 I'm a parent. I've got four children. Two of them are here. I want them to grow up in a country where they can think what they want to think, be what they want to be, and not what somebody's wife or somebody in government makes them be. I don't want, I don't want to have that. What can contemporary America learn from the late rock legend Frank Zappa, who famously testified before Congress against record album warning labels in the 1980s? The parent's music resource center wants a labeling system. Frank became the go-to person because nobody else in the record industry showed up. We live in a country where we're supposed to be free. We supposedly have democracy here. What do we do? Sit around and go, meee. He was on a mission and he was going to accomplish that mission no matter what. As a new documentary about Zappa makes clear, he leaves an ultra individualist legacy that exemplified freedom of expression, musical innovation, and lifestyle liberation. We were loud, we were coarse, and we were strange. He had so much talent, it defied everything. By the time he died of prostate cancer in 1993 at the age of 52, Zappa had spent time in jail for making an obscene recording at the behest of undercover cops, released 60 albums in every genre imaginable, and defended the sensibilities of virtually every American. Watch out where the huskies go, don't you eat that yellow snow. I think he matters now because he was very far ahead of his time in terms of dealing with where government was going, rise of far-right nationalism. He was very anti-authoritarian, very anti-fascist, and very pro-citizens' rights, but he also saw the tech revolution coming. So in all of these extremely interesting ways, Zappa was ahead of the curve. Documentarian Alex Winter explored Zappa's commitment to free expression throughout the film, including when in the 1980s, a group of senators-wise from the Parents' Music Resource Center, or PMRC, and pushed for warning labels on music with lyrics they found offensive because of sexual content, glorification of drug use, and satanic imagery. Zappa emerged as one of the very few rock musicians who pushed back, appearing before Congress, to defend free expression. Zappa's testimony is really, really impressive. It's basically a six-page manifesto about the importance of the Constitution. The PMRC proposal is an ill-conceived piece of nonsense which fails to deliver any real benefits to children, infringes the civil liberties of people who are not children, and promises to keep the courts busy for years dealing with the interpretational and enforcemental problems inherent in the proposal's design. It is my understanding that, in law, First Amendment issues are decided with a preference for the least restrictive alternative. In this context, the PMRC demands are the equivalent of treating dandruff by decapitation. It's interesting because in retrospect, a lot of people look at that, those hearings as a failure because they ended up with the advisory sticker. What the fact is is what the PMRC was trying to do was censor content at its root. So to end up with an advisory sticker, which became basically a badge of honor for any artist who wanted to appear legit, it was a huge victory and an enormous setback for this sort of autocratic notion of policing culture in such a ludicrous way. We find ourselves in a similar time, I'm sure Zappa would have been very vocal of what's going on now. But it did, I think, put him on the map in terms of a certain generation who may not have come to him in the 70s or even in the early 80s who suddenly realized he was out there battling for them. He was very eloquent, very accessible, very smart and hilarious. And he made great music. So I think it worked a lot of people up to him, actually. Zappa's defense of individualism and free speech had an international audience too. In 1990, Vaclav Havel, the dissident playwright who became the first president of post-communist Czechoslovakia, invited Zappa to Prague, where he received a hero's welcome for inspiring resistance to authoritarianism. There were thousands of people at the airport, they all knew who he was. He really was a symbol of freedom for them. And he was very much a symbol of the Western menace for the police state during the communist era, which helped him a lot at this time. But I think that it was genuine. I don't think that like a lot of rock and roll artists at that time, they would just spout sort of these kind of bullshit cliches about peace or about freedom, and they wouldn't really live it. And they didn't really mean it. They didn't really know anything about these things. They really were just capitalists who were trying to get more kids to buy their records. Zappa really did. I mean, his album, the lyrics, and he put his money where his mouth was. And I think that spoke to people as well. To winter, Zappa's appeal to Americans was similar to his appeal for people living under communism. In societies that emphasize conformity and decorum, he unapologetically blazed his own path. He didn't really fit into any particular political bucket, and a lot of people claimed him. I think that Zappa was, at heart, anti-authoritarian, very pro-individual liberty. He was not super anti-government. He just was anti-government corruption, malfeasance, and very pro-citizens' rights.