Musical Meaning in Frank Zappa's The
Blue Light and Galoot Update.
Introduction
The music of Frank Zappa has held a
constant fascination for me over many years. His catalogue is an intensely
varied and complex entity spanning four decades of musical history and spilling
over into almost every genre along the way. He doesn't just perform many styles
of music however, each and every one of these styles is incorporated into his
musical aesthetic and given the Zappa stamp of identity.
This is part of Zappa's project/ object, or
as Zappa calls it 'conceptual continuity', described by Miles as:
the
idea that each project is part of a larger object, an over all body of work in
which every individual piece is changed, if only slightly, by the addition of
each new part. This new part could be a film, a record or even as he once
claimed, an interview.
(Miles
2004:160)
Add to the project/ object the
incorporation of every day objects, record sleeve art work, stage props, throw
away comments on stage and you begin to develop an intriguing web of potential
meanings. Watson (1993:xxxi) attributes this to a kind of alchemy, a combining
of the man made physical world Zappa inhabited, into his work, manipulation of
the; 'elements [that] contain sedimented social information that react in his
crucible in unpredictable ways'. Monelle elucidates on this by describing a
theory connecting Chomskyan theory and music, put forward by Leonard Bernstein
at his 1973 Norton lectures, Harvard:
He
was impressed, also, by the way in which linguistic deletion can produce
ambiguity, a process he discovered also in music; and he suggested that poetic
language, and especially the device of metaphor, was a kind of super-surface
structure in which transformational laws are used to lend ambiguity and
transparency to ordinary language, just as musical devices are employed to
generate highly ambiguous surface structures in music.
(Monelle
1992: 127)
Zappa certainly revels in these kinds of
ambiguities both musically and linguistically, realizing that something
undefined, but with vague grounding can gather meaning over time. This relates
to Watson's sedimented 'social information' in as much as the objects
represented in Zappa's music and lyrics often are removed from context, for
example lists of commercial products in Billy the Mountain (Just Another
Band in LA, Zappa 1972) or the incorporation of musical icons such
as the shark theme in Jaws (1975). By disembodying these objects
(or deleting aspects of their context) Zappa has access to their real life
associations and their relationship to his art, they become compositional
tools.
For the fan the dawning of this concept
effects the listening experience for ever, no album or artefact can ever be
viewed in the same way, it no longer operates in isolation. That is the point
of departure for this project, the realization that there is a lot of
information buried deep within not only the text, but the music as well, and
that this information is potentially readable through recourse to the cultural
and material signs Zappa has utilized.
The piece of music this project will focus
on, has two incarnations, the first is The Blue Light from the Tinsel
Town Rebellion (1981) album, the second the Galoot Update from Thing
Fish (1984). The Blue Light is the original incarnation of the two,
edited together as it is from two live performances at the Berkeley Community
Theatre and the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, the Galoot Update, takes
these tracks and adds studio recorded elements such as narrator and different
timbres, to create a song from a pseudo Broadway musical.
A Little Bit
About Thing Fish
Thing Fish is in
Zappa's (quoted in Watson 1993:550) words 'a major work'. Its story comprises a
Broadway musical within a Broadway musical in which the main protagonists,
audience members, Harry and Rhonda are subjected to all manner of life changing
situations led by the Mammy Nun stage show. The Mammy Nuns themselves are
mutated inmates from San Quentin who have been fed a transforming chemical in
their mashed potatoes. Zappa's sleeve note libretto describes them as:
Wearing
giant potato head masks with human eyes set in randomly. The lower part of the
mask is a custom moulded flexible duck bill prosthesis. Their hands are Jolson
style white glove monstrosities.
The
'MAMMY NUN' costumes resemble the habits of some unknown order from the neck to
the waist, with skirts patterned after the blue and white checkered napkin
material favoured by the lady on the 'Aunt Jemima' pancake box.
(Thing
Fish, Zappa 1984)
Zappa deliberately uses overtly race
sensitive icons to describe the Mammy nuns, Mammy itself being a term favoured
by Al Jolson (www.jolson.com 2007) to describe the black impersonation songs he
performed. The transforming chemical is considered by Kevin Courier (2002)
amongst others to represent the Aids virus, something that Zappa frequently
suggested could have its origins not in nature, but in government sponsored
chemical weapon development, designed to target certain portions of society.
The libretto suggests during the prologue that the Thing Fish chemical
was tried on, ‘all unwanted highly rhythmic individj’lls an’ sissy boys!’ These
two terms relating to the black and gay communities. The plot from here travels
through all manner of situations ranging from the religious to the obscene
closely tracking the initial notions.
Zappa and
Editing
The process of editing and recycling
material is at the heart of Zappa's creative output, a blurring of the
differentiation between live and studio work. Zappa according to Bob Stone
(quoted in Michie 2003) would tour accompanied by a fully functional mobile
recording facility, which allowed Zappa to archive vast quantities of his live
music. According to Grier this suggested to Zappa:
a new avenue of invention: the studio
editing process as the crucial stage of composition. Source recordings might be
hastily done or even captured live; what mattered most was post-recording
production and, ultimately, the organization of sound.
(Grier
2001)
This production approach is very much
evidenced in The Blue Light and more specifically Galoot Update.
The result is songs of ambiguous origin, the performances that comprise them
drawn from many different sources live or otherwise, from all over time and
space.
Zappa as Film
Composer
Zappa's career prior to being a rock
musician involved a brief stint as a film composer and according to Miles
(2004) he composed the scores for two feature films; Run Home Slow and The
Worlds Greatest Sinner. Later in his career he made several films of his own
including 200 motels (Zappa 1971) which was scored for orchestra and rock
group. It is possible to see from some of the examples given above the effects
this had on his compositional style, and there are many songs in his catalogue
that use the visual referents found in film music to make a point. In this The
Blue Light is no exception and with reference to Zappa's previous film work
it is possible to suggest an element of intentional signification at work. This
project hopes to piece together the musical themes these two pieces are
comprised of to define what relation the music has to the text and the
narrative of Zappa’s project/ object, employing a semiotic method.
The Semiotic
Method
It seems fitting to include a definition of
the term Semiotics as this dissertation will mainly be focusing on this aspect
of Zappa's music. The principle definition chosen is that presented by Phillip
Tagg (1999) in his Introductory notes to the Semiotics of Music, Tagg
references (among others) the definition of Charles Sanders Pierce and calls
semiotics, 'the study of signs and symbols, especially the relationship between
written or spoken signs and their referents in the physical world and the world
of ideas'. Tagg adapts this idea to music suggesting a model of musical
communication, which he describes as a channel by which encoded information can
be carried between performer and listener, Guck adds to this:
Experiences
happen in the imaginative space between the interacting human agent and the
music. As the analytical excerpts have already shown, there are many kinds of
musical experiences. They might be either of sound qualities directly (e. g.,
harmonic or contrapuntal relations and modal lines), or of felt qualities
emergent in the sounds (e. g., motion and feeling), but it is not clear that a
distinction between "heard" and "felt" can be maintained.
(Guck
2006)
Tagg notes that the channel is
not neutral and can be subject to interference from the various social factors
that come between audience and performer. Semiotic analysis would seem to be
suitable for the study of Zappa as it is clear he considered his music as a
process of encoding cultural symbols, Zappa (quoted in Watson 1993) has
mentioned, for example his process of coding cultural symbols and other
information into music is specific to American audiences.
Tagg elaborates further on musical
signification giving the example of film (this analogy as will be seen later
has particular relevance). He suggests that when watching a film without sound,
a blank faced person reading a letter could mean many things, but cannot easily
without other references be attached to any one particular. This is very different
if that scene is accompanied by say a piece of dissonant music reaching a
crescendo, here the letter can only mean bad news and a series of negative
events. Conversely played with pleasant music the meaning would be more
positive and would be the precursor to a different series of events. It is
evident from this example that musical structures carry meanings that augment
our emotional response.
A fundamental element of Tagg's analytical
process is the museme, this term relates to the smallest fragment of a musical
phrase that can contain meaning. Tagg uses these musemes to break down the
music into sections that can then be assembled into museme stacks and analysed
by various comparative techniques for meaning. These museme stacks make both a
vertical and horizontal reference to the music, dissecting the music to small
sections within parts and globally within the vertical context. Tagg has
several methods for dealing with these musemes, the first, inter-subjectivity,
can be surmised as the observably similar reactions people have to certain
pieces of music. These responses are analysed and gathered together to
statistically gather consensus on the meaning of the piece.
The second, which is one of the methods
this dissertation will use is inter-objectivity. Inter-objectivity in Tagg’s words; ‘the procedure
of inter-objective comparison relates a particular piece of music to other
pieces of music’.
The purpose of doing this is to create meaning by linking together pieces of
music at the museme level to explain the collective meaning of the piece. Tagg
(1982) uses the example of Abba’s Fernando in which he makes note of the
tritone museme that occurs at the beginning of the chorus. With out going into
too much detail, through the position of this element that Tagg suggests is
usually associated with the relaxation of tension in music, he is able to find
a musical part of the story at odds with the nostalgia implicit in the chorus
lyrics. The same is true for Zappa, musical elements are created to support or
contradict the narrative within the lyrics. Tagg’s inter-objectivity is an ideal way
to decipher this aspect of Zappa’s composition in that there is a hidden level of
meaning that has no obvious referents until it is broken down and traced in
smaller more manageable sections.
Another tool employed by Tagg (1999)
useful to this piece is the generative method of analysis. This method seeks to
prove assertions about the meaning of particular musemes by changing their
structure, for example if a particular museme starts in the tonic and ends in
the dominant, reversing this sequence should significantly alter the net effect
of this element, there by helping to support assertions. This method is
particularly helpful in interpreting physical representations in music or
kinetic or sonic anaphones (see appendix A) as by altering the sound the
particular representation will have different properties, ascending instead of
descending for example.
The dissertation will use Tagg's method in
part supplementing it with other theories, it should be viewed as the basis of
the technique as it helps divide up the work not necessarily into a strict set
of musemes, but into sections of musical meaning (in some places the music will
be divided into musemes in others referents to audio examples will be given).
Tagg’s is the most amenable technique in terms of The Blue Light and
Zappa in general as the elements of the music seem to have been sectioned off
for their meaning prior to any analysis. One of Zappa’s methods for creating
meaning is accumulating musical clichés and references that lends its self
nicely to Tagg’s method of intertext analysis.
Nicolai Graakjaer (2006), in his work on
the role of music in TV adverts, identifies that television commercial slots and
other kinds of television music exhibit the following; reveille (to attract
attention) and mnemonic identification (to facilitate product memorisation and
recognition). Graakjaer also suggests ways in which these devices can be used
within TV adverts, for example some emblems can be used in preparatory manner
i.e. reintroduced through out the advert in order to emphasise and round off
the piece. This repetition of themes is evident in the piece examined and
exhibits a similar function to that described by Graakjaer, with the exception
that it is representing a concept instead of a product in much the same way if
it were being used in the musical narrative of a television program.
Graakjaer utilizes some of Chion's ideas in
his analysis of advert music specifically the notion that sounds can unify or
punctuate the visual aspect of television. Graakjaer calls this synchresis a
word he forges from synchronism and synthesis. The basis of synchresis is the
relationship between picture and sound and the way that these two elements
effect each other. Graakjaer separates these into four levels of intersection:
Characteristics
of the picture frame (e.g. not moving, moving fast...), characteristics of the
sequence of picture frames (cuts separating frames), clusters of picture frames
(different frames depicting same phenomena or part of narrative)... and [the]
characteristic of specific elements in the picture (people, trees, cars,
etc...).
