Frank Zappa ( b34 )

Zappa set excerpts from the PMRC hearings to Synclavier music in his composition "Porn Wars" on the 1985 album Frank Zappa Meets the Mothers of Prevention, and the full recording was released in 2010 as Congress Shall Make No Law... Zappa is heard interacting with Senators Fritz Hollings, Slade Gorton and Al Gore.

Legacy

Zappa had a controversial critical standing during his lifetime. As Geoffrey Himes noted in 1993 after the artist's death, Zappa was hailed as a genius by conductor Kent Nagano and nominated by Czechoslovakian President Václav Havel to the country's cultural ambassadorship, but he was in his lifetime rejected twice for admission into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and been found by critics to lack emotional depth. In Christgau's Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies (1981), Robert Christgau dismissed Zappa's music as "sexist adolescent drivel ... with meters and voicings and key changes that are as hard to play as they are easy to forget." According to Himes:

"Admirers and detractors agree that Zappa's music – with its odd time signatures, unorthodox harmonies and fiendishly difficult lines – boasts a rare cerebral complexity. But that's where the agreement ends. Some fans find his sophomoric jokes ("Don't Eat the Yellow Snow") and pop music parodies ("Sheik Yerbouti") a crucial counterbalance to the rarefied density of the music; other devotees find the jokes an irrelevant sideshow to music best appreciated in a chamber or orchestral setting. The critics find the humor's smug iconoclasm a symptom of the essential emptiness of Zappa's intellectual exercises.

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