Frank Zappa: still dead, still a genius, pupupupupupu pu, ta na nah.

I search youtube for Frank Zapa's recordings now and then, and I'm always pleased to find several that I didn't find last time.  A good chunk of musical recording on youtube are accompanied by a still image (like this)or out-of-context video, which is cool, cause sometimes I'm just looking for music to listen to and I don't care about looking at anything.  But today I found several video versions of the song Montana from throughout his career, and I gotta say, it's pretty interesting to watch the videos and see what's going on onstage.  It's super neat to have several recorded versions of the song too, since they're with different groups and have very different arrangements for a song that's kind of a set piece.  I've included a few here in chronological order.
1973.

 
1974

1988
Note how incredibly bored Frank Zappa seems, causing him to say things like "on the other hand, I might keep the wax, and mehneh moo, hulda han, and hulda da han."  It must be pretty tough to be famous for the ingenious stuff you did a while back, when you're still doing ingenious stuff now and people aren't so big on it.  Then again maybe he should suck it up.  He is making good money to go on tour and stuff.

I also enjoy reading the youtube comments people put up since they are composed by admirers and trolls, and largely consist of arguments between them.  A lot of people who are posting less than admiring comments are likely just people who think trolling is fun, which by the way is retarded, but whatever floats your boat, I guess.

The remainder of negative commenters are probably people who just don't get Zappa and are too young to effectively do so.  They're stunted by their historical perspective.  I can completely understand that, and here's why.  I didn't really become aware of much of anything that went on in the world around me until 1984.  At that point, Tina Turner had this hit single called What's Love Got To Do With It and I thought it was a pretty good song.  I was 7, but I could appreciate the song as being pretty unusual.  Most folks stick to the premise that love is real important and stuff, and here was this song where she's saying it's basically irrelevant, obnoxious and she's done with it.  It was a pretty cool song idea.  Plus it was catchy.

Quite a while later, I became aware that she had a previous career as a pop singer with her husband Ike and that they had a public divorce and so on.  In my mind, I think of Tina Turner as this sort of elder statesman of pop music, and the idea of her literally running away from her husband and hiding out with friends to keep him from finding her is pretty tough to imagine.  It would be like discovering that Genghis Khan was afraid of getting wet.  I'm just hindered by my 1984 perspective.  I can't even fix it.  I can't learn the history and see her differently, because I'm just too deeply embedded with this idea of her as a superhuman. 

Don't get me wrong, I still hate people who troll on the internet.  What's wrong with those people?  But I dig where they might be coming from.