Crux Of The Biscuit: Zappa & Critical Thinking

Crux Of The Biscuit: Zappa & Critical Thinking

Project 2013-09-15 22:18:39 +1200

Gary Steel is NZ's longest-serving music writer/reviewer, and most outspoken cultural critic.

American composer/musician Frank Zappa not only infiltrated the adolescent Steel's mind, but through his personal philosophy taught him the importance of critical thinking.

Throughout 35 years of ceaseless interrogation of music and musicians, Steel's back pages have been dotted with hundreds of Zappa reviews and think pieces, culminating in his extraordinary, epic 1990 interview with the composer.

Steel's book uses Zappa as a cultural talisman to chart his own voyage through the murky world of music reportage and criticism in the alien landscape of New Zealand, reprinting and contextualising his reviews, interviewing Zappa players like Steve Vai and punters who met and mingled with FZ on his one trip here in 1976; and finally, publishes the entire transcript of that legendary interview.

But the book needs an end-piece, and that's the forthcoming world premiere of Zappa's 200 Motels in LA this October, featuring the LA Philharmonic at the Walt Disney Concert Hall.

Steel plans to attend the show, and to spend a week in Los Angeles (the late composer's city) researching and interviewing for the book, which is due out in the first quarter of 2014. The writer, however, needs help in getting there. This is an opportunity for anyone who has ever appreciated Steel's unflinching honesty to help him achieve his aim: a book that looks aghast at the mainstreaming of music culture (heck, of cultural life itself) in NZ and finds an American icon the best way to broach a subject that's important to any thinking human who is interested in the audible arts.

"The usually acerbic Gary Steel" - Anonymous reviewer of Gary Steel
 

"The crux of the biscuit/Is the apostrophe" - Frank Zappa

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