Don't buy this book:



[This mesage was originally posted in reply to message 1605 in The Grumpy Old Rant Room].

And, for all its problems and idiosyncracies, I'm one of them. It's highly original and inspired.

Do buy that book.

No, there's a lot of important cultural history in there, and a serious attempt to see if it's possible to reconcile Zappa's ideologies, as represented both in his general thought and actions, and his work, with other paradigms much to the left of those. I do actually quite fundamentally disagree with some of Ben's conclusions in this respect, but it's still stimulating. By the way, though an active member, he is something of a maverick thinker within the SWP (not many of them have much time for the Frankfurt School or the Situationists, for example).

Didn't something like this conversation occur back at TOP? Wasn't there a whole Ben Watson thread, in which Ben eventually appeared, and shot off a few lame verbal squibs at everyone before disappearing again? or did I dream that?

I didn't know about the smaller version. Interesting that it's called "The Complete Guide to his Music" whilst being a quarter of the size of the other one. Actually (in TNDOPP) there's practically nothing about the music and an enormous amount about the lyrics (which to me are a lot less interesting, and often quite offputting).

Otherwise, yes, it certainly is - in other words, a serious attempt to find a place in socialist thought for an interesting musician whose views were really quite conservative (and light-years from socialism) but whom the author happens to be obsessed with. Can it be done? No. But I could have told him that before he started. In fact I may well have done.

I'm sure Ben would love to be classed alongside Lukács.

I have problems with it too, everything sounds awful in there.

How very true. But the point of the book is, as you yourself said, - the operative word there being "reconcile", which is not what Lukács or practically anyone else was trying to do.

PS (I really must get to bed soon) I'm quite fond of some of the music of Richard Strauss. I know why I like it, I know something about its relationship to society and politics, and if I had the time and ability I suppose I could write something about what's attractive and unattractive about the music (and what lies behind it) from a socialist point of view. But if, in doing so, I tried to make out that Strauss was any kind of social radical, that would weaken all my other political arguments, because it would be easy for anyone to say "if he can have such a ridiculous opinion about Strauss, he could have made equally massive lapses elsewhere". And this is pretty much what Ben has done in this book, and also in his book on Derek Bailey which is if anything worse, in that it indulges in a rewriting of "the story of free improvisation" to exclude everyone that Ben disapproves of or has had a spat of some kind with. (That's the book we were discussing at TOP, I now recall.)

As basically a right wing libertarian, Zappa's political outlook was pretty consistent, on the whole. I find Watson's approach cringingly apologistic at times. I get the distinct impression that Frank and Gail were laughing at the text, rather than with it, much of the time, during his famous reading sessions. I certainly doubt they got his snipes at UK improvising musicians whose music and politics he has trouble getting to grips with.