(Graakjaer
2006)
Despite the fact there is no literal visual
element in music, only sound, this is relevant to Zappa in that his music often
responds to the lyrical content as if it were a visual component. This is best
evidenced in Zappa's song Gregory Peckory (Studio Tan, 1978)
where not only does the music respond to the text with appropriate musical
fills, but a number of sound elements are included to elaborate on the physical
world being created in the words. The overall effect of this is to create a
piece which imitates a film sound and music track and is intensely visual.
Using the above approach it should be possible to identify points in the music
that are responding to the visual aspect of the text.
A brief
overview of the Themes and Concepts of The Blue Light
It seems sensible at this juncture to
provide a simple overview of some of the themes and concepts Zappa is dealing
with in The Blue Light so as to prepare the way for subsequent analysis,
it should be noted that these are established elements of Zappa’s oeuvre
present in much of his work.
The Blue Light, operates in
much the same way as a lot of Zappa's material, in that it provides a critique
of cultural conformity and the inherent dangers in that position. In this
particular instance it is the hippies of San Francisco that are drawing Zappa's
fire, a group Zappa had particular contempt for as this quote from an interview
in Relix reveals:
Relix: Paul Kantner says he doesn't
feel the need for fulfilment, just the search. Do you feel the same way?
Zappa: (sarcastically) I'm not that metaphysical kind of a guy. I don't talk about fulfilment and searching and all that. That's for people from San Francisco. That's all they care about up there. They have so much brain damage from all the LSD tests the government did on them that they can't even talk English anymore. They're swimming around in pools of metaphors and cosmic debris.
(Peterson
1979)
There are direct links between
this and the lyrics of The Blue Light,
You
can’t even speak your own fucking language
You
can’t read it anymore
You
can’t write it anymore
Your
Language
The
future of your language
(S17,
The Blue Light, Tinsel Town Rebellion 1981)
The Relix quote is of particular importance
to our study as it introduces three major themes of The Blue Light, the
first is the idea of being submerged in a pool of metaphor, this becomes a
recurrent theme in The Blue Light represented by the ocean. The second
is the idea of metaphor itself, as Zappa pays particular attention to some of
the metaphor or more precisely mythology that the San Francisco hippies are in
his words are ‘swimming around in’. The third is the idea of a dark hidden
force, in the case of the quote government sponsored drugs, operating unseen
behind the curtains.
The Galoot Update uses similar
themes to The Blue Light, but provides us with new thematic evidence of
the various concepts that under pin The Blue Light, and as such will be
used in the dissertation as an occasional comparative tool, giving additional
updated information.
The structure
of The Blue Light
The
musical structure of The Blue Light is given bellow (fig 1) and relates
to the examples 1 to 17 on the CD prior to the following analysis, this
document is a useful reference through out this piece. The letter S in each
section followed by a number is there to identify each section easily in the
text, each chapter heading will have this identifier at its end to signify what
sections it deals with, there will also be in text references.
Figure 1: The Structure of The Blue Light.
|
Section
|
Contents
|
|
S1: 1st Intro
|
Rising and
falling chord pattern.
|
|
S2: Main
Theme (Opening)
|
Repeated
descending bass figure.
Main melody
which descends to cadence.
|
|
S3: 2nd Intro
Phase I of
the story.
|
Sprechstimme/
Meltdown Vocal.
Drums
|
|
S4: 1st Dread
Structure
|
Descending
dissonant synth brass chords.
Dread
chorus.
Thunderous
drum roll across the kit.
|
|
S5: Verse 1
|
Sprechstimme/
Meltdown Vocal.
Drums
Main
character piano Ostinato.
|
|
S6: 2nd Dread
Structure
|
Two notes
on the bass guitar preceding
Dissonant
chords similar to S4 and S8.
Dread
Chorus
|
|
S7: Verse 2
|
Sprechstimme/
Meltdown Vocal.
Drums.
Including 'Moving forward' section.
Main
character piano Ostinato.
|
|
S8: 3rd Dread
Structure
|
Same as S4
|
|
S9: Verse 3
|
Sprechstimme/
Meltdown Vocal.
Drums.
Main
character piano Ostinato.
|
|
S10: 4th Dread
Structure
|
Same as S6
|
|
S11: Verse 4
Phase II of
the story.
|
Sprechstimme/
Meltdown Vocal.
Drums.
Main
character piano ostinato.
Bass
harmonic ostinato
Mystical
synth pad timbres
Main melody
dark synth sound
|
|
S12: 5th Dread
Structure
|
Similar
dread elements fused with Zappa's narrative.
|
|
S13: Verse 5
|
Sprechstimme/
Meltdown Vocal.
Drums.
Main
character piano ostinato.
Bass
harmonic ostinato
Mystical
synth pad timbres
Main melody
dark synth sound
Guitar
vibrato harmonics (scream simulation)
Vocals from
dread section of piece in combination with verse structure, unadulterated
monster movie melody.
|
|
S14: Jaws
Phase III
of the story.
|
Bass guitar
playing Jaws ostinato.
Zappa
Sprechstimme/ Meltdown vocal regarding Atlantis.
Acopela
Main
character piano ostinato.
|
|
S15:
Underwater section
|
Bass
ostinato
Meltdown
Vocal
Sci-Fi
Movie Under water sound effects
|
|
S16: Main
Theme
|
Sections S1
and S2 repeated with falsetto vocals and chorus singers.
|
|
S17: Sacrifice
|
Layered
Ostinatos organised in a similar manner to figs. 70-1 Procession of the Sage,
The Rite of Spring (1967)
|
The structure of The Blue Light
consists of contrasting blocks of music that comprise the sections. These
blocks of sound have their own particular functions, the opening section (S1
and S2) sets the scene, the verses (S3, S5. S7, S9, S11, S13) tell the story of
the main character, through Zappa’s meltdown lyrics, which collide with the
blocks here named, ‘dread structures’ (S4,S6,S8,S10,S12) which seem to impart
the characters fears utilizing what I have chosen to call the ‘dread chorus‘.
During the sections S11,S12 and S13, the two forms dread and verse, which both
have a different voices, merge together elements of each, bleeding through the
boundaries. The final 4 sections (S14,S15,S16,S17), seemingly nullify all of
the earlier structure, with the exception of S16 where the opening theme is
reintroduced in full. The dissertation will assert that the structure follows a
process with regards the musical element corresponding to the main character
(piano ostinato) that sees it swallowed up by the final 4 sections of the song
(S14 to S17). In the following chapter we will begin the analysis of the
opening sections S1 and S2.
Chapter 1: The Ocean Swell: An Analysis of the Introduction (S1 and S2)
Chapter 1: The Ocean Swell: An Analysis of the Introduction (S1 and S2)
Before we hear the opening melody of The
Blue Light there is a short section of guitar, bass and drums that acts as
an entry to our main theme (S1), providing it with a setting. The first process
that should be applied to this sequence is separating it into musemes, to
ascertain what motion is present in the music and what this signifies. We shall
start with the guitar part, summing the multiple parts into a simplified
version of the musical axis.
As we can see from the score the individual
musemes are rising whole or half tones, starting from A, working up through the
scales octave (D, tonal centre A Mixolydian). In each instance the musemes
reach a kind of momentary platform at their target pitch, before rising again,
the chordal pattern is created by using the open A string as a pedal note
against the other rising notes, this effect is however not obvious through the
audio production.
The rising museme reaches its apogee with a
very brief tip over the octave to the major 3rd, acting as an episodic marker
(see appendix a) just before the descending museme rapidly descends the scale
just climbed (fig 1). From this point the music rises again, this time
the ascent starting from the B, shortening the rise of the initial section by
omitting the opening notes, but keeping the rest intact. This leads to the same
episodic marker and the notes descending in the same way as before.
This transcription shows that the ascending
lines of the piece rise slowly in a ratcheting motion, and the descending lines
fall quickly away. Treating this as a musical metaphor for the motion of a
physical entity, or in Tagg's terminology a sonic or kinetic anaphone, we can
compare this sequence of musemes to the motion of a boat on the swell of the sea
or the waves themselves. Given our oceanic theme suggested above, this is at
least a possible scenario. We however need to analyse this further, Tagg's
inter-objectivity provides us with a comparative tool in order to do this.
There is a resemblance in the intro's slow
ratchet up and rapid fall, to the verse structure of the sea shanty, What
Shall we do With the Drunken Sailor. An excerpt in the liner notes to
Zappa’s Lost Episodes proves an interesting testament here:
I
love sea shanties, I thought they were really good melodies, so I arranged them
for a rock and roll band.
(Lost
Episodes, Zappa 1996)
This refers to a piece called Handsome
Cabin Boy, recorded in 1967, although not directly related to The Blue
Light it suggests that Zappa had interests in the music in question. Given
this it is at least possible that the similarities between the music in
question and sea shanties is deliberate.
This is not
to say Drunken Sailor is exactly the same as The Blue Light, just
that they have similar motions embedded in them. If we take the part of the
verse:
What
shall we do with the drunken sailor
D
flat Major
What
shall we do with the drunken sailor
B
Major
What
shall we do with the drunken sailor
D
flat Major
we see that it pitches between
two keys, slowly building before the rapid descending cadence back to D flat:
Early
in the morning.
These were of course work
songs, but according to William Saunders (1928):
one
must be struck by the remarkable similarity, so far as there can be a similarity
between sound and motion, it bears to the rise and fall of the swell along the
side of a ship lying at anchor, or moored to a wharf or quay. The water does so
rhythmically enough, but never twice in succession.
(Saunders
1928)
The ‘never twice in succession’
is particularly helpful with The Blue Light as we can see that the
repeat of the first musical structure is shorter by several notes than the
first. Saunders goes on to say:
‘This,
to my mind, is one of the most extraordinary examples of “atmosphere” it were
possible to find in music or song‘.
It is atmosphere that I
believe Zappa is creating here, a kind of pre-emptive setting of the scene
encoded entirely in the music, Zappa is essentially taking us out to sea.
A musical precedent for waves in music can
also be found in the rise and fall of the music of Debussy’s (2006) 2nd
movement of La Mer, Jeux de Vagues (games of waves), in which there are
similarities to the rise and fall of S1. La Mer has a direct correlation
to waves as the title is literally connected to the motion being described. By
building up a stack of inter-objective references in this way it is possible to
secure meaning in the opening section S1 and S2.
In addition to support the oceanic
atmosphere being created there is also an aspect, in the method of production
applied to the electric guitars that suggests waves, this is known as the
Flange effect. This effect adds the sweeping sound audible in this section of The
Blue Light, much like the sound of an un-tuned radio rising and falling. In
fact the flanger works by applying a detuned version of the input, subject to a
small delay and feedback loop, to the original sound that is increased and
decreased by the electrical rising and falling of an oscillator (or wave generator).
The overall swishing noise of this can be considered as very reminiscent of
waves. Tarasti (2002:82) notes that Magnus Lindberg’s piece Action,
Situation, Signification signifies sea by utilizing repeated oscillations,
we have here another layer of inter-objective reference imbedded in the audio
production itself.
The main
melody
The above section gives way to the opening
melody (S2), a melody which reappears intermittently through out the piece in
different guises, for example it appears later as a falsetto male vocal part
singing the title ‘the blue light’ (S16). There is an ambiguity about what the
blue light actually is, Zappa has the Thing Fish character from the record of
the same name say:
Jes'
follow de BLUE LIGHT, down de aisle to the potatoes durin' de intermission, an'
while y'all be thinking about the blue light...
