From Countercultures to Suburban Cultures: Frank Zappa after 1968

Abstract

This article extracts and addresses the theme of suburbia in the recorded work of Frank Zappa, with particular attention paid to the period around the turn of the 1980s and the onset of the Reagan years. During this period, suburban concerns – mostly of a sexualised nature – come to the fore in a number of critically ignored or derided albums. These advance a conception of suburban cultures as coloured by a dissipated and problematic legacy of the freedoms gained in the countercultural phase, and so track the trajectory from the Summer of Love, and “Freak” cultures, to the onset of neoliberalism and “Valley Girl” cultures. In terms of the wider scope of Zappa’s work, and with Zappa considered as a one-time commentator of the countercultural phase, the engagement with suburbia comes to represent both the terminus of a period of liberation and ideological radicalism, and of Zappa’s satirical project.