![\"Frank](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/Frank-Zappa-Red-Copenhagen-1967-Far-Out-Magazine-1140x855.jpg\")
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Credit: Bent Rej<\/p>\n
Sat 17 October 2026 22:00, UK <\/p>\n
There are plenty of things that you can call Frank Zappa<\/a>, but a commercial artist isn\u2019t one of them. <\/p>\n During his lifetime, the man released a whopping 62 albums, and that\u2019s not even counting the records for which he acted as the producer or helped to write. He was completely obsessed with everything to do with making authentic music. He loved basic songwriting like that of AC\/DC, and revelled in the chaos of people like Captain Beefheart, because both artists were simply doing what came naturally and what they loved. <\/p>\n Ronald Frederick Lane was a great songwriter, but he thought that people who focused too much on fame and success wound up poisoning their own creativity<\/a>. People become so obsessed with the spotlight that they dismiss what they think is good and focus on what they think will sell. <\/p>\n \u201cAs far as I\u2019m concerned, if half of them had never been stars, they would have done something better; it\u2019s totally stardom that\u2019s fucked them up,\u201d said Lane when talking about some of the musicians who had made a name for themselves in the \u201860s.<\/p>\n Adding, \u201cOr this illusion of stardom; it\u2019s not even real. Alright, let the little girls\u2019 magazines say it\u2019s glamorous and all that, but Christ, we\u2019re grown men, aren\u2019t we? We should know better. But no. All the \u2018stars\u2019 think it\u2019s glamorous too\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n Zappa and Lane had a similar mindset: they were both artists who championed authenticity over anything else, and that meant not paying attention to trends, or worrying too much about what was making waves on the radio. In fact, Zappa didn\u2019t think too much about the songs he wrote that made it onto the radio<\/a>; if something was accepted by the mainstream, in his mind, it wasn\u2019t challenging enough. <\/p>\n In 1982, he wrote the song \u2018Valley Girl\u2019, a track which got plenty of airtime, but that he wasn\u2019t quick to claim. He felt that the song was empty enough that radio stations and audiences at large would be more likely to latch onto it, but that didn\u2019t necessarily mean he thought that it was a good song. In fact, the popularity of the track meant that it was likely the exact opposite. <\/p>\n Further reading: From The Vault<\/p>\n \u201c\u2018Valley Girl\u2019 is innocuous enough that they\u2019ll play it,\u201d said the avant-garde artist. \u201cThey figure everyone will just have a little laugh and that\u2019s it. No real information is conveyed. There is definitely an anti-information syndrome as far as radio is concerned. No real content is ever allowed on the airwaves anyplace.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2018Valley Girl\u2019 wasn\u2019t the only song by Zappa which reflected his disdain towards a lot of music in the mainstream. He famously hated the flower power movement, and so wrote \u2018Flower Punk\u2019 in a bid to take those who engaged with it to task and essentially tell them where they could shove it<\/a>. Like I said, you can call him a lot of things, but trying to call him a mainstream artist, or an artist who remotely tried to appeal to the mainstream, would be way off. <\/p>\n \u201cI didn\u2019t really expect any group who was singing about flower power to believe in it,\u201d he said, concluding, \u201cAnd that\u2019s the thing that was really bugging me about the whole thing, because the audience that was going along with the fad of flower power was being fed all this garbage and never stopped for a moment to question the integrity of the people who were whipping it on \u2019em.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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