"The Present day composer refuses to die." Edgard Varese, 1921, is an interesting introduction to Frank Zappa.
Is it the composer who refuses to die or is that the music refuses to die?
How does the past come back into the present and continue on into the future?
Plastics in the time of Zappa
ReplyDeletePlastics can be traced back to biblical times and have come through much metamorphosis, from their original bitumen origins. Both Thomas Hancock and Nelson Goodyear did experiments that lead to Goodyear patenting rubber in 1851. Alexander Parkes is generally considered the inventor of the plastics that we know today and patented the process in 1856. However, Charles Macintosh is said to have started making ebonite in Britain in 1851, which is significant as it was the first thermosetting of plastic material involving a distinct modification of a natural material (3 Brydson).
Today, the making of plastics is heavily reliant on the oil industry. Before WWII most of the thermoplastics were produced from vegetable source (9 Brydson). In the 1950s and 1960s there was a departure from the coal and vegetable sources of raw materials in the making of plastics towards using petroleum (10 Brydson).
Also interesting are the companies involved in the manufacturing of Plastics. Some examples are Du Pont, General Electric and Monsanto. Even Henry Ford experimented with soya bean plastics and plastics derived from rubber (9 Brydson).
Plastics had become popular in the 1950s and 1960s after postwar propaganda films like The Kingdom of Plastics (1945) and Saran Wrap’s The Best Made Plans (1956), which were used to promote the domestic use of plastics. Plastics had been successfully used in the weaponry of war, so this implemented a source of financial returns in the postwar era. Also interesting is that General Electric produced the Kingdom of Plastics (1945) that classifies plastics as being a kingdom unto its own, beyond the animal, mineral and vegetable worlds. Plastic was clearly predicted as a futuristic and valuable resource that was ultimately derived from natural materials.
General Electric sold their Plastics Division in 2007, “… for $11.6 billion to the largest public company in Saudi Arabia, the Saudi Basic Industries Corporation.”. “After all, it was the ever-rising cost of benzene, a petroleum derivative and an essential raw material for G.E.’s plastics products, that had sucked the profitability out of the unit for G.E. A company like Sabic, with an inexpensive and huge supply of benzene, could far more easily turn a profit” (22 May 2007, NY Times)
I, like many people, mistook the advertisement that Frank Zappa did for Portland General Electric to be the G.E. company that we are all more familiar with and so had thought that G.E. had really used him to their advantage. I was trying to track down the date that the commercial was made as the YouTube ad was posted in 2007, which was unrealistic. I did more research after reading this particular comment submitted under the YouTube video:
“Maybe I need to give people a little bit of background about the commercial. In the late eighties and early nineties, PG&E was running a series of advertisements to promote solar energy and energy conservation. (Remember folks, Portland is a hippie town and VERY Environmentally friendly) A number of similar ads were shown with famous people, not just Zappa. And the commercial has been cropped. It was a bit longer than the one here. The PGE ad slogan was after Zappa's pitch. Hope this helps.”
Indeed Portland General Electric is separate from General Electric and is into promoting alternative energies, like wind power. How could Zappa not have known this? So this delivery must have been deliberately done.
Du Pont has been known for manufacturing plastics since the 1930s and Monsanto designed the plastic house of the future for Disneyland in 1957. Monsanto is now into the genetic modification of our food.
The plastic lyrics that Zappa was using in the 60s and 70s are alive and well, beyond the metaphor. We are now almost literally becoming plastic.