(Thing
Fish, Zappa 1984)
Zappa is clearly inviting the
listener to speculate on the meaning of The Blue Light, Ben Watson
(2007) puts forward the idea that the blue light could be the flashes of light
that are often found in large Hollywood movies, where by for example a torch
light will reveal chasmic depths when flashed across the screen. He carries
onto suggest that Zappa uses ambiguous titles and words so as they gather
meaning over time, dealing with these ambiguities is part of the work Watson
(1993) feels the listener has to do in order to comprehend the art.
With this in mind the blue light could be
shafts of under water light, or could represent something completely different,
or in fact represent many simultaneous things. As a brief example; as part of
the research for this project I entered The Blue Light title into an
internet search engine and a film of the same name came up. The filmic The
Blue Light was a 1930's Nazi propaganda film by Leni Riefenstahl.
Fascism as will be seen later is a definite theme in Zappa's The Blue Light.
This could of course simply be coincidence, but the fact that other themes
in this song reference this period of history causes there to be possible
alternate layer of meaning to any initial reading.
Despite this extra-musical evidence, it is
impossible to locate such complex themes within the melody of the opening
section, these concepts are tagged on associatively. It seems best to look at
the melody from Watson's perspective and analyse it in terms of light. As a
model for blue light I have chosen under water light evidenced in films such as
Steven Spielberg's Jaws (1975) (this film is directly referenced in the
music later in the song). Light under water does not travel as well as in air
and lends a perceptible blue tinge to deep water, the deeper you go the less
the light penetrates and the darker it gets, until the blue turns to black.
If we look at the melody of The Blue
Light or in fact any melody we notice there is a note that has the most
resonance within the tonal centre of the piece this note is the tonic, in the
case of this section of The Blue Light; D, tonal centre A Mixolydian. If
we look to our light analogy we can view the tonic as the brightest point, the
surface light as it were, but what of our darker blue light. If we look to the
other degrees of a scale, 4th and 5th for example have harmonic importance
relative to the tonic as sub-dominant and dominant respectively. This western
system of harmony is hierarchical and affords differing importance to
particular degrees of the scale, and the most satisfying resolution of a piece
is with the tonic. With this in mind let us look at the melody:
The melody travels through the
tonic to a sustain on the 7th, and then repeats this cycle except rather than
return to the tonic we have slow descent to the dominant which is emphasised by
a dramatic bending up to the same note on a distorted electric guitar, at the
end of the melody.
According to Guck:
In
the case of a dominant this might include the desire to hear a tonic follow and
resolve the tendencies heard in V. "Dominant" or "V" is as
much shorthand for that complicated, instantaneous, highly contextualized perception
sensation as it is a name for the collection of notes.
(Guck
2006)
Guck continues on to quote
Diana Raffman who posits the idea of musical strings, these strings engender in
the listener the need for resolution, the tonic being perceptibly the stable
point of the relationship. If we look at our melody like this we can see that
we are constantly being moved away from stability, or the surface of the water.
Our second trip up to the tonic/ surface ends with us being dragged to the
dominant and left there, if this is the sea we in other words remain underwater
and drown.
As this melody is repeated in other
sections of the song, in various states, it is similar to the preparatory
function Graakjaer (2006) describes in the melodic structure of advert music,
which has the function of reinforcing the theme of the advert (i.e. the
product). Graakjaer suggests that this has an important role in gluing the
advert together and building toward climaxes. This is in effect no different to
the Blue Light where by the theme is reintroduced in order to
recapitulate the concepts of the piece and to deliver the narrative to its
ultimate destination.
The Imagery
of Drowning
Miles' (2004:8) biographical detail of
Zappa's childhood gives details of how Zappa's father worked as a research
scientist on several military bases specializing in the manufacture of poison
gas. The young Zappa had his own gas mask, that he one day took apart with a
can opener, to which his father’s response was to ask Zappa who was going to
die if the tanks leaked. Zappa stated his fascination with the idea that there
could be a gas 'that if you smell it you die'.
The conceptual relevance of suffocation
seems to carry on through out Zappa's career as a symbol for repression, according
to Watson (1993:123), 'claustrophobia and the inability to breath [are]
recurrent symbols of repression in Zappa'. Connecting the idea of drowning to
gas, gives us a link to The Blue Light, where our underwater landscapes
become a sea of repression and fear, a theme that will be dealt with through
out this dissertation.
Sinking and
the accompaniment
The bass line in the opening section (S1
and S2) including both the opening chords and main theme, is a descending 3
note figure starting with three notes in the tonic A passing through the 7th, G
and ending on the dominant, E. There is an immediate clue in the word
descending, but there are aspects to this part that are more elucidating.
When an object sinks its progress is slow
and gets slower, if we listen to the bass line we can hear that its sound lends
its self to this kind of motion, it is a kinetic anaphone for slowing down. We
could analyse this inter-objectively using say iterative blues music that
mimics the speeding up and slowing down of trains, or we could use a much more
efficient method set out by Tagg, the generative method. Here we simply find an
alternative way of playing the notes and listen to the difference. If we
reverse this sequence rising up from the E through the G to the three notes of
the A, we find that the sound lends itself more to acceleration, or perhaps
shooting to the surface. Allowing for the context set out in this chapter, this
would be a functional reading of this bass line.
If we look at the bass line in correlation
with the drums there also seems to be a stylistic reference at play. The drums
during S1 an S2 are accenting on the second and forth beats of the bar, with
the first half of the bar being taken up by cymbals. This beat is called a
‘backbeat’, and the bass plays the final note of its descending line on the 4th
beat of the bar which is accented more heavily than the second beat. We can
compare this to The Ventures song Walk Don’t Run (1960), that has a similar
relationship between cymbals and accents, it also has a descending bass figure
that ends on the accented 4th beat of the bar. The style of music played by The
Ventures is called surf music. The inference here is obvious and works in
tandem with Zappa’s great passion for the music of the 1950’s and early 60’s,
that according to Miles (2004) was a heavy influence on Zappa, along with the
B-Movie horror of the same era.
We can see that Zappa is stacking up wave
references, the rising and falling of the guitar line, the oscillations of the
guitars timbre, surf music, all become elements in what Tagg (1999) calls
museme stacks. Layers of musical meaning that feed into each other providing
context.
Form and
Episodic Markers
The overall style of the opening S1 and S2
has overtones of the themes given to television shows. A good example of such
themes is the original 1960’s Star Trek. This particular theme has an
analogy for both S1 and S2. The opening (analogous to S1), has a theme that is
coupled with images of the vastness of space, the great stellar ocean the
spaceship enterprise is to travel. Although the theme is stylistically very
different to that of The Blue Light it has a similar purpose, the
grandness of images with the shimmering back ground music and dramatic horn
melody all emphasise the location of the film. This coincides with the scene
set by the waves that open The Blue Light. The second section of the Star
Trek theme has a strong melody over a fast paced backing, very like The
Blue Light intro in terms of construction, it also comes to a dramatic
conclusion with all the instruments giving emphasis to the final note of the
melody before the episode starts. In The Blue Light, the final note is
emphasised by the electric guitar bending the note several times in a dramatic
heavy rock style, which acts as an episodic marker in itself, opening the
narrative.
Updating the
imagery
Where as in The Blue Light the
conjectural themes mentioned above are hard to locate it seems that Zappa has
overcome this problem within the Galoot Update. Up and till the start of
the melody the Galoot Update follows the same structure as The Blue
Light within the melody section, however different timbres and musical
elements are employed to emphasize new aspects.
In order to
do this Zappa took the melody of The Blue Light and switched it from
guitar and synth to a pseudo gospel choir, mimicking Broadway given that this
is the context of Thing Fish. This choir is organised into the kind of
call and response accapela found in the music of African American slaves,
evidenced for example in the audio excerpts found on the PBS website (2007),
the Galoot Update filters this through the kind of caricatures of black
music found in the music of Al Jolson (www.jolson.com 2007). Another aspect
found in this section is a sampled slightly comedic cry of misery.
Putting these sounds in an oceanic setting
is extremely potent, especially as Watson (2007) points out, galoot sounds,
very like the Hebrew word galut, meaning exile (it does however have various
other meanings, including pertinently 'foolish person'). Here we have slave
calls and cries of woe on the seas being taken to America, and simultaneously
drowning in a culture that is ultimately hostile to racial difference. Timbre
in some sense provides the extra signification Zappa needs to bring out the
themes mentioned above in his melody, as this quote proves:
I've
developed a 'formula' for what these timbres mean (to me, at least), so
that when I create an arrangement - if I have access to the right instrumental
resources - I can put sounds together that tell more than the story in the
lyrics.
(Zappa
& Occhiogrosso 1989:171)
The differences between the two pieces
seem to feed into each other, providing a slant for the sound employed by the Galoot
Update and more evidence toward an oceanic reading of The Blue Light.
We will now move onto to a discussion of
Zappa's vocal technique and the meaning behind the dread structures.
Chapter
2: Meltdown and Dread (S3 and S4)
Meltdown is the term given by Zappa to his
version of Sprechstimme (or speech-song).
According to the New Grove II
(2007), '[Sprechstimme is] a type of vocal enunciation intermediate between
speech and song'. This style of vocal is described by Watson (1993:387) as
'leering silly-voice taunting that [includes] improvised words and notes'. This
style reached its apogee on Zappa's album The Man From Utopia (1985)
specifically on tracks such as The Dangerous Kitchen, which Zappa
described by saying:
The
accompaniment was designed to provide rhythm, texture and sound effects, not
necessarily chords, melody and a 'good beat' - a sort of rock Sprechstimme
setting, combining a parody of the poetry and jazz aroma of beatnikism with an
abstraction of the type of onomatopoeia found in those Beethoven meadowland
movements.
(Zappa
& Occhiogrosso 1989:184)
This sound texture is
precisely how The Blue Light progresses from the end of the opening
introduction (S3), in fact Kelly Lowe (2006) describes The Blue Light as
Zappa's first foray into this style. This style can be seen as an extension of
Zappa's use of timbre, except located in the vocal, embedding in the words the
slants of meaning that he needs to get his point across, with out recourse to
other sources. As Zappa mentions above the accompaniment becomes an extension
of the narrative, as such the section following the introduction bares these
hall marks, consisting of drums, meltdown vocals and unusual musical
structures.
Zappa's Silly
Voice Antics
Another aspect of the meltdown vocal being
used for the narrative present in this piece, is the various stylistic
inflections Zappa uses to convey a point. These have a cartoon quality to them
and seemingly heap more derision and scorn on to the subject matter. Zappa
often uses these voices to represent different characters in much the same way
actors in horror films such as The Exorcist (1973) corrupt their voices
to simulate possession.
Zappa’s vocal method can be traced back to
the comedian Lenny Bruce, of whom Miles (2004) suggests Zappa was a big fan, to
the extent that Zappa had planned a musical of Lenny Bruce’s life (incidentally
according to Courier (2002) the title of the opening track on Weazels Ripped
my Flesh (Zappa 1970) ‘Didja get on ya’ is a Bruce routine, which also becomes
a line in Thing Fish).
On Thank You Masked Man (Bruce
2004), Bruce represents characters in his routines using multiple voices, these
voices are tailored to the character being represented via a system of
caricatures, for example shaky and weak could represent old age, or high pitch
and winning could represent a certain type of youth. These character's voices
are also subject to the application of attitudes, for example lusting or
maniacal, giving a strong visual aspect to Bruce's narratives.
The
first routine on the album, 'The Sound' is introduced by Bruce saying:
The
Rick Lazar Martin Schwarz vinegar cannon ball story. The story of a man and his
horn. A great picture and like all crappy pictures where does music start, in
New Orleans, where little Rick is shinnying himself up over the men's room in
the musicians union.
