Back in 1982, Max Paddison suggested that Frank Zappa's 1960s' Mothers of Invention recordings deserved to be read in the context of Adorno's views on mass culture. Based on a ‘critical, self-reflective attitude’ (Paddison 1982, p. 216) towards their musical processes, as anticipated in Adorno's essay, ‘Music and technique’ of 1959, these records could be seen to mount an incisive critique of the ‘culture industry’. The title of a series of essays in Telos (Spring 1991), ‘Special Section on Musicology: popular music from Adorno to Zappa’, locates Zappa in a debate about Adorno's continuing relevance where theories of popular music are concerned. More recently, Ben Watson's Frank Zappa, The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play (1994) uses a theoretical admixture of Marx and Freud in which Adorno looms large. (The dust jacket photograph of Watson mirrors the photograph of Adorno at Oxford in December 1935 which now adorns the 1997 paperback edition of Paddison's Adorno's Aesthetics of Music.) The influence of Adorno remains in Watson's later essay in The Frank Zappa Companion (1997), which takes Dada as a crucial point of reference. Central to all this remains the question of Zappa's identity and status as an avant-gardist, and it is this issue which concerns me here. I agree that the Mothers' albums, together with later work, can be made to represent a radical popular music. It's the word ‘represent’ that causes the problem.