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Article: Rock and roll entrepreneur: Frank Zappa's true legacy.(Culture and Reviews)(Biography)
- Article from:
- Reason
- Article date:
- April 1, 2005
- Author:
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Was Frank Zappa, the memorably mustachioed musician who died in 1993 of prostate cancer, rock and roll's answer to Herman Melville? Maybe so, and not just because the Moby-Dick scribe sported some pretty odd facial hair.
Writing about Melville and other American Renaissance writers, Lionel Trilling argued in The Liberal Imagination that our culture is "dialectic" and that our most representative figures "contain a large part of the dialectic within themselves, their meaning and power lying in their contradictions."
Trilling could have been talking about Zappa, who started his career in the mid-1960s as the leader of the Mothers of Invention, one of the ...