A place for my stuff

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.   
    They may not mean to, but they do.   
They fill you with the faults they had
    And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
    By fools in old-style hats and coats,   
Who half the time were soppy-stern
    And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
    It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
    And don’t have any kids yourself.

Philip Larkin and Frank Zappa would’ve been fast friends. Larkin’s poem, “This Be the Verse” almost sounds as if it could’ve been lyrics on a Frank Zappa album.

If you’re a fan of Frank Zappa’s music, there’s a better than average chance you’re a fan of Frank Zappa the man. For a certain type of kid growing up in a certain set of circumstances, discovering Frank Zappa is like receiving a transmission from outer space indicating there is life on another, far more interesting planet.

As a social commentator, Frank was farsighted. He could see where our politics were heading, where the music industry was trending, where technology was leading us. He was rigorously logical and level-headed in a time of social upheaval. He was ethical in a dirty business. He knew how to get the best out of different types of musicians. And through it all he maintained a finely tuned bullsh*t detector whilst living in Hollywood, a town that runs on more sh*t than Mad Max’s Barter Town.

For all his talents and observational acumen, one thing Frank was not good at was being a parent or a husband. As his daughter, Moon, illustrates in her new memoir, “Earth to Moon,” Frank’s acute intelligence and perception did not mean that he or his wife, Gail, could be described as model parents. Frank was largely absent from his children’s lives, and he treated his wife less as a spouse and more as an administrator and sex partner (one of several). And Gail, utterly and unhealthily devoted to Frank, seemed to view parenting as another in a long series of responsibilities in the larger administration of service to Frank. To fans of Frank the man, these revelations will doubtless come as a huge disappointment, but probably not a complete shock.

To the outside observer, the Zappa children seemed to be ideal exemplars of positive, fully functional counter-culture values: they were talented, mildly eccentric, and nonconformist. They eschewed high school, got their GEDs, and led clean, drug-free lives that stood in stark contrast to so many other Hollywood kids. Maybe they even seemed like the family you wish you had. Some Zappa fans, myself included, almost felt like we knew the Zappas. We wanted to be part of their scene. How cool would it be to enter their storied House, to hang with the weird/cool kids and the high priest of the weirdos, Frank Zappa? Who wouldn’t want the inadvertent pop star Moon Unit (author of Frank’s sole chart hit), and Diva, champion knitter, as sisters? Or ace guitarist Dweezil and maniac Tom Jones impersonator Ahmet, for brothers? What a kick it would be to live in a house with resident artists like Cal Schenkel and Bruce Bickford, with occasional visits from musicians like Edward Van Halen or Steve Vai. Or so we imagined.

So it is with extreme sadness that Moon’s memoir arrives to dispel us of these kaleidoscopic notions. The Zappa family weren’t models of anything but dysfunction, it turns out. As a result of Frank’s absence, and Gail’s devotion to Frank, the children were effectively starved for attention, hugs, basic nutrition, an education, and emotional support. According to Moon, they were given zero instruction on how to become caring, mature human beings. It is despite their parenting that the Zappa kids became mostly decent people, not because of it.

Some of the particulars that Moon describes will be recognizable to many Gen X kids and their Boomer parents of a certain bent in the 1970s: the pervasive smoking, the infidelity, the abandoning of children to figure things out for themselves. Add to this the countercultural trends rampant in California in that time: the wholesale rejection of conventional moral sentiments and family norms in favor of the dubious alternatives of half-baked Eastern spirituality and homebrew witchcraft. Although Frank largely rolled his eyes at those newfangled belief systems, Gail was as enthusiastic a participant in them as any of the Manson girls were.

Speaking of Charles Manson, if Frank Zappa had wanted to become a cult leader, he could easily have done so. Throngs of devoted groupies and musicians were always in his orbit. If he had asked them to do terrible things, many would probably have complied. As it was, the Cult of Frank did exist to varying degrees. In her book, Moon describes Gail’s household priorities with Frank at the top of a pyramid, and everyone else further down somewhere. A variety of courtiers passed through the house, jockeying for attention from Frank the pharaoh – artists, musicians, groupies, celebrities, and assorted “people who do stuff that is not normal.” The children had to continually compete with everyone else in the house for their parents’ attention.

For all his countercultural milieu, though, Frank was a classic 1950s American male: a misogynistic, capitalistic master of the universe who did as he pleased, with who he pleased, without any consideration for the needs and feelings of others. He was not emotionally available to his wife or children, but he was always sexually available to his partners of choice. And Gail, for her part, suffered because of her devotion to a man incapable of being devoted to anything other than his work.

