It Just Might Be A One-Shot Deal
The Meek Shall Inherit Nothing
Packard Goose
Take your Clothes off when you dance
TEN (ZEN) COMMENDMENTS by Simon Prentis
(The Rondo Hatton Report vol III, june 21, 2010)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UHneQD1aRg
6) You should be diggin’ it while it’s happening (from “It just might be a one-shot deal”)
Though you can be scared if it gets too real, with death valley days staring straight ahead, it’s best to celebrate the time left until you’re a cinder, doing “whatever you can that makes your particular life more beautiful, and you get involved in art. ‘Cause that’s what makes things beautiful.” In the face of collective collusion in the decision to choose cheese, Zappa’s suggestion for improving the quality of life is to “think of this matter in terms of how much of what we individually consider to be beautiful are we able to experience every day.” For even if time turns out to be a spherical constant, you’ve still “got X number of moments of your undead state to deal with whatever you’re going to deal with. And I think that the best way to do it is to deal with as much as you can deal with while you’re alive, not as little.”
7) When you pay the bill, kindly leave a little tip / To help the next poor sucker on his one-way trip (from “The Meek shall inherit nothing”)
Zappa’s remarks about the usefulness of what he might be able to say through his work indicate that he saw an educational value in ‘art’ aside from its intrinsic entertainment value. And in the particular context of football: “I think that if you had to choose between playing football or doing art, you’d probably be better off doing art, because if everything does disappear, the only thing that is going to be worth digging up later on is the art, not the footballs. To me that would be a better way of spending your waning hours, and that is what we’re talking about.”
8) Music is the best (from “Packard Goose”)
The culmination of the mini-manifesto, the ultimate tip is to tune in directly to whatever subdivision of the Big Note suits your factory rate. If, as Walter Pater said, “all art aspires to the condition of music” then the decoration of time through music is as good as it gets. And, as previously noted, anything can be music. Zappa’s working definition was “the organization of any data”. But there has to be active participation: “It doesn’t become music until someone wills it to be music, and the audience listening to it decides to perceive it as music.” A dialectical dance between subject and object. And speaking of dancing:
9) There will come a time when you can even take your clothes off when you dance (from “Take your clothes off when you dance”)
Once you figure out that it’s not only hair that not where it’s at, but everything else as well, you are finally free. Only if you want to be, of course, but it should be noted that this song, Zappa’s prescient prequel to Imagine, upstages John Lennon in advance by not only positing a world which has risen above all possible evils, including discrimination based on race, religion, gender and greed, but doing so without a po-faced PC agenda. Those still inclined to believe that this song is a parody of hippy banality might like to ponder the inverse square law that applies almost universally in Zappa’s music: the stupider the music the meatier the lyrics and vice versa. It’s his answer to the question ”Shall we take ourselves seriously?” and further proof that “despite all evidence to the contrary it is theoretically possible to be ‘heavy’ and still have a sense of humor.”
10) One size fits all. (album title 1975)
Free now from uniforms or shame at our new-found nakedness, the essential oneness of the universe is revealed. Snatching profundity from the jaws of banality, this phrase encodes the ultimate esemplastic vision, a Zen-like resolution of the many as one. The album offers a parody of partial perspectives of all persuasions, from spurious extraterrestrial speculations on the origins of life on earth to the more immediate concerns of those who can’t afford to buy no shoes, contrasting the poor-little-rich girl misery of the theoretically happy and advantaged Florentine Pogen with the unexpected lust for life of the supposedly unhappy and disadvantaged Bobby and his girl in trailer park heaven — before plunging in to Andy, the key song in what is, essentially, an album about religion. As a climax, the absurdities of the extraneous verbiage washing over Evelyn are shattered by the poodle’s sharp bark of enlightenment, a canine salutation Zappa once told me was “suitable for all festive occasions as it possesses a certain interspecial comprehensibility.”