(Bruce
2004)
Bruce sets the scene by
describing the piece as a movie picture, and then setting a physical space for
the text. From here he uses all manner of the voices described above to bring
the story to life, he also vocally imitates aspects of film music. There is a
self contained syncretic aspect to this, the response to the visual aspects of
his narrative being represented in the different sounds generated in his voice.
An extension of this can be found on the title routine ‘Thank You Masked Man’
which has been turned into an animation (available on the enhanced CD release),
here animated representations of the characters created by Bruce’s voice have
been set to a sound track, the effect of which is to create a reverse of
Graakjaer's Synchresis. This is an extra syncretic aspect to Zappa's ability to
deliver meaning, he uses the style employed by Bruce to add extra spin to the
thing being said, which in turn has an effect on the music and its particular
meaning. The ’silly voice’ from this perspective should be seen as a semiotic
timbral device.
In a similar way to Bruce Zappa also opens
the lyrics to The Blue Light with what seems like a filmic reference in
the line ‘You’re writing home’ (S4). This conjures up images of a character,
modelled on the romantic protagonist in the movies who leaves the comforts of
home and small town life, to pursue the big city world and upon arrival writes
home letters full of glowing reports despite the disaster it truly is.
Dread
Structures (S3 and S4)
The main melody of S2 cuts away to a drum
accompaniment and Zappa using his meltdown technique (S3). In this section he
affects a voice very similar to that of the Central Scrutinizer character from
his Joe's Garage (1979) pseudo rock opera, delivering the dialogue:
Your
Ethos
Your
Pathos
Your
Porthos
Your
Aramis
(S3,
The Blue Light, Zappa 1981)
We are here, again descending, this time
through the psyche, starting off with ideals; your ethos, then emotions; your
pathos, which Zappa quickly turns to fiction with your Porthos, your Aramis,
both characters from the Three Musketeers stories, this word play makes a
nonsense of the lofty premises of the opening lines. The vocal as mentioned
above bares a strong similarity to the Central Scrutinizer character from Joe's
Garage, this is a good example of conceptual continuity with the
reappearance of a character from another part of Zappa’s project/ object. The
Central Scrutinizer is an automated surveillance device charged with enforcing
‘all the laws that haven’t been passed yet’ including making music illegal,
Zappa based this on the 1970‘s Iranian revolutionary Islamist government making
music illegal. The use of the Central Scrutinizer here gives the vocal delivery
an oppositional authoritarian charge to the object being described, there is a
strong paranoid aspect to this and the element of fear as we shall see is
important to The Blue Light.
At this point the music and timbre change
(S4) and we hear the lines:
Your
Brut Cologne
You're
writing home.
(S4,
The Blue Light, Zappa 1981)
Here we see that Aramis was
simply a transition to Brut cologne (Aramis is also a cologne), we have
descended from ethos to a list of beauty commodities.
These two lines are delivered in the first
of what I have chosen to call dread structures (see figure 1), these dread
structures operate in contrast to the meltdown sections of the piece consisting
as they do of large textured dissonant chords and multi voiced dissonant vocal
parts. There is a strong inter-objective resemblance in the tonal structure of
these sections to the B-Movie music staple that indicates horror, voiced in
onomatopoeia; dun, dun, daaaaaa. This theme is found in the House of Hammer
Dracula films and was according to Larson (1996) composed by James Bernard
using the three syllables of the word Dracula, i.e. DRAC-u-la. Larson suggests
that:
Bernard
balances the DRAC-u-la theme, which represents vampiric evil, with an
emotionally weaker motif representing Van Helsing and the “good” people on
which Dracula preys.... Bernard has created a textbook tour-de-force of
Leitmotiv interplay.
(Larson
1996:23)
Larson goes on to quote Bill
Littman regarding this motif interplay:
The
Dracula motif always resolves itself, musically representing the strength of
the Vampiric character. The motif has to be literally broken up to lose this
resolution. (This, of course, happens only at the end with Dracula’s
destruction) .
This conflict of themes is very similar to
the play between the different themes in The Blue Light, the different
sections representing different aspects of the characters situation, becoming
more and more intertwined until the piece concludes with a similar braking up
of the musical elements comprising the piece.
Musical
Textures
Concepts such as dread structures in
Zappa's music do not necessarily operate in exact accordance to the style of
music they are mimicking. They are often adaptations of recognized musical
objects turned into textures. Zappa describes this use of musical textures as;
An
assortment of ‘stock modules’ used in our stage arrangements.... These ‘stock
modules’ [such as] the “Twilight Zone” texture (which may not be the
actual Twilight Zone notes, but the same ‘texture’).... are archetypal
American musical icons, and their presence in an arrangement puts a spin on any
vocal in their vicinity. When present, these modules ‘suggest’ that you
interpret those lyrics within parenthesis.
(Zappa
& Occhiogrosso 1989:166)
There are other examples of Dread or
musical motifs symbolising fear or negative emotions in general in Zappa’s
music. Within the song Yo Cats on the Frank Zappa Meets the Mothers
of Prevention (1985) album, there is a moment when the lyrics
declare that, ‘music has died’, followed by a piece of music that is
recognisably calamitous in the vein of silent movie scores, descending piano
chords followed by minor arpeggios.
This manipulation of culturally recognised
themes is very similar to Kassabian's concept of 'affiliating identifications'
within film soundtracks, which he describes as:
These
[affiliating identifications] depend on histories forged outside the film
scene, and they allow for a fair bit of mobility within it.
(Kassabian
2001:3)
Effectively this is
underpinned by the social conditioning of the audience, drawing on the cultural
symbols of everyday life.
Dread as a
Concept
If we apply this idea of texture to the
dread structure we can see that Zappa's dread ‘parenthesis’ leads us to the
idea that there is an aspect of fear or horror, apparent or hidden in the
lyrical section we are encountering. But how exactly does that apply to Brut
cologne, Zappa in an interview with Bob Marshall (1988) suggests that the
advertising of commodities relies on aspects of fear and dread to persuade the
consumer to purchase, some thing he describes as; ‘institutionalized fear which is one
of the major subtexts of American society right now’. He continues on to say:
You have to break down the
sub-categories of the dread. I wish there was a way to graph this out, but
advertising is very powerful, and in order for advertising to work, it works on
a non-logical, subconscious, psychological level. And to induce people to buy
things they don’t need for reasons which are not there, they have to trick
you.... They do tricks, and part of what’s involved in the data that they are
tricking you into consuming is this built-in dread factor: “You can fail.
Someone will laugh at you. You are impotent. You will be poor. You will die!”
Various flavours of dread, they’re lurking in there in different combinations,
and, of course, after they’ve shown you the dread, they show you the light at
the end of the tunnel: “Our product will allow you not to die. You will not
have pain. These little yellow pills, this really works. Our car goes fast and
it’s red. You’ll get a blowjob if you drive this!” That’s all built in there,
O.K. So, people have been conditioned to consuming the dread factor.
(quoted in Marshall 1988)
If we apply the above notion of musical
parenthesis to the substance of this quote, we can see that Brut cologne fits
in to schema of The Blue Light as something negative, its connection is
to the institutionalized fear that Zappa talks of above. As a substance cologne
is used to cover up unpleasant odours so placing it over music that invokes
dread and horror suggests that Zappa is associating; cover up and imminent
danger. This is also evidenced in the story of Thing Fish where Galoot
Cologne is one of the methods used to hide the secret chemicals that
ultimately transform the prisoners of San Quentin into Mammy Nuns. The
possibility that galoot could be referencing the Hebrew word Galut (Watson
2007), which means exile, makes this more potent still, in essence covering up
the stench of exile. Another important aspect of Brut cologne is that it is a
cosmetic beauty product, something that often draws Zappa’s fire, with songs
such as Beautiful Guy from You Are What You Is (1984), or I’m
so Cute from Sheik Yer Bouti (1979), making connections between
ideas of beauty and right wing white politics. Right wing politics being an
important feature of The Blue Light. The line ‘you're writing home’ (S4)
is the first indication that there is a person behind the previous
descriptions, it is as if we are now being introduced to the main character of
the piece by applying a verb instead of a noun to the 'you're' prefix, we shall
look at this in the next chapter.
Dread
Construction
The dread structures are comprised of two
different musical sections that alternate; S4 and S8 comprise the first
section, S6 and S10 the second, and the final dread section S12 marks a change
from the first two. S4 and S8 are created by descending dissonant synthesized
brass chords accompanied by the dread chorus, who flesh out the dissonant
chords. In these sections a thunderous drum roll across the kit marks the
descent, and in S8 also acts as a preceding episodic marker for the dread by
giving a pre-emptive roll on the tom toms.
S6 and S10 are configured of the same
musical elements as each other, they both open with two notes on the bass
guitar that lead into dramatic dissonant chords similar to S4 and S8. Over the
first chords the chorus sings a melody separate from the movement of the
chords, but ties in with the final chords to emphasise the last words of the
section. There is a lyrical as well as musical correlation between these two
sections, the first (S6) exclaims, 'you like it, it gives you something to do
in the day time', the second (S10) changes 'day time' for 'night time', keeping
the rest of the lyrics the same. These two sections become episodic markers
marking change of time and scene.
S12 is significantly different
from these two types and is dealt with in Chapter 5.
Although we have to wait until later in
the song to have an exact correlation with the DRAC-u-la motif these earlier
dread structures do work in horror movie staples, in as much as they use the
loud dissonant chord, used in the movies to emphasize scenes of horror. For
example the dissonant stabbing string chords in Hitchcock’s thriller film Psycho
(1960), bring an extra horror to the thrusts of the knife in the shower
scene. It is also note worthy that the chords as the woman slumps down into the
bath dead, follow a descending pattern. This descending seems to be a strong
element in horror themes.
The timbre of the synth used for the dread
section chords has parallels with the title track from the Tinsel Town
Rebellion album, they both seem to comprise the same Hollywood award show
fanfare brass sound (the evils of Hollywood being the subject of the song, Tinsel
Town Rebellion). There is a precedent for using a timbre such as this in
Zappa's politics:
Because usually the way I talk about
politics is in one sense and I've said this many times in interviews: politics
is the entertainment branch of industry.... The problem with most of the
decisions of the last eight years in the Reagan Administration is they're all
ideologically based and very seldom have the policy decisions been based on
practicality, or far long-range thinking. It's just been based on whether or
not the rhetoric that appears in the news that day is in phase with
conservative ideology, or appeasement to certain interest groups.
(quoted
in Marshall 1988)
This idea that the Reagan
administration reduced politics to entertainment, the use of rhetoric to
appease the rightwing demands of wealthy Americans, is echoed by Zappa shouting
out 'Death Valley Days, straight ahead' in S13 (Death Valley Days was
a cowboy series that starred Ronald Reagan). By creating dissonance within a
timbre that enshrines the notions of celebrity and entertainment, Zappa
effectively invokes the danger of this rhetoric. It also gives us another
perspective as to what lies behind the dread.
The ideas of politics, dread, celebrity
and entertainment are part of a ongoing theme in Zappa's work. In this case
they are made part and parcel of social control and political agendas. However,
these features are mixed with a number of visual elements which, as has been
discussed earlier, may have some link to Zappa's interest in film and visual
imagery in general. The next section of this dissertation will analyse features
of this imagery in detail.
