Animated: Frank Zappa on Why the Culturally-Bereft United States Is So Susceptible to Fads (1971)

Frank Zap­pa was always frank. You got­ta give him that.

Speak­ing with Vil­lage Voice jour­nal­ist Howard Smith in 1971, Zap­pa talked can­did­ly about the tastes, opin­ions, and beliefs of most Amer­i­cans, whether they apply to music or pol­i­tics or any­thing else. “You have a nation of peo­ple who are wait­ing for the next big thing to hap­pen.” “I see a lot of changes. But I think they’re all tem­po­rary things and any change for the good is always sub­ject to can­cel­la­tion upon the arrival of the next fad. And the same thing with any change for the worst.”

Maybe it’s like this every­where. But it’s par­tic­u­lar­ly so in Amer­i­ca says Zap­pa:

I think that’s a rea­son­able way to look at it because [the U.S.] doesn’t have any real sort of val­ues, you know? And a fad pro­vides you with a tem­po­rary occu­pa­tion for your imag­i­na­tion. Real­ly, [Amer­i­ca] doesn’t have any real cul­ture. It doesn’t have any real art. It doesn’t have any real any­thing. It’s just got fads and a gross nation­al prod­uct and a lot of infla­tion.

It’s not a flat­ter­ing por­trait of the States. But know this. Zap­pa did­n’t see him­self being above it all: “I’m an Amer­i­can. I was born here. I auto­mat­i­cal­ly got entered in a mem­ber­ship in the club.” Yeah, Frank could be frank.

The video above was ani­mat­ed by Blank on Blank. You can read a tran­script of the con­ver­sa­tion here.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stream 82 Hours of Frank Zap­pa Music: Free Playlists of Songs He Com­posed & Per­formed

Frank Zap­pa Debates Cen­sor­ship on CNN’s Cross­fire (1986)

A Young Frank Zap­pa Turns the Bicy­cle into a Musi­cal Instru­ment on The Steve Allen Show (1963)