In the early days of The Cult of Frank, Gail secured her spot as A#1 amongst her many attractive lady competitors by becoming pregnant with Moon (Moon does not discuss whether Gail trapped Frank by becoming pregnant against his wishes, but Pauline Butcher’s 2011 book, “Freak Out! My Life with Frank Zappa,” left me with that impression). To his credit, Frank was self-aware enough to know that he did not want to have kids, but ultimately went along with Gail’s program. When Moon was born, Frank gave her the middle name, “Unit,” to herald the arrival of their new family unit. To the intense sadness of all parties involved, that unity never quite materialized.

Moon’s account of her childhood takes up most of the first half of the book, and she demonstrates a preternatural ability to channel the voice and thoughts of a child living through the moments in the book as they happen. Her diction and syntax become simplified, and the distance between 2024 and 1976 is erased in the process. The effect is immediate; the reader is brought right along with her. Some portions of the book are so cinematically drawn that I felt as if I were shooting footage in my head for a Cameron Crowe movie entitled, “Almost Famous.”

I wish that someone were available to provide the context behind the childhoods of Gail and Frank. To play armchair psychologist for a moment, it seems to me that Frank’s obsessive nature seems indicative of a trauma response to something that happened to him early in life, and Gail’s wholesale rejection of conventional morality and her tendency toward self-delusion and obsession points to some serious early injury to her psyche as well. With Frank so thoroughly obsessed with music to the exclusion of all else, and with Gail so thoroughly obsessed with Frank, they were united in a shared quest to avoid self-reflection.

To a general audience of non-Zappa freaks, the book serves as a valuable survival account of repeated traumas between a mother and daughter. Moon describes Gail as her “first bully,” and so the book’s contents will be familiar and cathartic for anyone who has survived a life with a narcissistic, unreliable, unbalanced, and resentful parent.

To the Zappa fans, I can’t say I recommend the book as pleasurable reading. But I would recommend it for the degree to which it provides insights into one of Frank’s favorite topics: the endless absurdity of human existence. You might not want to know this much about your heroes, but for better or worse, you will find yourself feeling much closer to the glowing center of the Zappa universe. Maybe it’s important for fans to understand Frank as the deeply flawed, all-too-earthly human he really was.

In a recent interview, Moon made an important point about living in the shadow of a legend: nothing you do is ever yours. Anything you do well is immediately ascribed to your legendary parent’s genes (we see you, Wolfgang Van Halen!). With the arrival of this book, however, Moon can at least say that she has accomplished several things that her parents never could: she has learned how to find peace, regulate and express her emotions, heal her psychological wounds, and become a caring, sensitive and supportive parent for her child – a series of feats that eluded even the legendary genius Frank Zappa.

My wife asked me, “who is the audience for this?” And I think the answer to that is, “mostly older dudes and/or musicians actively hostile to the existence and ascension of Taylor Swift.” So bear that in mind if you choose to read further.

As a father of young daughters, I knew I would inevitably be exposed to potentially carcinogenic levels of Taylor Swift. As a musician and appreciator of the science of pop music, I looked forward to the challenge of decoding her massive, unprecedented success. I couldn’t help noticing that Swift has re-written several pop-music rules, so here are some observations on what I suspect makes the Taylor Swift phenomenon so unique. Apologies in advance if this has all been covered by the pop media outlets – I don’t read them. This is really just me sorting out my own thoughts.

Observation #1: The Lyrics Come First

For most pop music these days, the groove is king. Most of the songs on the Billboard Hot 100 are dance club jams. And whether it’s hip-hop or R&B, a hot backing track is usually more important than whatever Jack Harlow or Doja Cat are actually saying – case in point, as I write this, Doja Cat is at #4 on the charts with a song that lifts its groove from 1964’s “Walk On By” by Dionne Warwick. Even Ed Sheeran has to lift from Marvin Gaye to make a hit. That’s a big part of the pop formula: make it danceable, and find something familiar that the audience can’t quite place.

But Taylor Swift’s music is not dance music, and her backing tracks aren’t the main event. Her songs aren’t undanceable per se, but they don’t strike me as the first thing any DJ would pull out of a crate. And while lyrical supremacy is the norm for most singer-songwriters, singer-songwriters tend not to become the top-selling arena act with the highest grossing concert film of all time.

