Frank Zappa

Frank Zappa: one of America’s greatest dissidents

One of my favourite American dissidents has always been and remains Frank Zappa. Zappa defies categorisation in terms of group allegiance, but as an individual, his views were remarkably coherent.
Zappa started his professional musical career in 1950s California, but before one thinks of a kind of proto-Beach Boy, Zappa’s California was the barren Mojave Desert (pre shopping mall days). He eventually made it to Los Angeles where he became to the hippy movement what Voltaire was to the French Enlightenment.