Scott Thunes in his blog mentions Zappa having the weirdest love-hate relationship with jazz that he’d ever seen.
In reading what Zappa has written or said in interviews, I’ve determined that Zappa had a weird love-hate relationship with everything. Love-hate relationships are just how Zappa approached the universe. They were his mode of relating to things.
He had a weird love-hate relationship with modern music, as evidenced by countless interviews and also his 1984 speech to ASUC, printed in its entirety in his 1988 autobiography.
He also had a weird love-hate relationship with rock and pop music as well– writing catchy rock tunes and then giving them lyrics like “Titties n’ Beer”.
He had an especially weird love-hate relationship with musicians in general– his bit in his autobiogaphy about the “human element” evidences this, and many interview quotes both dissing and praising the various musicians he’d hired and worked with.
He had a very weird love-hate relationship with politics– he absolutely hated it, derided it as “the entertainment branch of industry”, despised watching it on the news, but he couldn’t stay away from it, and kept on top of it religiously.
He had a weird love-hate relationship with parenting, considering he hated the whole Ozzie n’ Harriet stereotype and loathed doing any kind of family activities with his kids, but he definitely loved his kids and was a doting dad.
And, as reported in some unauthorized biographies and also by his and his wife’s own admission in interviews and in the book (“Gail has said in interviews that what makes our relationship work is that we hardly talk to each other”), they had a weird love-hate relationship with each other as well.
Zappa’s whole thing was love-hate relationships. He was notorious for exalting and deriding things at the same time, taking them very seriously and also snidely dismissing them at the same time. He was so rich in irony, he couldn’t do anything without taking the piss out of it.
It’s all eyebrows.
