Terrapin_Station

Re the "pretentious" thing, by the way, one of the best cures for that is simply coming to a realization that aesthetic judgments, and indeed value judgments period, are not at all objective. There's no fact that Frank Zappa is better than or more musically worthwhile than Justin Bieber, or that Thelonious Monk is better than or more musically worthwhile than Kenny G, or anything like that. It's simply a matter of what someone prefers, what sorts of things appeal to them, where there are no right answers for that.

I definitely prefer Zappa and Monk myself, by the way. I'm especially a huge Zappa fan. He's my second-favorite musical artist, after Stravinsky.

Also, as a Zappa fan, don't you have any intuitive grasp of how Zappa can love both stuff like "Bob in Dacron" and "Valerie" at the same time? That seems essential to being a big Zappa fan in the first place. And if you can understand why Zappa loves stuff like "Valerie", you should already understand something of the attraction of so-called "simpler" pop music.