Charts, sales, streams, views, budgets, box office, trends, searches, awards, likes, followers …īut to watch Winter’s film is to realise how completely we’ve squandered the wondrous potential of music since those golden years. Today it’s a given that we process the stuff in terms of numbers. When he said that, back in the Reagan era, it was still possible to feel shocked by the insidious corporate takeover of music. “The whole idea of selling large numbers of items in order to determine quality … is what’s really repulsive about it.”

“The business of music is all about this fake list of who sold what,” goes one of Zappa’s acerbic soundbites in Alex Winter’s new documentary, Zappa. One worries whether the fabled Utility Muffin Research Kitchen – the sprawling recording studio where the workaholic composer made scores of utterly unique albums up until his death in 1993 – will retain its value as a shrine to uncompromising American invention. No disrespect to Gaga, but it’s sad to think of that legendary Hollywood Hills home, with its mythic basement vault now emptied of four decades of unparalleled creation, sold cheap to pop’s nouveau riche.

But that’s how we’ve learnt to measure things in the music biz. Yes, it is crass to talk dollars when culture is at stake. The Zappa family trust was $US6 million in debt. She paid $US5.25 million, Variety reported in 2016: a steal after the $US23 million she “splashed out” for her Malibu estate two years earlier.

Frank Zappa by Daniel Schröder