It is difficult to know where to start with Frank Zappa. One could easily talk for hours about the huge scale and crowning importance of his work in the context of 20th century music, his position as a unique cultural commentator and critic of modern American society, or how most musicians of the 60s, 70s and 80s were in some way indebted to his groundbreaking approaches to studio recording. Much wanton spilling of ink could accompany a slobbering hagiographical account of Zappa as a man who ‘pushed boundaries’, musical, ethical and aesthetic. Books have been written about the way in which Zappa expressed the inner hypocrisies of postwar American culture in its totality. I could go on at length about his campaigns for the importance of free speech in the music business, his refusal to ingest the banalities and falsities of the commercial music industry, or his uncompromising attitude to total musicianship and quality of artistic endeavour above all else.

This would still leave space for his unique, intelligent, and inspiring sense of humour which was a central element of his music and social commentary. Perhaps, to finish, we could discuss the challenging philosophical school of ‘Zappology’, whose practitioners discuss questions of ‘The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play’, ‘Information, Ignorance, and the Muff in Muffin’, or my personal favourite, courtesy of Keston Sutherland at the 2004 International Conference of Esemplastic Zappology, ‘What's The Ugliest Part of Your Market-Researched Anaclitic Affect Repertoire? [Franz Zappa als Anlehnungstypuskritik]’.

But then again, this would be to miss the point. For what is perhaps the most important thing to realise when listening to Frank Zappa, and exploring the world of his artistry, is that his endeavours are not just the products of ‘another’ musician. There is more to it than the music, or the humour, or the wit - how else can one describe the sometimes unsettling obsession which many Z-connoisseurs express in casual music-related conversation?

One of the best illustrations of this transcendent quality is a question asked on the popular and imposingly well-informed ‘Zappateers’ online forum, an ‘international collection of freaks’ devoted to snuffling out every last bootleg and wayward samizdat recording of Zappa, the Mothers of Invention, and later lineups. A certain ‘Sterno’ asks, ‘When did you realize that FZ was ... well ... IT?’. It is precisely the fact that Zappa and his music encapsulate an ‘it’, rather than a casual ‘that’, which makes the listening to albums such as Freak Out, Hot Rats, We’re Only In It For The Money and countless others such powerful and intriguing experiences. It is why fans of his music seem to have been initiated into a secret sect of worshippers intent on spreading the gospel, recoiling in horror when people don’t get the truth, man. ‘It’ is why Frank Zappa deserves to be noticed for more than the occasional scatological joke by means of a F#7add11 chord. ‘It’ is that mysterious ingredient which moves people to be shocked, moved, and intrigued by his music to the same extent today as they were forty years ago, which allows his satire to coruscate in the caverns of consumerist society. ‘It’ is something more than music, more than image, more than words. So, to paraphrase Faith No More; ‘it’ - what is it?

Francois de la Rouchefoucauld once said that ‘the accent of one's birthplace remains in the mind and in the heart, as in one's speech’. This sentiment is important in unlocking the value of Zappa’s initially confusing and perhaps alienating artistic language. Granted, listening to Zappa can at times be like sitting in on an extended joke between friends. But it is the superficial listener who explains the appearance of a scapular in ‘Muffin Man’ and the title of Burnt Weeny Sandwich, along with the echoing of such themes and many others throughout Zappa’s repertoire, as the product of a particularly fertile imagination, or the creations of a ‘weirdo’.

Come on, how could a sane person keep up such a thread of references and nodes of strangeness over forty years of musical production? An integrated barrage of musical poodles, robots, unpleasant fungal infections, animal noises, blowjobs, industrial tones, belching, clanking, sprayed condiments, devils, putrid whipped cream, vegetables, jazz noises, cannibalism, sexual conundrums, feedback, cutting satire, overbearing government figures, middle class pleasantries and abused advertising language mitigates against the usual explanation of spontaneous ‘randomness’. It all fits together to make sense in a very deliberate fashion; throughout his career, Zappa’s continual drawing upon a conception of ‘conceptual continuity’ across art production resulted in a Wagnerian gesamtkunstwerk which actually, well, ‘werks’. This is because it was not conceived in the spirit of grandeur or artistic catharsis.

