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 overcome it.
The riots lasted for almost a week. When the last fires were put out and people returned to their homes, 34 people were dead. Over a thousand others were injured and $200 million worth of property was damaged or destroyed - much of it the property of poor black families who had little to lose (Bullock 12).
Zappa's lyrics capture both the violence and the futility of the Watts riots. Unlike the key events in the Civil Rights Movement - such as Martin Luther King, Jr.'s - vo...