The Baltimore, Maryland-born rocker Frank Zappa is known for his philosophical thinking and thoughtful expression as much as he is for any guitar chord or song lyric. Experimental and improvisational in his music, Zappa—despite dying young at just 52 years old in 1993—remains fondly remembered for what he had to say about the world, as well as what he sang.
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His efforts paid off in myriad ways. In 1995, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and two years later he was bestowed a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. With all this success, fans might wonder what exactly Zappa had to say about the world around him, life, love, music, and more.
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Here are the best 20 Frank Zappa quotes.
1. “Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe.”
2. “Most rock journalism is people who can’t write, interviewing people who can’t talk, for people who can’t read.”
3. “Politics is the entertainment branch of industry.”
4. “Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.”
5. “One of my favorite philosophical tenets is that people will agree with you only if they already agree with you. You do not change people’s minds.”
6. “You can’t always write a chord ugly enough to say what you want to say, so sometimes you have to rely on a giraffe filled with whipped cream.”
7. “All the good music has already been written by people with wigs and stuff.”
8. “There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something we’d all love one another.”
9. “The computer can’t tell you the emotional story. It can give you the exact mathematical design, but what’s missing is the eyebrows.”
10. “You can’t be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline. It helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer.”
11. “Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.”
12. “Without deviation progress is not possible.”
13. “If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library.”
14. “Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.”
15. “The United States is a nation of laws: badly written and randomly enforced.”
16. “It isn’t necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice. There are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia.”
17. “No change in musical style will survive unless it is accompanied by a change in clothing style. Rock is to dress up to.”
18. “Everybody believes in something and everybody, by virtue of the fact that they believe in something, uses that something to support their own existence.”
19. “A composer is a guy who goes around forcing his will on unsuspecting air molecules, often with the assistance of unsuspecting musicians.”
20. “I never set out to be weird. It was always other people who called me weird.”
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