For Swift and for her fans, the stories inside the lyrics are what inspire their devotion. The fans don’t show up to dance their cares away, they show up to commune with the high priestess who writes their cares into her stories. This is a big reason why the re-recordings of her albums work: because nothing in the original backing tracks was uniquely magical. The stories are what matter.

Now, I’m not naïve. I know that record companies pay Clear Channel and Cumulus to play Swift’s songs every hour. But while corporate payola might sell singles, it doesn’t always translate to ticket sales or inspire the devotion that Swift’s fans demonstrate.

Observation #2: The Lyrics Are Laser-Focused

It’s an easy gripe to say that Taylor Swift is not Joni Mitchell. Of course not. She’s not a poet presenting enigmatic symbolism for her audience to decipher. She is instead an extremely good storyteller who knows her audience intimately. Her songs are really like miniature romance novels, or short films. And she writes these stories within a very specific set of parameters. Like Stephen King, she knows what her people want, and she knows how to give it to them – but unlike so many others, she knows how to do it with total conviction.

Swift’s secret sauce is that her songs are written by a girl, for girls. But not just any girls: regular-people girls. To get at what I mean by this, I can’t quite pick out what it is she does, so much as what she doesn’t do. She doesn’t do dancefloor escapism. She doesn’t do high-stakes melodrama or exaggerated melisma. She doesn’t do self-aggrandizing braggadocio. She doesn’t sell a fantasy life. She doesn’t do materialism. She doesn’t pitch herself as a superhero badass.

My sister sent me a video of Swift at 18, being asked what she wants to be doing at age 28. Chief among her responses was to “never, ever alienate my fans, ever.” Swift said she never wants to make “my personal album – that no one can relate to but I can personally relate to.” The self-denial is interesting, especially at so young an age, but the results speak for themselves. By way of comparison, as a twentysomething, I felt like John Mayer’s first album was the story of my life; but as soon as he got famous and started writing more personal songs about being “Bigger than My Body,” or how “Something’s Missing”….he lost me.

Prioritizing the fans over herself has served Swift well, but I hope she knows that she’s now in a place where she can write intensely personal songs and her fans will still follow her anywhere. With recent songs like “Anti-Hero” I can see she’s starting to get personal – it’s a song about Taylor Swift only and no one else – and it’s done quite well for her.

Observation #3: Dudes Are Not in the Demo

Unlike most pop acts, her songs are not written by a committee, or focus-group tested for general appeal, because to do that would involve writing songs dudes would dig. Any pop songwriter is inherently attempting to appeal to the widest audience of both men and women, but in doing so they have to forego a certain amount of gender specificity. Swift refuses that compromise. I’ve consumed a lot of pop songs in my years, but I have never heard an artist write so many songs aimed at the lives of young women, to the exclusion of young hetero men.

She effectively cuts out half the market in order to go all-in on the other half, the very underrepresented half. She does this through a variety of means, but to take one example: her songs regularly mention what she’s wearing. How many men’s songs regularly reference their clothing? One devoted fan even charted the references in a Tableau data-viz. And little details like “at tea time everybody agrees” in “Anti-Hero.” How may hetero dudes born before 1997 know what “tea time” means in this context? Hint: it has nothing to do with the beverage. Swift talks to girls (and gay men) the way girls talk to each other; so little details like these would probably go right over their heads.

Observation #4: She Works Clean

Well, mostly clean. She’ll toss in some swear words and references to booze here and there, but to my ears it sounds forced, like she’s trying to keep her image from being too squeaky clean. But she would never write a song like “B*tch Better Have My Money” or “F*cked My Way Up to the Top.” (I’m not hating on those types of tunes; just noting the specific stylistic choice) With the arrival of “Vigilante Sh*t,” she’s dipping her toes a little further into that water, but it stands out from her catalog as the exception rather than the rule.

Something like 75% or more of pop songs are about sex in some way, but I can’t think of any sexual subtext or innuendo in any Swift song. On top of this, Swift doesn’t present a persona that’s untouchably cool like, say, Madonna, or world-weary like Lana Del Rey or Miley Cyrus (3 years her junior!). Even a simple tune like Elle King’s “Ex’s and Oh’s” has a line like, “they always want to come but never want to leave.” I can’t imagine Swift ever using the word “come,” with its overtones of sexual climax. She works clean. She has 9-year olds in the audience (and I’m one of their dads, so it’s something I notice and appreciate).

