How Did Frank Zappa Influence Music

Frank Zappa was one of the greatest American musician, composer, songwriter and guitarist. His works were very innovative, which usually had free-form improvisation and sound experiments. During his career which was more than 30 years, he composed rock, pop, jazz, jazz fusion, orchestral and musique concrète works and produced more than 60 albums. Frank Zappa learned composition and performance by himself and influenced by many different artists which resulted that his music was hard to categorize. When he was young, he was affected by many 20th century classical composers, such as Edgard Varèse, as well as the rhythm and blues music. He began writing classical music and playing drums in rhythm and blues bands in high school time. Later, he started playing electric
Moreover, his lyrics always had different point of view of social and political problems. He criticized the mainstream education and organized religion and He strongly supported freedom of speech, self-education, political participation and the abolition of censorship. He was an anti-censorship people because he thought censorship would infringe civil liberties. This was the main reason why he would opposed PMRC, Parents Music Resource Center. PMRC was an organization co-founded by Tipper Gore, wife of then-senator Al Gore. This organization was for addressing the issue of song lyrics with sexual and satanic content, and they proposed to label the songs with explicit content. Zappa considered this was the path toward to censorship. Therefore, On September 19, 1985, Zappa testified before the United States Senate Commerce, Technology, and Transportation committee and attacked the PMRC. He said, “The establishment of a rating system, voluntary or otherwise, opens the door to an endless parade of moral quality control programs based on things certain Christians do not