Ich (talk) 22:13, 22 November 2021 (UTC)

Quotes attributed to "Zen Masters : The Wisdom of Frank Zappa" should be listed in "Disputed"

There are several quotes on the main page attributed to a work of some kind called "Zen Masters : The Wisdom of Frank Zappa". If this is a book, as far as I've been able to tell, it doesn't exist. Or is so minor and obscure it simply cannot be found. The quotes should be removed--or at least placed in the "Disputed" section. I note that someone else has already tried to point this out on the main page. 97.126.18.169 16:47, 28 March 2024 (UTC)