ABSTRACT

Suburbia would prove to be the terminus of Frank Zappa’s satirical project. In the final analysis, the ringmaster of freaks, a mother to the North American counterculture and champion of outsiders would find himself outnumbered and outmanoeuvred by the rising tide of ‘plastic people’. The nature and efficacy of Zappa’s last formal political stand at this juncture is the concern of this chapter. It is the precise social and political moment of this juncture – as the 1970s turned into the 1980s, and the dawn of the Reagan era, perceived as the final routing of ‘the long 1960s’ – that lends a context to Zappa’s seemingly reactionary sentiments, a framing which goes some way to recover Zappa’s work from its detractors.