How would Frank Zappa wish us a Happy New Year?
Tonight’s script is already written: dinners planned well in advance, sequins, toasts, bangs, fireworks and a sentimentality that for many seems suffocating and forced. Among these many I am also there, as I imagine many others. For those of us who can’t stand parties on command, there’s only one antidote left: imagine ourselves being in the company of Frank Zappasitting in front of his Synclavier with a cup of black coffee and a lit cigarette, ready to destroy everything conventional about these days – that is, everything.
Let’s not fool ourselves
The most irreverent mustache in rock would probably start from a simple observation: New Year’s Eve is the most useless party of the calendar. What is there to celebrate? On January 1st we are no less conformist, manipulable and mentally lazy than we were on December 31st.
New Year’s Eve is merely a symbolic reset, more useful to the market than to individual conscience; an elegant way to sell low quality sparkling wine, prefabricated good intentions, crowded gyms for a few weeks (then that’s it) and a temporary illusion of control over the chaos.
Zappa is the kind of crazy genius who asks an uncomfortable question at the dinner party just to witness the reaction it causes on the bystanders, and who looks at New Year’s Eve parties as an anthropological experiment. Then he takes you aside and says: “Be careful not to get crushed by the collective madness as you try to have fun on command“. Zappa does not wish you to “start again”, but not to pretend to do so. An invitation to look in the mirror with intellectual honesty: we are the same, with the same defects, the same fears and – if all goes well – the same critical skills.
Against conformism
If there is one criticism that Zappa has never failed to advance, in his music as in his interviews, it is the denunciation of organized stupidity. Politics, cultural industry, religion, education: no system was safe from his ferocious irony. “I wish you to become less easy to dupe”: a wish that sounds almost offensive, but which contains the heart of his thought, that is, a warning to never let your guard down, to cultivate critical thinking and to know how to discern between wheat and bran, between who (or what) deserves and who does not.
Zappa hated the idea that music should be reassuring, and he equally hated the idea of people behaving as expected of them, without ever breaking the mold. He hated conformism, that attitude which finds its apotheosis on New Year’s Eve: same customs, same toasts, same countdowns. This does not mean that Zappa aspired to heroic or sensational deeds, on the contrary: he lived by authenticitywithout too many frills. He appreciated the non-aligned thoughts, the intellectual disobedience – not facade rebellion. And what is New Year’s Eve if not that slightly hypocritical moment that many wait for to enjoy a transgression that until then had been stifled with modesty?
Transgress all year round
Another wish à la Zappa would be: don’t wait for New Year’s Eve to transgress. Let’s not wait for life to improve on its own, automatically. Whether the year will be good or bad will depend (also) on how much we are willing to think, to doubt, to create and not to delegate our vision of the world to others.
We don’t need a peaceful year: we need a year unpredictable and stimulatingwithout taking ourselves too seriously. Just like Frank would like.
