Frank Zappa
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Frank Zappa made Americans think about the Watts riots when he wrote and sang "Trouble Every Day" - and even more importantly he made Americans think about the way that race defined so much of the American experience during the middle decades of this past century. His commentary on the narrator's observations of the riots - which might or might not be his own perspective - is both ironic and brutal, the voice of a person who wishes that everything would change as well as the acknowledgment of a man who thinks that nothing is likely to be different any time soon.The song, which appears on the Freak Out album, was written in 1966, the year after the Watts riots. Those riots marked Watts as the smoldering symbol of poverty, community come undone, intergenerational misery and black anger. The riots started during the August heat of 1965 when a short and relatively minor fight broke out after a California Highway Patrol officer (who was white) tried to arrest a man (who was black) for speeding and reckless driving in Watts, near Avalon Boulevard and 116th Street. The scuffle itself was minor, and the driver was in fact probably guilty of being careless at far too high a speed. But whatever justice there was in this particular intended arrest did not matter: It was a spark to the powder-keg of a neighborhood and a city and a nation that was trying to come to terms with a century's legacy of slavery and the Civil Rights movement that was attempting to overco
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of the sixties and of the cultural wars that waged during that decade is how disengaged most people were at the time. When we look at accounts of life in the mid-sixties, we see protestors in the streets and do not stop to realize the limited participation in those protests. This does not mean that the protests - against the war, against Jim Crow laws - were not important but rather that the number of soldiers on the fields of the cultural battles were in fact relatively few. Most Americans sat back and watched their televisions.
While the main thrust of the song is an angry lamentation about the issue of race in American - the virulence of racism that turned blacks against their own community, tearing down what little other blacks had been able to build - it is also a shout against the dulling of people's senses by television:
You can cool it
You can heat it
Cause baby I don't need it
Take your t.v. tube and eat it
And all that phony stuff on sports
And all those unconfirmed reports
You know I watch that rotten box
Until my head begin to hurt
From checkin' out the way
The newsmen say they get the dirt
Before the guys on channel so and so (http://www.seeklyrics.com/lyrics/Frank-Zappa/Trouble-Every-Day.html).
This m
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Approximate Word count = 2168
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)
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