Variant: If you end up with a boring miserable life because you listened to your mom, your dad, your teacher, your priest, or some guy on television telling you how to do your shit, then you deserve it.
Source: The Real Frank Zappa Book (1989), p. 233.
Frank Zappa: Doing
Frank Zappa was American musician, songwriter, composer, and record and film producer. Explore interesting quotes on doing.
Frank Zappa:
258
quotes
208
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Oui interview (1979)
Context: The cool-person syndrome is peculiarly American. Part of that has to do with the way the educational business is run in the U. S. It’s not based on how much you can teach your child: it’s based on how much money the suppliers of basic materials can make off your child. Somewhere along the line most people pick up the desire to be a cool person, which is just another way to make them buy things. Once you’ve decided that you need to be a cool person, it makes you a possible victim of anyone whose products are the equivalent of bottled smoke. Somebody tells you to buy this particularly useless item and you’ll be a cool person. No matter how stupid it seems, you have to buy it. Pet Rocks. Pringle’s potato chips. whatever it is — the newest, the latest. Since the cool-person thing is something you learn in school, and since the school business is pretty suspicious and definitely tied up with the government, it makes you wonder whether or not the desire to be cool is part of a government plot to make you buy stupid things.
“Nothing weird about that as long as you do it in a meaningful way.”
Oui interview (1979)
Context: There isn’t anything weird about my music. Weird is a skeleton in the closet, wearing a rubber mask with warts all over its nose, and all that kind of shit. That’s not what I do. The thing that makes my music unusual is that people only hear one kind of music all the time over the radio. It’s wallpaper to their lives. Audile wallpaper. There’s one acceptable beat and there are three acceptable chord progressions. There are five acceptable words: baby, love, tears, yat yat. Just because I don’t deal in those terms doesn’t mean I’m weird. So tell these people: I ain’t weird; I’m rational. I’m a person who can choose to write stuff like that, or choose to write stuff that includes all the notes on the piano played at once, followed by a cement truck driving over the piano, followed by a small atomic explosion. Nothing weird about that as long as you do it in a meaningful way.
Oui interview (1979)
Context: Everything on this planet has something to do with music. Music functions in the realm of sculptured air. Polluted as our atmosphere might be, air is the thing that makes music work. Since all other things that occur in the sound domain are transmitted to the ear through that swirling mass, depending on how wide you want to make your definition, you could perceive quite a bit of human experience in terms of music.
“The most important thing to do in your life is to not interfere with somebody else's life.”
In response to Joe Walsh on The Howard Stern Show (1987).
Zen Masters : The Wisdom of Frank Zappa (2003)
“I'm probably more famous for sitting on the toilet than for anything else that I do.”
Interview on Nationwide (1 July 1983).
“Do you think you are protecting somebody by taking away seven words?”
Crossfire debate on censorship (1986)
"The Meek Shall Inherit Nothing"
You Are What You Is (1981)
Interview on Channel 4 (1 June 1983) - YouTube video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFjZOeL10MA&NR
Rolling Stone interview (1988)
Appearance on The Howard Stern Show (1987).
"Trouble Every Day"
Freak Out! (1966)
Oui interview (1979)