Chapter
3: Graakjaer's Synchresis in the Lyrics of The Blue Light
As mentioned above we are introduced to a
character with the line 'you're writing home' (S4), this is the first
description of activity in The Blue Light and it introduces us to the
notion of synchresis in this piece. As mentioned above in the introduction,
Graakjaer[1]
(2006) looks at the medium of advertising particularly the relationship between
picture and music. He notes that certain activities or moods depicted on screen
can illicit, often simultaneously, responses in the music. This is also true of
The Blue Light, in as much as, even though there is no visual component
this gap is filled by Zappa's descriptions of our characters activities, for
example:
Well,
you travel the bars
You
also go to Winchell's Doughnuts[2]
And hang out with the highway
patrol.
(S11,
The Blue Light, Zappa 1981)
This style of describing
events continues on throughout most of The Blue Light and is laden with
images. Jwcurry describes a similar element in the music and lyrics of Thing
Fish:
The
Grammatical systems subjected to mutation are those of both language and music,
the two notational devices mutually affective in their varying from the norm:
an idiosyncrasy applied to one system results in alterations of the other in
order to accommodate the change in a sympathetic manner.
(Jwcurry
1991)
This is true to a certain extent, we can
see however from the quotes taken from Zappa that he privileges music over
lyrics so that the layers of music are deliberately coded with information,
reversing the flow of information in both Graakjaer’s system of synchresis and
Jwcurry’s analysis.
A good example of Zappa using synchresis is
given on the provided CD (track 18), the excerpt is the track Debra Kadabra from
the Bongo Fury (Zappa 1975) album. On it we can hear Captain Beefheart
exclaim:
Make
me grow Braniac[3]
fingers.
Which is responded to by a
dissonantly harmonized brass line, to which Beefheart responds:
But
with more hair.
Here the brass instruments
exaggerate the same line increasing its volume and attitude, suggesting more
hair. This is a very direct communication between the lyrical text and the
music. This relates very strongly to Graakjaer’s notion of synchresis in that
the song and more specifically this particular section of the song relates to a
real film called The Braniac, Zappa describes the inspiration he and
Beefheart derived from the film:
When
the monster appears there’s this trumpet lick that isn’t scary. It’s not even
out of tune, it’s exactly the wrong thing to put there... When you here in the
background DA-DA-DA-DA-DAHH, that’s making fun of that stupid trumpet line...
When he’s saying “Make me grow Braniac fingers”, that’s what he’s referring to.
(quoted
in Miles 2004:247)
We can see here that not only
does the music respond to the lyrics, it is also representing a real event that
has its roots in a shared experience, it has been selected by the composer to
carry certain information.
In terms of the musical method this means
giving individual musical parts within the performance, information that they
represent, Zappa gives the example of the Twilight Zone texture that he
employs in order to convey a certain meaning, but this is often stacked up so
that many simultaneous pieces of information happen at once. Catherine J. Ellis
(1985)
describes a similar feature in Aboriginal music in which she says the use of melody is a signifier of
totemic ancestors, each ancestor having their own melody. She continues by
placing melody in a hierarchy of interlocking musical information, where each
individual element corresponds to a different aspect of the story being told.
In this way it is possible for the text to be given meaning by associations
provided in the music, an ancestor for example could appear through melody, or
alternatively an action through rhythm that are not mentioned in the text,
giving the performance hidden depth. Applied to The Blue Light we can
see the different musical layers performing similar tasks in representing
characters, settings and concepts as part of the whole story.
The Main
Character as Ostinato (S5,S7,S9,S11,S13)
As mentioned we are introduced to our main
character with the line ‘you’re writing home’, here Zappa immediately cuts from
the dread timbre back to the meltdown style, with the exception that the
percussion and vocal are now joined by a third element; a three chord piano
ostinato (see CD track 19). This ostinato arrives with a syncretic lyric (S5):
You
are hopeless
Your
hopelessness is rising around you.
(S5,
The Blue Light, Zappa 1981)
This lyric could very well be
describing the ostinato itself, which is low in functional musical value,
lacking tonal momentum, i.e. not moving through a positive harmonic progression,
nor having proper rhythmic propulsion within the musical context, leaving it
alienated. The musical context itself only consists of Zappa's meltdown vocal
and drums.
This musical unit finds interesting
explanation in the work of Tarasti (quoted in Cook 1996) who posits that a
semiotic concept called actoriality operates within music. This theory relates
to the aspects of music that represent situations involving either events or
characters through musical themes or other musical devices. This quote from
Tarasti helps with our ostinato:
In
a composition a theme-actor can appear, which functions in a purely musical
sense, in such that it influences another theme-actor that serves as a
recipient of this action, there by establishing the relationship agent/
patient.... Consequently, in music, as well as verbal texts, there exist many
levels of narration.
(Tarasti
2002: 73)
He later carries on to say:
Of
course, some composers employ a narrative technique in which the same theme
actor is led through different situations and events. The theme itself neither
"does" anything nor changes into anything, but passively undergoes
various events in these changing musical milieus and situations.
(Tarasti
2002: 81-82)
If we align this with the theory of synchresis,
where by characteristics in the lyrics are mirrored in the music, it is
possible to begin to attribute characteristics to this ostinato. As the chart
shows it appears through out the song, (except in the dread sections and the
end section of the song something that will be dealt with later) and has a
definite relationship to Zappa's 'you are hopeless line'. Later in the piece,
as in Tarasti's theory the ostinato is subject to other themes representing
different aspects of life, and is used in conjunction with Zappa calling it
'you' or 'you are'. It is possible to suggest from this that Zappa considers
this ostinato the representative theme of his main character, it is certainly
the only musical unit within the song that it is feasible to do this to.
Ostinato and
Hopelessness
There is potentially something hopeless
about our ostinato, this is also recognised in other music where ostinatos are
employed as representative tools. Cumming in her analysis of Steve Reich's Different
Trains (2006), describes ostinatos as:
Of
musical processes the ostinato is one of the least amenable to being
represented as a complete ‘unit’, or musical ‘object’.
(Cumming
1997)
She notes that in Different
Trains ostinatos are used as musical representations of the motion of
trains. Which not only the title, but other sonic anaphones such as bells
signifying crossing bells and the sound of a train siren attest to. Cumming
finds in this mechanical representation a point of reference with
psychoanalytic semiotics an idea she attributes to David Schwarz, she suggests
that:
The
repetitive rhythmic patterns which form the train-motion are ‘compulsive’ in so
far as they seem to stimulate their own continuation. In their compulsiveness
they may be linked with the notion of ‘drive’ in Freud’s thought - a
depersonalised aspect of the self.
(Cumming
1997)
Cumming later links this depersonalised
compulsive state to mechanical motion, quoting Reich:
Reich
expressed an explicit interest in the activity of ‘people imitating machines’
not as a ‘sickly trip’ but as something which could be ‘psychologically very
useful, and even pleasurable’. A strange kind of marriage might be found in
these remarks, between the mechanization of movement and the pleasures of a
loosely defined spirituality.
(Cumming
1997)
This notion of compulsion and
depersonalisation is something that is a definite factor for our character in The
Blue Light, especially if we consider the lines (S13):
You’ll
do anything, go anyplace,
Just
so you can hang out with the others,
the
others,
Just
like you.
(S11,S12, The Blue Light, Zappa 1981)
It is helpful to return
Zappa’s scornful quote above, regarding drug use in San Francisco, the
recipients of which, it is the conjecture of this dissertation, are being represented
by our particular ostinato. Illicit psychoactive drug use is in many respects a
form of escape from the self, and a kind of passivity, something that Zappa
clearly deplores, hence possibly his choice of ostinato to represent the main
character.
Mechanical manipulation of human beings is
something that Zappa focuses on in his work particularly in relation to sex.
For example in the story Joe's Garage (1979) Zappa has the main
character Joe join a cult of 'appliantology', which in the words of the church
leader 'L. Ron Hoover' (a play on L. Ron Hubbard of the scientologists) is a
church for people 'who can't admit to themselves sexual gratification can only
be achieved through the use of machines'. This leads Joe into a sexual
encounter with an automated sex device named Sy-borg which is preceded by the
usual courting rituals. This seems very much like the antidote to Reich's
notion of pleasure in mechanical motion, Joe accidentally destroys the machine
during intercourse leading to his incarceration. Zappa seems keen to point out
the problems of substituting mechanical for human process, which by
representing a human character with a mechanical musical figure in The Blue
Light he brings ringing home.
Chapter
4: Percussion and Zappa's Concept of Time
As the musical context in the verse
sections (S3,S5,S7,S9,S11,S13,S15) of the Blue Light consists of
percussion, piano ostinato and meltdown vocal, the music of the verse's
relationship with time, which would usually be serviced by melodic invention
moving through harmonic patterns, is unconventional. Zappa's meltdown style
deliberately avoids standard popular music melody and harmony and in the Blue
Light uses the percussion track to create this sense of time, positioning
narrative responsibility with the drums. This gives the percussion
responsibility for what Tagg (1982) describes as moments of tension and
relaxation in the verse sections of the song.
This compositional style is evidenced in
Zappa's song Jazz Discharge Party Hats (The Man From Utopia, 1985). The
basis of Jazz Discharge Party Hats, is a Zappa's meltdown vocal part
transcribed onto guitar by Steve Vai, where by the guitar follows exactly the
melody and inflections of Zappa's voice. Achieving a melodic representation on
the drums being impossible the drums of The Blue Light create the
forward momentum and copy the rhythmic structure of certain parts in the
lyrics. Track 20 on the CD gives an example of the drums following the rhythm
of the lines:
Is
rising around you, rising around you.
(S9,
The Blue Light, Zappa 1981)
Tired of
Moving Forward?
Track 21 on the CD presents an example
contained in S7, of the drums responding to the lyrics narrative information.
When Zappa reaches the line:
You
are tired of moving forward.
(S7,
The Blue Light, Zappa 1981)
The drum track comes to a
stand still, breaking off with two single beats before 'moving forward'. This
cessation of percussive activity creates a dent in the time continuum of the
piece, helping to signify the impasse our characters life seems to be at, a
syncretic response to the situation of hopelessness being presented by the
lyric. The two single beats in many respects create a tension, a cut off in
time that leaves the vocal hanging in space, and the listener waiting for normal
momentum to resume. In many respects this is disrupting what a listener would
expect of rhythm in more conventional popular music (i.e. non stop forward
motion, and any pauses to be rhythmically intact), by halting time Zappa is
playing with expectation to create this narrative device.
The ostinato also stops during this brief
section, before returning to its monotonous repetition. Juxtaposing the two of
these forces one proactive and able to take the piece forward, the other
non-responsive and constantly rotating in one place, it appears that two
opposites are being played off against each other. The ideas the lyrics are
attributing to the character represented by the ostinato, suggest that he is
unable to cope with the future and presumably the responsibilities this might
hold:
You
are tired of moving forward
You
think of the future
And
secretly you piddle your pants.
(S7,S8,
The Blue Light, Zappa 1981)
The drums could well represent the time he
fears. In the test of this it is useful to look at Tarasti’s (quoted in cook
1996) notion of engagement and disengagement within his theory of actoriality.
Tarasti (2002) asserts that themes or musical elements can act out concepts or
characters and that these themes can engage and disengage through interaction
with other themes. An example of this is given by Susan McClary (1991) whose
feminist musical theory posits the destruction of the second oppositional theme
in sonata form as an example of male female conflict.
