[rating=9.00]
It’s a difficult thing to try and describe the music of Frank Zappa. Free from both category and convention, it was an unfiltered abundance of musical exploration, often undercut with a scathing critique of both popular culture and contemporary American ideals. His public persona, particularly in his later years, is a bit easier to describe, a man who was both deeply conservative and vehemently anti-Reagan, which seems like a contradictory impossibility since the right has been taken hostage by a frothing, primitive religious totalitarianism in recent years.
The documentary Eat That Question helps sketch out both sides of Zappa’s personality, thanks to exhaustively assembled archival footage, playing fast and loose with its chronology (at least at first), while alternating between his various performances and televised interviews he’d given throughout his career. Rather than crafting a narrative, or splicing in quotes from his famous friends and admirers, Eat That Question simply lets Zappa be Zappa, both on stage and off.
“They think they’re true fans but actually they’re just fucked. They’re snotty little people that don’t know what’s going on,” says Zappa early on, talking the fans he’s acquired through the years, and the close-minded mentality of self-proclaimed die-hards who profess to only like ‘his early stuff.’ It’s quintessential Zappa, showing up early on to relay not only his disdain for compartmentalization, but the reactionary mentality that tried to label his music and his persona.
“They don’t make it easy to be a musician,” he continues in another clip, citing our country’s cultural void, a result of contemporary short-sightedness coupled with a lack of any real world history. Despite his loathing of the American obsession with the bottom line, something that comes up frequently throughout the film, it’s impossible to not see Zappa’s genuine love for his country, one that allows him to express himself.
He hated censorship, refusing to believe in the authoritarian shaping of the English language, creating so-called “dirty words” that, in Zappa’s mind, were words that got the job done. It addresses some of Zappa’s more well-known standards: his personal opposition to drug use, that he found marijuana boring, and how he wouldn’t let musicians he toured with use drugs while on the road. He explained that the latter was mostly out of a legal and logistical concerns, a rule that gave him the peace-of-mind that he’d never end up wondering where his drummer was by showtime.
Likewise, the early concert footage with the Mothers of Invention shows Zappa in all his iconic, anti-culture glory, but the real treat here is when we’re given a window into the his immersive, all-consuming creative process. Whether he’s taking a razor blade to a piece of sheet music or modifying grooves he records on his synthesizers, you see him as an uncontrollable workaholic, living, breathing, and creating music solely for its own sake.
What Eat That Question really comes together around the time it gets to the infamous Tipper Gore-led hearings about profanity in rock-and-roll music. It’s a formative moment, where Zappa the musician and Zappa the political idealist come together for a scathing takedown of the institution of censorship, followed by clips from several more hot-tempered interviews where he proudly wears his commitment to creative freedom and personal expression proudly on his sleeve.
More than anything, Eat That Question succeeds in peeling back the layers of Zappa’s dichotomy, a fervent capitalist who loves the ideals of his country while describing our contemporary society as “culturally nothing.” Yet, he refuses to play festivals in France because of his disdain for Communism, but would go on to praise other cultures across the glove for their thousands of years of history
By the end, you start to see something similar across these career-spanning interviews. Zappa clearly understood the necessity of showing up to a network talk show and talking about his life and his music, but he never once pretended to like it. More importantly, he never wasted an opportunity to speak out, be it against the music industry, top-40 culture, or even his own government when the time came. With these moments intercut with his performances, Eat That Question lets viewers better understand the complex nature of a man who described his music as “anything, anytime, any place, for no reason at all.”
Eat The Question is now playing in limited release.
