"We're talking about words...

...and I don't believe that there is any word that needs to be suppressed." -- Frank Zappa, Crossfire, March 28, 1986

In that fascinating clip that echo posted, Zappa takes the position that there's no combination of words that would need to be censored. He's absolutely right.

The panel on the show repeatedly dances around the issue of Prince's "Sister", without ever referencing it directly. In 1986, Prince singing about his 'lovely and loose' 32-year old sister seemed outrageous. That's only two years before Straight Outta Compton, and six years before Ice T would sing about killing cops. For entertainment's sake, I wish we could have reconvened this panel twenty years later to get their reaction to Eminem's "Kim", wherein he depicts the brutal murder of his wife. Novak & Co. would probably be stunned to learn that TIME would name The Marshall Mathers LP one of its All-Time 100 Albums.

What really fascinates me in that clip is how cyclical the arguments are. At one point, Zappa says that he's more concerned with America's progress towards becoming a 'fascist theocracy' than he is with dirty pop lyrics. Great minds think alike! In 2005, Harold Bloom would say to Charlie Rose in all seriousness, "I'm a very frightened man. At 75, I find that increasingly I'm living in a theocracy." Both men would have done better to stick to the subject at hand, which brings me back to this old chestnut of censorship.

The 'X-rated' music of David Allan Coe couldn't be more obviously offensive. A song like "Nigger Fucker" is so thoroughly racist that, though it was recorded in jest, it's relegated Coe to the dunce's corner with all the other problematic artists like Wagner. Discussion of these artists apparently must never forget to reference whichever issue it is that got them in to hot water: Stockhausen will never escape reference to his comments about 9/11; Sinead O'Connor's brilliance will always be qualified by her stunt on SNL. Before the arguments run their course, there's a good chance Hitler will have been referenced and someone will posit that the only responsible thing to do is ban or boycott their work.

These cyclical arguments are more appropriately considered thought ruts. As an optimist, I tend to imagine these perennial debates as a car trapped in a snow bank. To free the car, you have to rock it back and forth over the same ground for what seems like an eternity. Hopefully, retreading these arguments decade after decade ends up getting us somewhere.

The goal for those of us on Zappa's side of the argument, or at least for me, isn't to get to a world that openly embraces offensive art. The ideal would be to get to a point where such work isn't sequestered artificially. Let the work sink or swim on its own merits.

The Drama In Doing Nothing

We were just in Cleveland performing a program that veered from Elliott Carter to Giuseppe Verdi to Prince, with heavy doses of Stockhausen and a finale of Queen. If it didn't all flow together like a good mixtape, I think we'd spend a lot of time answering questions like, "How do you justify putting Prince on the same program with Mauricio Kagel?". Thankfully, the flow works. It always has, for the most part, and to me, it's a very honest byproduct of being a child of the 80's, when everything started to become instantly available. My brain's all jacked up with high and low culture, and it's never really been clear to me what the difference was. Once, when I remarked to a professor that I thought Pink Floyd's 'The Wall' was as unimpeachable as 'Tosca', he said that if I really felt that way, I shouldn't be studying in a conservatory. At the time, most of my professors would've shared that view, but I doubt it now, given how many of us kids who grew up on CHiPs and Chopin are taking over the teaching posts nowadays.

What brings all of this to mind is Moby Dick, actually. I got to chapter 36 today ("The Quarter-Deck"), and it reminded me of Michael Jackson's entrance on the Dangerous tour. In my edition, over 100 pages have gone by, and Ahab has been not much more than a ghost. He makes his first real appearance in chapter 28, where Ishmael gives us a full rundown on his appearance. But he really doesn't do much until chapter 36, when he all of the sudden assembles the entire crew of the Pequod on the quarter-deck.

Melville ratchets up the drama with the slightest effort:

"Sir!" said the mate, astonished at an order seldom or never given on shipboard except in some extraordinary case.

"Send everybody aft," repeated Ahab. "Mastheads, there! come down!"

The exceptional nature of the circumstance is deftly drawn, and then Melville has Ahab lob some softballs at the crew:

"What do ye do when ye see a whale, men?"

"Sing out for him!" was the impulsive rejoinder from a score of chubbed voices.

"Good!" cried Ahab, with a wild approval in his tones; observing the hearty animation into which his unexpected question had so magnetically thrown them.