We can see this in our example above as
the two 'actors' we are watching (piano ostinato and drums) both disengage
simultaneously on the line 'moving forward'. Zappa uses this trick again when The
Blue Light enters what could be described as the second phase of its story
(S11). The drums in this section shift from their proactive frontal nature in
the first three verses, suspending the use of snare and kick drums for the more
ethereal Hi Hat, Ride and other cymbals. Other musical aspects are added to
this including a reintroduction of the main theme from the main intro, which we
will discuss later. What happens to the drums in this section in terms of their
role as time keeper is to slow it down to a standstill to disengage from its
normal flow. We can see examples of this in action movie film scores where two
scenes of differing levels of action are being cut between to heighten tension.
For example a getaway driver waiting in a parked car will be accompanied by
slow wah wah guitar and drums similar to those above, where as when the film
cuts to the criminals he is waiting for there will be marked change in the
music full drums and instrumentation playing at a fast tempo etc. As the two
scenes integrate i.e. they get into the car for their escape the more powerful
music of the criminals wins over and the car speeds off.
The concept of disengagement would suggest
that the character or situation that the drums are representing, i.e. time, has
slowed or has become inert. Within the lyrical context it seems our character
has found a way of life to distract himself from the problems of time that
Zappa, through the use of the dread sections, has marked as a point of terror
for our character. The lines:
Well,
you travel the bars
You
also go to Winchell's Doughnuts
And
hang out with the Highway Patrol
(S11,
The Blue Light, Zappa 1981)
give us some clue as to the
kind of activities he is engaging in to escape the steady flow of time.
It is mentioned
above that our character from S11 enters a world of bars and other such
activities, it is also suggested that this entails journeying into a different
sonic landscape. But what does this new landscape consist of? And what effect
does it have on the interactions between the musical elements we have seen in
previous sections? The next chapter deals with the final sections of
The Blue Light, and the fate of our main character.
Chapter
5: Under the Sea. (S11 to S17)
The first element of note in the final section, is the reintroduction of
the melody from S2 at the beginning of S11. The timbre that is delivering the
melody is however different to its predecessor with a thinner rasping quality,
it is also delivered quickly so as it only plays over the first few bars of
S11, as opposed to its drawn out nature in S2. This shortening of the element makes
it an effective sign, a reminder of what went before, but sufficiently altered
not to take over the whole section. This kind of semiotic structure is very
similar to the notion of Leitmotiv that Kassabian (2001) makes note of in film
music, as well as Tarasti's actoriality. Although both are appropriate it fits
better with the filmic analogy in that it reintroduces a scene or a place we
have been before. Kassabian elaborates on the accumulation of meaning a motif
gathers during a film:
[In the film Jaws] the
first entry of the theme signifies danger; thereafter, the theme signifies
danger from the shark specifically.
(Kassabian 2001:57)
The notion of motif's signifying
various on screen concepts would not have been alien to Zappa, due to his work
in film composition (see introduction). The entirety of S2 is also brought back
again in S16 with the inclusion of a vocal line. This suggests that this
Leitmotiv has a particular function in reintroducing its symbol (in the view of
this dissertation the ocean). It is this repetition of identification that
creates a case for what's being signified, at each repetition we can check our
theory against the narrative and look at the accumulated meaning, as the
following lyrical excerpt from S11 attests:
You
think of the future
And
secretly you piddle your pants
The
puddle of piddle
Which
used to be little
Is
rising around you, rising around you
You
like it
It
gives you something to do
In
the night time
(S7,S8,S9,S10,
The Blue Light, Zappa 1981)
With the combination of lyrics
and music the scene (S11,S13) has become a kind of underwater journey through
American nightlife except the water is the accumulated urine of the main
character (the word urine could easily be exchanged for fear).
The timbre of the
theme has also been altered, gone are the layers of guitar and synth, leaving
just synth. This changes the nature of the melody in that it looses part of its
dramatic quality, so where as before in S2 it was bold and fore grounded in the
music, it is now nested within it and subject to the new context. This coupled
with the thin rasping quality of the synth timbre give it a sinister dark
quality, which coincides with the night time aspect of the lyrical content,
preceded as it is by:
It gives you some thing
to do
In the night time
Well, you travel to bars
(S10,S11, The Blue Light, Zappa 1981)
S11 has a new musical context, we have already mentioned the disengaged
cymbal led percussion and the melody of S2, it also marks the inclusion of bass
guitar and another synth part as well as the three chord piano ostinato. The
bass guitar is another ostinato figure, played entirely in harmonics (or
overtones), Piston describes this technique:
If a vibrating string is
touched very lightly [at one of its dividing harmonic] nodes, it will be
prevented from sounding its fundamental, but it will continue to vibrate....
according to the node chosen, and it will sound the corresponding note.
(Piston 1955:30)
Harmonics have a bell like quality, which comes from the removal of the
powerful fundamental tone that defines the main timbre of the instrument. This
gives a particularly unusual sound when used by the bass guitar, which is
primarily used to drive the rhythm in popular music, with its dense low timbre.
Much like the percussion which has dropped into the background with its
ethereal cymbal crashes, the bass guitar’s propulsive rhythmic capacity has
been neutralized by specifying it be played in harmonics. This is in keeping
with the stasis of time that the character in the lyrical narrative seems to
have reached.
It is possible to take the harmonic on a more abstract symbolic level,
where by the harmonic could potentially represent disembodied culture itself,
it being a disembodied note, its fundamental tone being stopped leaving only
remnants of the original intact. This would echo the frustration Zappa seems to
have with appropriated culture within the American entertainment industry. Zappa is keen to add scorn to this world by
emphasizing its artificial nature:
You
can go to Shakey’s to get that
American
kind of Pizza
That
has the ugly, waxy, fake yellow kind
Of
yellow cheese on the top...
Then
you go to Straw Hat Pizza,
To
get all those artificial ingredients
That
never belonged on a pizza in the first place
(But
the white people really like it... ).
(S11,
The Blue Light, Zappa 1981)
Zappa is making a link here
between ethnicity and authenticity, something that Byron noted as a theme in
1950's America. Byron suggested that songs such as Oh Mein Pa Pa (Calvert
1954) were:
Like vaccines, weakened versions of
Americans' pre-Ellis Island identities injected into mass culture to build up
resistance. After the first flush of pleasure at seeing one's ethnic heritage
represented, most people found the trivialization (and overexposure) repugnant.
It was as if the goal of these psuedo-ethnic tunes was to make us all immune to
whatever was not white and "American."
(quoted
in Borgo 1998)
The same thing is pointed out by
Rudinow (Rudinow 1994), who suggests that ethnic groups (especially black
Americans) were commercially exploited by the white music industry. Zappa, by
evoking the manipulation of a piece of his Italian heritage (the pizza), is
pointing out the unquestioning nature of our characters consumption of American
entertainment and its manipulation of other cultures for financial gain. Zappa
had this to say about the music of San Francisco:
People think that San
Francisco rock is supposed to be cosmic value and all that, but it is
manufactured music and manufactured music is worthless... I was expecting
wonders and miracles and what I heard was a bunch of white blues bands that
didn’t sound as funky as my little band in high school.
(quoted in Watson
2003:110)
Given the bell like texture of the
harmonic there is also a synergy with horror movie sound design, in which
bells, specifically church bells often signify the coming of danger. A good
example of this is the film Hell Raiser II
(1988) where the appearance of the Cenobites (demons) is accompanied
by a cacophony of low register sounds and other horror effects in which
prominently placed is the sound of a large bell. This heralding of danger is
particularly appropriate in The Blue Light given firstly the B-movie
horror nature of the dread structures, and secondly the coming of the Jaws theme
in S14. The notion of lurking danger is almost definitely being fostered here:
Afraid
of the future
(Death
Valley Days, straight ahead)
The
future is scary
Yes,
it sure is.
(S13, The Blue Light, Zappa 1981)
Within our musical
context there is also a second synth that seems to be imitating a wind chime
style percussion instrument. The way it falls through the notes is very similar
to the way a percussion beater is run along the chimes creating an ethereal
sound from cascading notes. The synth timbre employed in The Blue Light
mimics this with the exception that it can select alternative notes and is not
limited to the same sequence as with a conventional set of chimes. The notes it
selects deviate from the normal diatonic progressions creating all manner of
unusual tonalities, which have the effect of sounding quite mystical and dark.
The player also cuts the note runs short sustaining on particular notes, giving
a different rhythmic quality to the sound. Again this sound is ethereal and non
propulsive in terms of rhythm, preferring instead to add texture to the overall
effect. Examples of this can be found in monster movies such as Gorgo (1961)
scored by Angelo Francesco Lavagnino (an example of which can be found on CD
track 22), here the ethereal sound of vibes, flute, bassoon and harp create an
underwater soundscape using a similar arpegiated technique as above.
The fact that the lyrics are invoking a night life scene is placed in
Zappa 'parenthesis' by the musical structure of S11, where the external
influences of nightclubs and bars seem to be represented in the music by the
bass harmonics ostinato and the synth timbres, presenting a world of mystery.
This has a precedent in the movies, where films such as The Lost Weekend (1945),
have a character who sets off on a night of misadventure to escape some problem
they have encountered during the story, trawling bars etc. The Lost Weekend has musical similarities to The
Blue Light in as much as it uses ostinato and dissonance to convey the
characters compulsion to drink, the overall texture resembling S11 and S13.It is worth
noting that our three chord ostinato is still present, symbolizing the
character travelling around this world Zappa has created.
Blurring the
Lines Between Dread and Verse (S12 and S13)
S11 ends as do all the previous verses with
a dread structure (S12), this dread structure does not fit the same model as
the others however. It starts with Zappa's line, 'just so you can hang out with
the others', when he repeats 'the others' the dread chorus singers, instead of
taking over Zappa's narrative as they have done in all the previous sections,
respond with a squirming fear ridden 'oooo'. This interaction between the two
narrative voices (Zappa and the dread chorus) is significant in that the
lurking danger that has been signified in S11 is taking hold of the whole
structure of the song, or becoming manifest. It is as if our character's fears
are taking him over, driving him towards the homogenised life style of 'the
others', where he is unable to think for him self, or assert his individuality,
something that Zappa definitely sees as a danger. The kind of danger that can
lead to escapist peer led activities such as excessive drug taking.
After this the two voices come together
after the third ‘the others’ to exclaim, ’just like you’, for which Zappa puts
on his most condescending ‘silly’ voice. This leads on to a descending
horror-esque figure which imitates a major B-movie cliché. This motif is often
used for the dramatic entrances of evil characters, such as Dracula. And can
even be found in a slightly different guise in Andrew Lloyd Weber’s The
Phantom of the Opera, where it acts as a kind of leitmotiv for the phantom. It seems that the dread is no longer content
to be simply a textured element and is showing its true colours, mimicking
horror movie scores.
At the beginning of S13 things have not
changed, Zappa exclaims ‘afraid of the future’ and immediately a dread response
is heard in the music. This response is in the form of a guitar harmonic note
that has been manipulated by the instruments vibrato bar. The vibrato bar has
the effect of manipulating the pitch of the note by slackening or tightening
the string, the player uses this effect to make the note sound like a human
scream travelling off into the distance. It is the falling wavering quality of
the pitch that does this coupled with the altered timbre of the harmonic. The
sound is almost certainly a sonic anaphone (see appendix), in the style of Jimi
Hendrix’s B52 bomber effect (Tagg 1999), and is showing our characters fear by
running away screaming as Zappa mentions the future. This is a perfect example
of Graakjaer's syncresis, the response of the music to the suggestions of the
text being almost instantaneous. It also seems as if there has been a role
reversal, the text makes a suggestion of a theme, fear of the future, and the
music creates a visual representation of it. These representations of reality
have a cartoonish quality to them, and it is quite possible to imagine the
image of some one running away screaming being used as a gag in a Warner
Brothers animation.
