All the good music’s already been written by people with wigs and stuff on.

The interviewers ask whether composers should lead a culture rather than supply what audiences already want. Zappa answers that industrial society chiefly values music for commercial uses and imagines how little interest passersby would show in a composer. The remark about wigs voices the dismissive attitude a contemporary composer faces; the next exchange concerns empty modern-music concerts.

Contemporary composers confront a culture that treats the classical past as sufficient and sees little need for new composition.

It is often used as Zappa’s straightforward verdict that no worthwhile new music can be written. In context it is a sarcastic conclusion to his description of the contempt and indifference faced by living composers, not a renunciation of his own work.

Society, Art

• Rock journalism is people who can’t write interviewing people who can’t talk for people who can’t read. (paraphrase)
• Asked what he thought of Western civilization, Gandhi replied: “I think it would be a good idea.” (not found) Mahatma Gandhi
• Writing about music is like dancing about architecture. (misattributed)
• From the beginning, all the world over, lack of originality has been reckoned the chief characteristic and best recommendation of an active, businesslike and practical man Fyodor Dostoevsky
• Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe. (not found) Albert Einstein

• quoteinvestigator.com/2019/06/17/wigs

Frank Zappa, Batya Friedman and Steve Lyons, ‘Revolt Against Mediocrity’, The Progressive, November 1986. Checked at Quotogeny, https://quotogeny.com/q/all-the-good-music-people-with-wigs/ (27 October 2026).

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