Tragic: Due to certain allegations, the music of a legendary American composer, musician, and satire has been banned.

Frank Zappa was a 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s American composer, guitarist, and satirist who was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on December 21, 1940, and passed away in Los Angeles, California, on December 4, 1993.

In no obvious order, Zappa was a superb cultural gadfly committed to exposing the hypocrisy and pretenses of both the U.S. and other countries, as well as disturbing suburban complacency in America.

political establishment and the oppositional counterculture; A modern orchestral composer with an unwavering commitment to the avant-garde tradition of the 20th century; a rock bandleader who assembled a number of outstanding ensembles under his own name as well as under the auspices of the Mothers of Invention; a knowledgeable admirer of the most obscure rock and roll and rhythm and blues traditions; a trailblazing record producer whose use of high-speed editing techniques predated the later innovations of hip-hop; and one of the best electric guitar improvisers of a generation that included Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, and Jimi Hendrix.

He was a natural postmodernist who dismantled the walls and hierarchies between “high” and “low” culture. He was one of the great polymaths of the rock age, and he may have had a wider variety of interests and abilities than any of his contemporaries.

almost the course of his 30-year career, Zappa recorded almost 60 albums, demonstrating his prodigious workaholism. The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which was released the following year, was greatly influenced by his debut record with the original Mothers of Invention, the conceptual double album Freak Out! (1966). In wry acknowledgement, the cover of the Mothers’ 1968 third album, We’re Only in It for the Money, parodied Sgt. Pepper’s, just as the music questioned the Beatles’ conceptions of beauty and love with its purposeful “ugliness,” Zappa attacked what he perceived as the vacuous fatuity of many elements of hippie subculture and the totalitarian philistinism of the establishment. Zappa asserted that he was not a hippy. He was a “freak.”

Following the Mothers of Invention’s name retirement in the late 1970s, Zappa stopped making overt political statements and released the highly influential jazz-rock fusion album Hot Rats (1969) under his own name. The album included a standout vocal by his longtime friend Don Van Vliet, better known as Captain Beefheart. Zappa put issued instrumental albums in the 1970s that included jazz, symphonic music, his own guitar improvisations, and subsequently synthesizers and sequencers. Additionally, he created rock-focused vocal albums like “Titties & Beer” (1978) and “Jewish Princess” (1979), which, like the majority of his live performances, focused on crowd-pleasing exercises in sexist grossness and breathtaking demonstrations of technical prowess.