"And what do ye next, men?"

"Lower away, and after him!"

"And what tune is it ye pull to, men?"

"A dead whale or a stove boat!"

Ahab has his crew in the palm of his hand by sheer dint of doing nothing for some weeks and then throwing them off balance. The sheer weight of their anticipation, their hunger for some direction, and the force of his personality marry in an alchemical moment. When, moments later, Ahab entreats these strangers to join him on his mad quest after a crippled white whale, they are more than happy to seal their doom with the fellow.

As I was reading the passage today, the image of Michael Jackson taking the stage kept coming to mind. On his Dangerous tour, he'd shoot up onto the stage from a trap door, amid fireworks. Then, he'd do nothing.

Like Ahab, he knew the power of his presence. By simply letting the tension build, as Ahab did in the weeks of his silence, Michael turns up the audience's enthusiasm to sheer hysteria. Then, after a minute of standing there in stone silence, what does he do?

He turns his head.

It's an absolute mastery of the moment and his audience. With that entrance, Michael, like Ahab, can command absolutely anything. Maybe I've watched too much TV and listened to too many rock records, but the connection makes sense to me:

Michael jackson - dangerous tour
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There's a Fine Line Between Clever and Stupid

The black album has a noble tradition, which like most things in pop music, dates back to the Beatles. White label pressings of brand new recordings lack any artist information, and back in 1968, with four rapidly maturing artistic personas and a double album's worth of brilliant yet eclectic material, the Beatles' eponymous album's plain white cover was an external signifier of the difficulty of labelling what lay within and the brand new terrain the band was entering.

The Damned were the first to turn the notion on its ear, and release a black album, and if you are into mythology, Spinal Tap had to repackage Smell the Glove as a black album, but the pinnacle of the genre is Prince's 1988 release. Everything about it reinforces its bootleg status. The content is some of the darkest he ever released. It's also the most unhinged.

The black album was supposed to follow Sign 'O' the Times, and it was supposed to be the funk bible, re-establishing Prince's cred with the black community, who were starting to see him as a sellout. The reasons for its non-release aren't all that clear, but in the mid-90's, Prince finally allowed a proper release of it, and at that time, he spoke rather eloquently about his decision not to release it. He claimed that it came from a dark place, and that at that point, he was almost obsessed with fatalism, and he was worried about releasing such a negative statement, especially if it were to be his last.

So, what he went with was this

(look familiar?)

While Lovesexy is fabulous, with upbeat stuff like "Alphabet Street", it's hardly one of his best. The Black Album, on the other hand, is some pretty fantastic stuff:

1. "Le Grind" not only uses hand claps (one of our favourite devices), it gets them going 'double time'. Killer.
2. "Cindy C" is pre- just about everything but the fashion success. She was on the cover of Playboy that year, but this song predates House of Style, Richard Gere, even Fair Game. Love when he talk-sings about her beauty mark.
3. "Dead On It" is a great example of how Prince had the unparalleled ability to turn shitty pre-fab sounds into funky pop brilliance. The drum machines, the chintzy keyboard synth, all would be dreck in the hands of a lesser artist.
4. "When 2 R In Love" is just one of his best songs. His falsetto is spot-on (brilliantly setting up the next song), and the bridge is one of his best: "Nothing's forbidden/nothing's taboo..."
5. "Bob George". I mean, what can you say about this song? It's one of the greatest things ever recorded. It's certainly one of Prince's best. It's a mean, synth-blues, with a jaw-dropping vocal that just takes the piss out of his whole persona. The takeaway line is "Prince?! That skinny motherfucker with the high voice?" A model of timing and delivery, this is the heart of the album. It's black in every way the title portends.
6. "Superfunkycalifragisexy", like "When 2 R in Love", could fit right in on Lovesexy. The 'orchestra hits' are pure out-of-the-box Casio crap, but he makes it work.
7. "2 Nigs United 4 West Compton" features another great unhinged impromptu performance from Prince, but it's mainly an instrumental jam that would crop up on a later live release.
8. "Rockhard In a Funky Place prefigures the soft jazz that would come, but doesn't loose sight of the groove. Its a great example of Prince working up a mid-tempo frenzy. Full of throwaway moments like "I just hate to see an erection go to waste". In a half decade, he'd recut this as one of his greatest singles: "Gett Off"