Re: Sexy Adorno

Take two pages Adorno and call me in the morning

Before we all get bogged down by what an old-school prog-rocker Theo
Adorno was, check out Ben Watson's book Frank Zappa: The Negative
Dialectics of Poodle Play (St. Martin's 1996). I regale you with
a few quotes:

From the New York Times Book Review: "An impassioned attempt to
demonstrate that Zappa was not just a musical innovator but a
wordsmith on par with James Joyce and a philosopher on par with
Theodor Adorno."

From Publishers Weekly: "discusses Zappa's music in the context of
avant-garde art, William Blake, Wyndham Lewis's Vorticist prose, punk
rock and the Marxist politics of the French leftist group
Situationist International"

From Amazon: "This 700 page tome will certainly be cited by our music
historian descendants. In fairness, it may confound today's Zappa
fans with it's copious references to Adorno, Freud, and Marx, but is
likely to delight the erudite with its excerpts of the playfully
situationist lyrics of Zappa, completely deconstructed by Watson."

From Library Journal: "Watson briefly sketches Zappa's early life,
then uses a Marxist framework to analyze chronologically the
importance of songs on the 57 albums that Zappa released until his
untimely death in December 1993. Throughout, the author uncovers the
classical, avant-garde, and rhythm and blues roots of Zappa's music
[...]"

From Ingram: "Too iconoclastic, too rude, too idiosyncratic to be
easily embraced by the music world or the critics, the late Frank
Zappa lives on by having established the avant-garde musical seat in
the pantheon of artistic genres. Here, Watson details the esoteric
and ambitious work of one of this century's most dedicated and
unclassifiable masters of freedom and imagination."