After the screaming incident Zappa, drops
into his normal voice and says, 'Death Valley Days, straight ahead', at
which a band member laughs. This relates to a television series that starred
Ronald Reagan (Sovetov
1996), and pre-empts the rightwing future of American politics. This grounds
the later musical events of The Blue Light to an ideological position,
the suggestion that Reagan's Death Valley Days and a rightwing agenda is
straight ahead, possibly in the narrative of the song.
Zappa immediately returns to the song with
the line, 'the future is scary' and here the dread chorus joins the verse structure
again breaking down the barrier between sections singing, 'yes it sure is'.
This is sung to the tune chapter 3 suggested had the onomatopoeia; dun, dun,
daaaaaa. The dread here has reached its purest expression, the bad news cliché
sound effect used by everyone. It is as if DRAC-u-la has appeared.
Jaws and the
Politics of Atlantis (S14)
The verse S13 does not end in a dread
structure, instead it simply disengages leaving only the piano ostinato and one
of Zappa's most obvious 'stock modules', the shark ostinato from Jaws (1975).
Zappa opens this section with the line ‘well, the puddle is rising, it smells
like the ocean’. This identifies the rising tension of the Jaws ostinato
with rising water, the creation of a figurative ocean enveloping our main
character.
We also have in the Jaws theme a
classic example of Kassabian's (2001:3) 'affiliating identifications', where by
films use non-original, external music within the score to convey meaning in a
scene. The music used in Jaws carries an enormous amount of cultural
baggage. According to Essman (2005) Jaws was one of the highest grossing
box office films of all time, and the two notes of the Jaws theme are
known by millions of people around the world to mean danger lurking, or
creeping up on a victim. The associations Zappa makes, quoting from this score
do not stop at the danger of the shark. There are aspects in the story line of Jaws
that are also pertinent to The Blue Light, for example the people of
Amity denying the presence of a man eating shark in order to keep their beaches
open to make more money. This has distinct overtones of societies allowing
rightwing agendas on the promise of lower taxation.
There is however a definite element Zappa
is attaching to the danger theme, and as he describes the rising water which
becomes a polluted ocean, through seemingly freeform dialogue. We happen upon
the lost nation of Atlantis, supposedly submerged beneath the Atlantic Ocean.
Zappa then reminds us that:
Donovan,
the guy with the brocade coat
Used
to sing to you about Atlantis
You
loved it, you were so involved then
(S14,
The Blue Light, Zappa 1981)
This taken simply on lyrical
content is not particularly elucidating, but when we consider that something
very big and dangerous is lurking beneath these lyrics, in the form of the Jaws
theme, there starts to be more to what is being said.
If we look at the lyrics of Donovan's song Atlantis
there is mention of the fact that, 'Egypt was, but a remnant' of the
Antediluvian race that disappeared beneath the sea. Considered against evidence
that according to Nagl (1974), the alleged existence of Atlantis, played an
important role in the Third Reich's quest to prove an Arian (or white) origin
for human civilization. We can see that dealing in such fantasies is to flirt
with dangerous rightwing ideology, especially if Egypt, the widely considered
origins of modern civilization becomes subservient to it. It is this flippant
use of myth and metaphor that Zappa is attacking, the potential for people to
succumb to hidden motives and conspiracies.
Zappa attaches something else to the shark
theme:
That
was back in the days when you used to smoke a banana
You
would scrape the stuff off the middle
You
would smoke it
You
even thought you were getting ripped from it
No
problem
Ah
Atlantis, they could really get down there.
(S14,
The Blue Light, Zappa 1981)
Zappa seems to be equating
drug culture to hidden danger, this coincides with his idea that the CIA
produced and supplied LSD to the San Francisco hippies. The lurking unseen
secret police fuelling a pacifying drug culture, that blinds people to even the
most extreme ideologies.
Under Water
At the culmination of this section S14 the Jaws
ostinato and the rest of the musical elements cease for Zappa to say 'Ah
Atlantis'. This cessation of activity is very similar to the calm after the
shark attacks in Jaws, the point where the viewers anxieties preceding
the victim’s fate have been answered. Here however it appears that the water
has stopped rising and we have ended up in Atlantis, for now the character is
‘safe’. This moment of quiet acts a fulcrum in the music and we tip over into
the line, ‘they could really get down there’, delivered in a combination of
showbiz pomp and dread structure, which ushers in the ostinato bass line of
section S15.
S15 appears to be styled on the kind of
under water music found in B-Movie films such as Henry Mansini's music for The
Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) (CD track 23), or more
recently the Jacque Cousteau pastiche of The Life Aquatic (2004). There
is a definite feel of underwater exploration to the music which invokes scenes
of mini-submarines and divers searching the sea bed (the Mansini piece provided
is named The Diver). There is almost certainly a trend in films from
around the time The Blue Light was recorded, to utilize this kind of
scene, especially in films that rely on representations of high technology to
fuel the adventure. Bellow are several examples:
Never
Say Never Again (James Bond)
Jaws
3
Jaws
the Revenge
20,000
Leagues Under the Sea
The
Abyss
The music of S15 is approximating the kind
of music found in the exploratory underwater scenes with the bass ostinato, it
is a representation as opposed to an exact copy. Not only this, the synth has
taken on a role similar to movie sound effects, providing syncretic
representations of the underwater world Zappa is describing. So as Zappa
describes Atlantis with the following:
The
plankton, the krill
The
giant underwater pyramid, the squid decor
Excuse
me, Todd
The
big old giant underwater door
The
dome, the bubbles, the blue light.
(S14,
The Blue Light, Zappa 1981)
We hear sounds that would not
be out of place in a B-Movie (or any of the above films) where for example an
electric eel passes by, they are typical examples of science fiction underwater
sounds. A more obvious sound effect comes in on ‘the bubbles’ where the synth
uses a timbre not unlike the sound of bubbles.
In looking for meaning in this scene it is
important to note that the main character ostinato has, since the shark strike
of S14, completely disappeared from the music. He has been subsumed by a theme
denoting exploration, and if, as this dissertation suggests, the shark attack
in part symbolized CIA led drug experimentation, the exploration our character
has become involved in would be drug induced. Certainly the looping nature of
the bass ostinato would locate Zappa’s concept of hippies, ’swimming around in pools of metaphors
and cosmic debris‘, and more importantly hopelessness in this explorative
theme. Furthermore the annihilation of the main character theme, works as a
kind of Tarasti (2002) disengagement, he becomes one of ‘the others’ Zappa
describes in S12. His personality is completely gone, part of an amorphous
cultural blob. This quote from Zappa is particularly relevant here:
Every natural human urge has been
thwarted in one way or another, so that so that some cock sucker gets to make a
dollar off your guilt.
Certain people buy into this because
they don’t want to rock the boat. Unfortunately, adaptation of this sort
requires that the adaptee willingly destroys his own personality.
(Zappa & Occhiogrosso 1989:233)
All this searching
is likely to be taking place in the same clubs and bars of S11 and S13, they
have however morphed from their everyday appearance into the mystical world of
Atlantis, the drugs have had their effect submerging our character in the half
light. After searching the fascist world of Atlantis, we encounter bubbles, are
these bubbles a sudden realization of being submerged? Our character panicking
at being trapped in a world beyond his control. After the bubbles, we encounter
’the blue light’, which is sung in an almost consonant harmony. It is as if the
blue light is almost a relief, a vision of the water surface and oxygen, which
would tie in with the notion of drowning and desperately trying to reach the
surface.
The Blue
Light (S16)
At this point (S16) we are thrown straight
back into the main intro and theme of S1 and S2, with the exception that a
falsetto voice is now singing variations of the phrase ‘blue light’ over the
music. This is again a recourse to preparatory nature of the opening music, the
waves etc. that were being symbolized in the beginning are back, except now our
character is trapped under them.
The vocal at first sings 'light' over the
new version of S1, raising its pitch along with the rising of the guitar line,
another voice shadows it with a softer lower pitched ‘light’. As the guitar
line reaches the point of descent, several combined voices almost groan the
word, ‘blue’. This repeats until the new version of S2, where the voices sing
‘blue’ over the first two notes of the melody. On the third note of the melody
the falsetto voice kicks in with 'light', the section repeats and the falsetto
kicks in again on the third note, and follows the line of the melody to the
dominant, as in S2.
The effect of singing over this section,
seems from a subjective point of view to ramp up the urgency, the near screaming
effect of the falsetto countered by the groaning of the other voices has a
potent effect on the meaning of the music of S1 and S2. It is as if the voice
is that of our character crying out for the light of the surface, but is pulled
back by a groan of ‘blue’, it is only half light and he cannot escape drowning.
These groans of ‘blue’ continue on into the S2 melody, and our character cries
out ‘light’ at the end of the them, still hoping for salvation. On the second
pass however he disappears into the water, the descent of the melody to the
dominant mimicking the final cry of some one falling to their death, in an
unfathomable void.
Death and drowning here are symbols of
cultural assimilation, the grinding down of human creativity to make way for an
homogenized entertainment industry, intent on power, money and ultimately
governmental control. It is this that is killing our character his inability to
swim clear of drugs and other such distractions, he is indeed ‘hopeless’.
Sacrificial
Puppets (S17)
The void that our character is falling into
with the final descent of S16 is not however left unfilled in S17, Zappa has
one final musical quotation to seal his fate. This quotation is from
Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, figs. 70-1 (1967) Procession of the
Sage. This section of the Rite is described by Hill:
Here.
suddenly, the [preceding] competing rhythms slot into place, as each motif
spins through regular cycles of fours, eights and sixteens (the march itself).
Thus at the climax of part I the same principle which climaxed the
'introduction' in babbling confussion is here transformed, as if into some vast
turbine in which every part of the mechanism moves with disciplined purpose.
(Hill 2000:
69)
CD track 24 has section S17 and the above
section of the Rite (1992), playing together simultaneously in
order to show the dramatic similarity between the two pieces. Zappa for reasons
such as available orchestration, is not using exactly the same notes as
Stravinsky, but he is using repeated motifs in a similar manner to create the
sound.
The motifs that Zappa is using to compose
this section are in part summations of the original music of the Rite, the
mute trumpet for example plays a similar set of notes to the trumpets of the Rite,
with the exception that a short jazz run precedes the cadence of the later.
The trumpet of The Blue Light also has a different feel, it almost
sounds as if the player is drunk somewhere in a New Orleans Jazz club.
Where the trumpet plays similar notes to
the Rite, the bass seems to be playing a repeated figure based on the
'twist' dance rhythm, which almost certainly doesn't appear in the Rite, with
its repetition however it becomes part of the momentum that creates a structure
of similar sound. The drums fit into a similar situation here, they follow a
repetitive pattern of militaristic snare rolls and isolated drum hits, that
almost sound like gun fire and explosions respectively.
There is one other sound that is a peculiar
quote not from the Rite itself, but from Stravinsky's Petrushka (1992),
from the wood wind ostinatos that can be heard under the music in the opening
sections of the work. These ostinatos have an almost tremello quality to them,
and can be distinctly heard played on synth or guitar under the music of S17.
Zappa has quoted Stravinsky's music through out his career and makes particular
mention of this fact in The Real Frank Zappa Book (1989), these elements
in S17 are definitely here to add spin the lyrics in both their component form
and the structure as a whole.
