What would Frank Zappa think?

It’s a question I often ask when it comes to matters of free speech, culture war spats and the overall arc of American politics.

Zappa, the late, great Southern California composer and social critic, lived in a world much different from today – having lived from 1940 to 1993 — but his approach and ideas are instructive even today.

I will say at the outset that jumping down the Zappa rabbithole for the uninitiated can be disorienting.

Zappa the man and Zappa the musician are neither who you expect him to be. His at times disheveled, long-haired appearance would make you think he was just some drug-using rocker from the ‘60s. In actuality, he despised drug use, was a notorious workaholic, a self-made man and a self-described “practical conservative.”

“Always a freak, but never a hippie,” as he once said of himself.

Likewise, his music is never what you expect it to be. Sometimes it’s standard-ish rock-n-roll, sometimes it’s jazz, orchestral music, some sort of fusion, comedy rock or at the end of his life, electronic music. His song titles rarely give you much of an indication of what you’re about to listen to.

There is often an unusual mismatch between the technical brilliance and complexity of the music with the goofiness of the lyrics that somehow ends up working (for example, “Montana”).

The only way to really make sense of it all is that Zappa ultimately made the music he felt like making, take it or leave it. If you didn’t like it, you didn’t have to listen to it, attend his (sometimes absurdist) shows or buy his albums or videos.

It was with this same sense of independence that he felt at liberty to say whatever he wanted.

He would regularly take the chance to poke fun at anything and anyone one he thought was full of it, from hippies, who he saw as just drug-addled phonies with slogans, to Christian conservatives, who he saw as agitating for a fascist theocracy in the 1980s, to Valley girls, who for him represented mindless American consumerism.

He didn’t care about being “cancelled.” He didn’t care about offending people, because, again, he was going to do what he was going to do with the support of people who liked what he did and what he did didn’t depend on what his critics thought.

At the same time, Zappa was far from some myopic cynic. He actively engaged the world around him and encouraged others to become involved in their government.

“I believe that people have a right to decide their own destinies; people own themselves. I also believe that, in a democracy, government exists because (and only so long as) individual citizens give it a ‘temporary license to exist’ — in exchange for a promise that it will behave itself. In a democracy, you own the government — it doesn’t own you,” wrote Zappa in “The Real Frank Zappa Book,” published in 1990.

Among his most famous battles was his fight against music censorship in the 1980s. A particular target of his was the Parents Music Resource Center, co-founded by, among others, Tipper Gore, wife of Al Gore, which campaigned for ratings systems and advisory labels on music albums in response to moral panic over sexually suggestive song lyrics.

Before a Senate committee, ​​Zappa denounced such proposals, saying, “The establishment of a rating system, voluntary or otherwise, opens the door to an endless parade of Moral Quality Control Programs based on ‘Things Certain Christians Don’t Like.’”

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He elaborated during an appearance with Johnny Carson that he was taking this stand on the relatively narrow point of music album ratings because he saw the slippery slope of where it could lead, “There’s a political concept behind shutting off access to certain types of information. If you can put your foot in the door by saying, ‘We’re going to stop dirty words,’ that literally means you’ve put in force the mechanism to stop other ideas. Once that censorship board is there, they have to find something for themselves to do… and they’re not going to unemploy themselves.”

One doesn’t have to think too hard to see both the comparison to contemporary social media crackdowns, and also appreciate the irony that today’s most prominent “censors” aren’t right-wing Christians, but secular progressives.

What Zappa understood was that in a nutty world full of ideologues and greedy ghouls constantly trying to leverage private and public institutions to their own ends, that it was up to everyone to keep such forces in check so that people could live their own lives according to their own values.

On this, his 81st birthday, I wish he was around to ridicule the absurdity of 21st century living.

Sal Rodriguez can be reached at [email protected]