Observation #5: Beatlemania 2.0

When girls were driven to insanity by The Beatles writing songs about holding hands, that was revolutionary in its simplicity and specificity – boys writing chaste, romantic songs about what girls want. Today it’s a boy-band formula. With the advent of Taylor Swift, though, girls have one of their own writing chaste, romantic songs about what girls want. It’s no wonder the arenas are full of screaming girls again.

(Sure, girls are screaming for BTS, too, but will they still need BTS when they’re 34? Not to mention Swift’s fanbase is multigenerational while BTS’s is decidedly not.)

Another parallel: not since The Beatles has an artist been allowed the chance to mutate so radically every couple of albums. She’s bounded across genres – she’s done country albums, a rock album, synth pop, and whatever the hell “reputation” is (it’s not R&B, and it’s not hip-hop, but it steals just enough gestures from those genres to almost qualify).

All of this is not to say that her songs are as musically inventive as the Beatles were, but again, the backing track is not where the action is for Swift’s audience. The screaming Beatlemaniacs probably didn’t notice or care when Paul would convert a Major IV to a minor iv. It’s an unfair expectation, because Swift has never had the luxury of a John Lennon to collaborate with, to compete with, to see who can write the more interesting chord progression, or find a fancier countermelody in a vocal harmony. She doesn’t have George Martin arranging trumpet solos, and she doesn’t have George or Ringo to contribute. Sure, she has Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner when she wants them, but ultimately she’s driving the bus. And unlike the Beatles, she didn’t quit touring halfway through her career to become an eccentric studio wizard.

Observation #6: Swift’s Musicology

For the musicians out there: something peculiar I’ve noticed about Swift’s catalog is she mainly uses major/minor/sus chords. I’ve yet to find a standalone dominant chord or a major 7th anywhere (“Teardrops on my Guitar” has one C7/E chord, though). Plenty of minor 7ths, but no majors. I don’t know if this is just a convention of modern pop songwriting or Nashville norms, but it’s another example of things she just doesn’t do. I would love to see her follow Michelle Branch or John Mayer by throwing in some 9^th chords, dominants, major 7ths. “Lover” has some nice add9s, but that’s as adventurous as she’s gotten so far. It’s time to jazz it up, Tay.

I also notice she enjoys ping-ponging major 3rds in her verse melodies while accenting the second beat of the bar – she does it in “Ready for It” (“But if he’s a ghost, THEN I can be a phanTOM…”) and “You’re on your Own, Kid” (“SUM-mer WENT away”). It’s a nicely distinctive syncopation that approaches funkiness – but that’s about as weird as she gets. Always focused, that girl.

Lyrically she loves a good antanaclasis – one might call them puns but they’re legit double meanings. “Devils roll the dice, angels roll their eyes”, “so we could call it even, you could call me babe for the weekend”, “we can’t make any promises now…but you can make me a drink” and “pouring my heart out to a stranger but I didn’t pour the whiskey.” I haven’t heard this sort of thing in many pop songs, but I’m guessing it’s fairly common in Nashville songwriting, as Morgan Wallen’s “Last Night” uses it a couple of times. Of course, that song (the #1 US top digital song of 2023) has six f*cking songwriters, and not one of them is named Morgan Wallen.

She also likes to replace words in repeated lines: converting “this slope is treacherous” into “this hope is treacherous.” You don’t find a ton of interior rhyme outside of the hip-hop world, so it’s a welcome twist.

Hat tip to Reddit for some of these – there are several more here and here. Again, the devotion required of the fanbase to collect these lists of motifs and themes is something I don’t think happens with other many other pop-star fanbases.

Conclusions

Swift is the rare megastar who has done the impossible: she works clean, she doesn’t write escapist dance-club bangers, she mostly writes her own songs, she controls the material, she has grown with each album, and she’s arrived at the top of the world at age 34 (well past the Logan’s Run expiration date of today’s pop stars). I’m excited to see where she goes next. I would love to see her do more collaborations – once upon a time, she covered my hero David Mead’s song “Nashville,” and I would love her to shine her megawatt spotlight onto some of the under-the-radar Nashville songwriters out there who live in the margins. Whatever she decides to do, her fans will follow her wherever she goes. I hope she makes her own White Album, or Hejira, or Pet Sounds – a departure record that gives zero f*cks about staying in her self-imposed lane. She’s broken all the other pop rules. I hope she breaks more of her own.