If we look at the subject of Petrushka
the ballet, it is about a puppet. The idea of replicated humanity has been
an ongoing feature of Zappa’s commentary on society, he seems to be suggesting
that the characters fate is to become a puppet or a dummy. Adding the necessary
puppet master to this suggests that some one other than our character is
pulling the strings. Why is this buried in a quote from the Rite? Well
the Procession of the Sage is, as alluded to by Hill, a march, and marching
is something Zappa is very vociferous about:
Americans
use drugs as if consumption bestowed a ‘special license’ to be an
asshole... I have a theory about beer: Consumption of it leads to pseudo-military
behaviour. Think about it- winos don’t march.
(Zappa
& Occhiogrosso 1989:229-230)
If we look closely at the
musical elements of S17, we have bar music standards such as the ‘twist’ and
the drunk trumpet motif set against an extremely militaristic drum pattern,
that not only sounds like parade drumming, but gun fire and explosions. The
‘twist’ has made its way into Zappa’s lyrics before:
When
there's just a few of them severely ignorant white folks
Doing
the peppermint twist for real.
(Mudd
Club, Thing Fish, Zappa 1984)
This collection of night life
symbols represents false manufactured entertainment, defined by aspects of a
controlling force, and this feeds into the other aspect of the Rite,
ritual sacrifice. We are witnessing the destruction of individuality, the
crushing of creative interaction within entertainment. Which interestingly ties
in with concepts of ritual and societal musics, where societies such as
Australian Aboriginals use music as a ritual part of everyday life, an
interactive hub that defines their relationships within the tribe. This is
something that homogenized culture cannot allow, you must purchase and adhere
to the music that is the most popular, a society of puppets.
The mechanical aspect of the music also
plays a role here, the ostinato structure almost acts as a grinder, mincing
down the subjects amidst popular culture rollers. Cumming (1997), identifies this
feature in Reich’s (2006) use of ostinato in Different Trains as a
version of Marx’s concept of the division of labour, the reduction of human
labour to mechanism.
Through out this section Zappa's lyrics
revisit some of The Blue Light's previous ideas, and we are again
confronted with language, 'the future of your language'. Within the setting of
the music the future of language seems fairly grim, this is reminiscent of
Orwell's (2004) 1984 and the idea of a new language designed to remove
the possibility of political descent called New Speak. Zappa is saying
that passive consumption leaves us open to this type of control, as an emphasis
Zappa and the other vocalists put on a dumb cartoon voice and read through
objects of American consumerism, such as meat loaf, Micro Nantettes (a cleaning
product see; Sovetov
1996) and Brut Cologne. This is played out over music
resembling the explosive chords at the end of part I of the Rite. These
chords are full of dissonance and play out the end game of The Blue Light,
society reduced to indiscriminate consumerism subject to government control and
ultimately dumbed down. The chords almost allow the piece to collapse, the last
throws of a free society falling into the swamp, or drowning in the arcane
looking toward the blue light.
Chapter
6: Conclusion
At the outset of this dissertation I was
aware that something was happening in The Blue Light, but not entirely
sure what. The piano ostinato, for example, caught my attention and by its
continuous nature seemed to represent something, creating a layer of meaning,
but the other musical elements rather than helping to create meaning served to
confuse the issue. It was only by recourse to a methodology, helping to look at
how these elements interacted internally and externally that the piece began to
take on a narrative. To me the piece represents an intense vision of a society
drowning in its own willingness to behave stupidly, encouraged by people keen
to profit from this behaviour. The narrative I have set out within the
dissertation tells this story from one perspective, but some one privy to more
of the cultural information signified by Zappa could certainly tell another. This
aspect of historical experiential knowledge shows up a flaw in the technique
used, in as much that the references Zappa is using relate to events and
situations beyond the scope of the research for this project. This creates the
necessity to fill holes with subjective analysis. However utilizing biographies
and interviews helps fill some of these gaps and steers the research toward a
result at least in keeping with Zappa’s philosophy.
The techniques used in this dissertation
also allow for the possibility of a narrative developing within the music that
works in tandem with the lyrical content, giving context and meaning to
abstract concepts within the lyrics. Applying ideas such as those of Graakjaer
and Kassabian to Zappa’s music, highlight elements of methodology in Zappa’s
composition, the importance of referents in the lyrics having syncretic effects
on the music or vice versa, and the way that this echoes film music praxis. In
using information this way Zappa is creating his own means of communication, a
layered channel that can be encoded not just with Zappa's own music, but
multiples of external influence. Stravinsky, Lenny Bruce and John Williams can
share the same compositional space with the 'twist' in order to create a new
story from their very different cultural backgrounds. Analysing music in this
way is however a fraught process, as finding inter-textual relationships is
subject to subjective evaluations of similarities in comparative examples. This
leads to the possibility of multiple interpretations of The Blue Light,
of which this dissertation is just one. The problems multiply where Zappa uses
literal quotations such as the Jaws motif as they are subject to shifts
in meaning over time as they become subsumed into the cultural sub-conscious
and gather extra baggage.
Within this analytical method there is
plenty of room for further research, as already mentioned the cultural
referents could be tracked down, and there is also the method Zappa used to
compose The Blue Light to be looked at. As mentioned in the introduction
Zappa edited the piece together from two live performances, to go back and look
at these source recordings would be very interesting. Other versions of The
Blue Light are also available on bootleg recordings that show a work in
progress, analysis of these artefacts would be useful in following the genesis
of the work.
The reinvention of The Blue Light into
the Galoot Update shows how Zappa can use this method to package and
carry ideas from one record to the next. The Galoot Update, is an
extremely potent example of Zappa’s conceptual continuity, taking what is
essentially a dig at popular culture and turning it into a protest against
racism and homophobia. Also raising the possibility that governments maybe involved
in attempts to deal with minorities through biological cleansing. He seems to
make corrections to aspects of The Blue Light as well, when he says in
S17, ‘you can’t even speak your own fucking language’, the Galoot Update has
the Thing Fish character leap in and say ‘what on earth do you mean my
language, I got your language hanging boy’ (pointed out by Watson 2007). This
seems to be chastising the notion that there is one superior language that has
primacy, which is a very western conceit, perhaps suggesting that Zappa has
re-thought this notion, allowing the Thing Fish to attack him.
When it is considered that The Blue
Light is just one song from a total of 57 albums, not to mention 100's of
hours of live performance bootlegs as well as the unreleased Zappa archive, the
implications of conceptual continuity beyond simply the lyrics, encompassing
the music, become monstrous an object almost impossible to comprehend. Watson's
(2003) 'work on the part of the listener' comes into play here. As mentioned at
the end of chapter 5 music in other societies is interactive, and requires
participation, the participation in Zappa's music is this work. To enjoy
Zappa's project/ object requires the listener to invest time and effort and to
think, not merely to consume passively, The Blue Light gives a warning
as to the dangers of ignoring such participation, or becoming subject to the
spectacle of the entertainment industry.
This set aside however The Blue Light is
a song that has left fans and critics alike guessing as to its meaning. By
dealing with the spin created by the music this dissertation creates an avenue
to deciphering at least in part what this piece could mean.
Appendices
Appendices
Glossary of Tagg's Semiotic Terminology
|
Sign
|
Description
|
|
Sonic Anaphones
|
Tagg describes these as quasi-programmatic elements of musical sound
that simulate real life sound events. He gives the example of Jimi Hendrix
mimicing a B52 bomber with his guitar, or Schubert's babbling brooks.
|
|
Tactile Anaphones
|
These are according to Tagg, musical textures, such as string pads
(keyboard sounds that use layered harmonized strings to generate thick sounds
to fill out the music), in order to fill in holes behind melodies. The net
effect of these is to create a kind of wall paper that can be seen as soft
and hence textured.
|
|
Kinetic Anaphones
|
Kinetic Anaphones are in Tagg's words 'to do with the relationship of
the human body to time and space', and are basically musical simulations of
physical activity i.e. running walking, flying etc. They can also be applied
to the rest of the physical world.
|
|
Composite Anaphones
|
Combinations of all of the above.
|
|
Genre Synecdoche
|
Tagg gives the example; 50 heads of cattle represent 50 complete
creatures not 50 heads, to elucidate this term. Applied to music this means
that small sections of music can be used to reference other alien styles of
music within the home music. For example an Indian Raga style guitar riff in
a rock song to give a momentary eastern reference.
|
|
Episodic Marker
|
These are elements in the music that dramatically create new
directions in the musical narrative, Tagg gives the example of the six quaver
upbeat to the chorus of Abba's Fernando, or the centrifugal melodic swirls at
the start of Johann Strauss's Fledermaus waltz.
|
|
Compositional Norms
|
This pertains to the elements that comprise the home music style of a
culture that has more than one form of music, Tagg gives the example of the
Blues being represented by music that has several chords embellished with a
large amount of vocal and instrumental inflection, elements that separate it
from say Viennese classical music.
|
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Discography
Andrew Lloyd Webber. The Phantom of the
Opera. 2000. Compact Disc. Polydor
B00004YTY2
Claude Debussy. La Mer. 2006. Compact Disc. Sanctuary Classics CD
HLL 7513.
Igor Stravinsky. The Rite of Spring. 1992. Compact Disc. Sony
Classical SBK 48 169
Igor Stravinsky. Petrouchka. 1992. Compact Disc. Deutsche
Grammophon 435 769-2
Frank Zappa. Baby Snakes. 1979. Compact Disc. Rykodisc RCD 10539
Frank Zappa. Bongo Fury. 1975. Compact Disc. Rykodisc RCD 10522
Frank Zappa. Joe's Garage. 1979. Compact Disc. Rykodisc RCD 10530/31
Frank Zappa. Just Another Band
From L.A. 1971. Compact Disc. Rykodisc
RCD 10551
Frank Zappa. Frank Zappa Meets
the Mothers of Prevention. 1985. Compact Disc. Rykodisc RCD 10547
Frank Zappa. Sheik Yerbouti. 1979. Compact Disc. Rykodisc RCD 10528
Frank Zappa. The Lost Episodes. 1996. Compact Disc. Rykodisc RCD
40573.
Frank Zappa. The Man From Utopia. 1985. Compact Disc. Rykodisc RCD 10538
Frank Zappa. Thing Fish. 1984. Compact Disc. Compact Disc. Rykodisc RCD 10544/45
Frank Zappa. Tinsel Town Rebellion. 1981. Compact Disc. Zappa
Records FZ25.
Frank Zappa. Studio Tan. 1978. Compact Disc. Rykodisc RCD 10526
Frank Zappa. Weazels Ripped my Flesh. 1970. Compact Disc. Rykodisc RCD 10510
Frank Zappa. You Are What You Is. 1984. Compact Disc. Rykodisc RCD 10536
Lenny Bruce. Thank You Masked Man. 2004. Compact Disc.
Fantasy FCD 7716
Steve Reich. Different Trains. 2006. Compact Disc.
Sanctuary Records BBM1097
The Ventures. The Story. 2000. Compact Disc. EMI
724357621021
Filmography
200 Motels. Dir. Tony Palmer, Charles Swenson. Bizarre
Productions. 1971.
Das Blue Licht. Dir. Leni Riefenstahl. Leni Riefenstahl-Produktion.
1934.
Gorgo. Dir. Eugnene Lourie. King Brothers Productions. 1961.
Jaws. Dir. Steven Speilberg. Universal Pictures. 1975.
Hell
Raiser II. Dir.
Tony Randel. Film Futures. 1988.
Psycho. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Universal Pictures. 1960.
The Exorcist. Dir. William Friedkin. Warner Bros. Pictures.
1973.
The Life Aquatic. Dir. Wes Anderson. Touchstone Pictures. 2004.
The Lost Weekend. Dir. Billy Wilder. Paramount Pictures. 1945.
The Creature from the Black Lagoon. Dir. Jack Arnold. Universal
International Pictures. 1954.
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