What’s the Ugliest Part of Your Body
You Are What You Is
Wind Up Workin’ In A Gas Station
A Token Of My Extreme
TEN (ZEN) COMMENDMENTS by Simon Prentis
(The Rondo Hatton Report vol III, june 21, 2010)
This is an extract from a talk given at ICE-Z 2 in Rome back in June 2006. Since the transcripts from this conference seem never to have been published, I’m taking this opportunity to reach a wider audience with the core of the presentation, short comments on selected quotes from lyrics and interviews designed as a cut-out-and-keep guide to one of the great underlying themes in Zappa’s work, a therapeutic sort of ‘Po-Jama Person’s Progress’ toward the goal of ultimate enlightenment:
1) Your mind is the ugliest part of your body (from “What’s the ugliest part of your body”)
To point at the ugliness of the human mind may not be the most original of insights. The future Queen Elizabeth 1 even composed a poem in 1554 along these lines, “No crooked leg, no bleared eye, No part deformed out of kind, Nor yet so ugly half can be, As is the inward suspicious mind.” But Zappa’s lyric gets its punch from the implication that the mind is actually a part of the body, along with toes and noses, and equally deserving of critical attention. For not only are ‘cosmetic issues’ nothing compared to the reasons you think you have them in the first place, they are entirely secondary to the main business at hand, which is to un-feature your hurt and cease inflicting your personal problems either upon yourself or the rest of the world.
2) You is what you am / A cow don’t make ham. (from “You are what you is”)
Dealing with the incipient ugliness involves owning it. As Zappa told Oui Magazine in 1979, “If you’re going to deal with reality, you’re going to have to make one big discovery: Reality is something that belongs to you as an individual. If you want to grow up, which most people don’t, the thing to do is to take responsibility for your own reality and deal with it in your own terms. Don’t expect that because you pay some money to somebody else, or take a pledge, or join a club, or run down the street, or wear a special bunch of clothes, or play a certain sport or even drink Perrier water, it’s going to take care of everything for you. Because it all comes from inside. As a matter of fact, that’s where it stays.”
3) You oughta know now all your education / Won’t help you no-how (from “Wind up workin’ in a gas station”)
School was never going to be the answer. If you listen to anyone else telling you how to do your shit, don’t complain if you don’t like the results. Zappa’s recommended procedure, based on available technology at the time, was “If you want to get laid, go to school; if you want an education, go to the library”, but his own body of work was clearly intended to function as a public service announcement in this regard: “Everybody else writes songs about beautiful girls who make you fall in love, and groovy guys that are so wonderful, and heartbreak and all that shit – that’s everybody else’s department. I’m alternative information on specimen behaviour.”
4) Whatever you can do to have a good time, let’s get on with it, so long as it doesn’t cause a murder (from “The Jazz Discharge Party Hats”)
Taking responsibility for your own reality, of course, includes acknowledging and accepting what you are and what you need to do to work out your personal demons. Barring homicide, it’s clearly important to get into the paraphernalia of whatever it is that turns you on. “As long as you don’t do anything to damage anybody else’s body or mind in the procurement of your sexual gratification, then go on ahead. If you want to fuck a dog and the dog likes it, you’re in business; if you fuck a chicken and it dies, you’re naughty.”
5) You might be surprised at what you find out when you go. (from “A Token of my Extreme”)
The classic quote in this context is “There is no progress without deviation”, but Zappa’s penchant for pushing envelopes was much more of an active quest. As he told Playboy in 1993: “I like taking things to their most ridiculous extreme because out there on the fringe is where my kind of entertainment lies.” Entertainment, of course, being the name of the game. “The crux of the biscuit is: If it entertains you, fine. Enjoy it. If it doesn’t, then blow it out your ass.” And then move on, because…