What you hear and see with Zappa, as much as it is a musical product, is an aural transcript of a social consciousness, a ‘maximalist’ imprint of contemporary American culture on a idiosyncratically creative mind, channelled to the listener by means of vibrating air molecules. The Zappa back catalogue is a profoundly human creation, deeply chaotic, and thoroughly personal. Zappa’s art is transformed from the bizarre to the comprehensible once you look at the specifics of his life.

Even a snatched biography of Zappa uproots forests of misunderstanding about the conceptual strands and constructions of his music. Born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1940, of Sicilian, Greek, Arab and French stock, Frank Zappa was in some ways immediately consigned to remaining at the frayed edges of the cultural carpet. His early childhood experiences were defined to a large extent by the employment patterns of his father, Francis, whose work in the US defence industry kept the Zappa family on a constant tour of various military complexes and research areas, with the concomitant social experiences imprinting themselves deeply on the young boy. Enterprising biographers have traced Frank’s frequent references to germ warfare, gasmasks, and images of biological decay in his music to these early years.

Technical equipment and chemicals brought home by his father were often treated in the manner of toys; the young Frank would entertain himself for hours by sitting on his bedroom floor hitting blobs of mercury with a hammer, or creating his own explosive concoctions from easily accessible household goods. Exposure to harmful substances, from playtime and his general living environment, had serious physiological effects - Frank suffered from a host of ailments, such as sinus problems, earaches, and asthma, and prevailing attitudes in American-Italian medical science in the 1950s encouraged doctors to treat these problems by inserting radium pellets into Frank’s nose and sinus cavities. This rather uncomfortable solution puts the nasal imagery that would frequently appear in his later work, in aural, literary and visual form, into an intriguing context.

Textual connections like this can be found all over the place, some more prosaic than others - Burnt Weeny Sandwich, mentioned above, actually takes its name from Frank’s peculiar dietary requirements and simple practice of cooking sausages on a gas ring during his twelve hour days in the recording studio. One of his most sentimental songs, or as close to sentimental as somebody like Zappa could get, is ‘Village of the Sun’, on Roxy and Elsewhere, which relies wholly on describing the area where Zappa used to go to high school, ‘Out in back of Palmdale/ Where the turkey farmers run…’. What is intriguing about the lyrics to this song is that even without knowledge of the background, the listener still gets the impression of insularity and emotional attachment to the place ‘Where Palmdale Bouldevard/ Cuts on through/ Past the Village Inn & Barbecue…’; with a bit of reading up, we enter ever deeper into a musical and memorial time capsule.

And then there are those Sprechstimme romps, such as ‘The Jazz Discharge Party Hats’ ( performed here by Mike Keneally) from the accomplished album The Man from Utopia , which Zappa himself described as ‘…combining a parody of the poetry and jazz aroma of beatnikism with an abstraction of the type of onomatopoeia found in those Beethoven meadowland movements…’. Suffice to say that the musical experimentation is masterful, the delivery flawless, and the subject matter hardly fit for family consumption:

‘So they're snorting the pants

'N' then they put them on their heads...

They were having a good time...

The girl was in the water...she didn't even see

What was going on with her underpants...

They were wearing the pants

It looked just like a tiny little party hat...

Their ears were sticking out the side...it was so fun

Later on they discovered,

This would make a great way of life for them…’

The small town existence of Zappa’s youth, in which cultural symbols and narratives of all sorts were refracted through a limited cultural prism of which Frank was all too aware, had a great effect on his later attitudes to himself and his music. One could suggest that a youth spent in the desert, chafing against pettifogging intrusion by the forces of ‘normality’, gives one a certain perspective on things. It is perhaps these experiences which also ensured that his relationship with music creation and convention was so gloriously unconventional. The first album Frank ever bought, as recorded in his ‘The Real Frank Zappa Book’ was Edgard Varese’s ‘Ionisation’, purchased purely on the basis that the composer looked like a mad scientist on the sleeve. The young Zappa would play the record to every one of his friends who came over to stay the night. ‘I thought it was the ultimate test of their intelligence. They also thought I was out of my fucking mind’. Stravinsky and Webern were soon to follow, completing a triumvirate of composers whose influence is often explicitly underlined in his music, albeit always with a heavy dose of originality and subversion.

Take the opening track on Weasels Ripped My Flesh, entitled ‘Didja Get Any Onja’. After a fairly short vamp section which opens the album, the music cuts out and we hear a lone, squealing human voice mimicking some form of horn or wind instrument, reminiscent of the kind of unsettling texture gaps Varese liked to leave in his pieces. The effect is strange, disembodied for a fusion vamp - but in some way seems to make perfect sense (although by the time you have seen the cover, which depicts a man shaving with a weasel - yes - anything will…). On the critically confusing album Cruising with Reuben and the Jets, in a more orthodox fashion, Zappa takes the kitschy doo-wop music of his youth and parodies it with explicit conceptual and musical reference to Stravinsky, who in his neoclassical period felt justified in doing the same with the Pulcinella suite. With Zappa, there is never a resort to stylistic tricks for their own sake. The music lives in a universe of its own, draws upon itself. We are moving closer to what ‘it’ is.

Zappa and the various musicians he worked with over the years did more than just get ‘creative’ in the tradition of these composers. One cannot underline enough how challenging this music is for the average genre fan, in terms of form, harmony, and metre as well as compositional method and performance style. Zappa referred to the process of composing as closest to architecture, in the way that various elements of the artist’s internal musical language could be deployed across many different scenarios. Musical language, the recognisable clichés of which you hear in performance, is just as recognisable as various styles of architecture; most architects are thoroughly conversant in how to build a classical façade or a 1960s monstrosity. Where Zappa as the musical architect stands unparalleled is in harnessing precisely this language for the purposes of showing up the shortcomings and hidden possibilities of all forms of popular music.

He controlled the musical output of his bands on stage and in recordings through the deployment of what he called ‘stock modules’, or various recognisable timbre sets - referred to as the ‘Twilight Zone texture, Jaws texture, Mister Rogers [texture]…’ along with many others. His use of these ‘Archetypal American Musical Icons’, evident throughout his repertoire, was more than just playing with sounds; it was a constant reflection of snatches of American culture back to an audience who were deeply in touch with it by means of other cultural products. The subtlety of this approach could vary from a nod to Charles Ives on ‘Call Any Vegetable’ to the skilful deployment of a large number of rock music conventions across the songs on Joe’s Garage. All in all, the Zappa touring bands and records were crafted around a ‘flexible grid which [supported] a constantly rotating collage of low rent Americana...’; a continual series of sound collages and ephemera which presents a fascinating, fleeting glimpse of American civilisation while avoiding the platitude-suffused limits of commercial popularity, from the hushed sanctities of Dylan to the soulless excesses of 1980s popular music. These are, quite literally, the echoes of American cultural development; perhaps, to be Zappaesque about it, the stretchmarks of the ever more regimented and uninspiring Western popular musical tradition.

This may be an abstract way of explaining why Frank Zappa can remain so important, and yet so distant, to the average musical consumer in a new age of unimaginative and uninspiring commercial music. Even so, Zappa’s genius in turning the role of the musician and composer into a supra-musical creative mirror of satirical social observation as well as cultural response stands as an impressive achievement. But the music itself must have the final say. It is philosophy, poetry, wit, scandal, dirt, and humour. It is organically creative, challenging, shocking, and occasionally overwhelming. Most importantly, it contains a tangible record of the other side of commercial-cultural America. If one were to isolate that magical quality spoken of above in a glass jar of critical consideration, ‘it’ would be the physicality of sound, that reassuring quality which lets us believe that Zappa’s works were made for us, rather than by ‘Them’.

But hell, in the words of the man himself, ‘…if it sounds good to you, it’s bitchen, if it sounds bad to you, it's shitty.’