American exceptionalism is easy to pick apart, and George Carlin would agree.

The point he's making was (c. 1970) that much of American culture's presumption of innate superiority post-WW2 was unfounded overconfidence demonstrating a lack of humility and intrinsic tempered confidence in relation to other rich traditions that also exist. It is also true that American culture was and is intrinsically hollow and shallow in many (but not all) dimensions not replicated in other parts of the world. And to be fair, Zappa was brilliant and a guitar virtuoso but a bit off in a way the 60's-70's counterculture celebrated profusely in a reactionary oppositional mirror of mainstream American culture. Growing up, my hippie nudist neighbors with their hydroponic weed and horrible tasting tomatoes would be all over everything Zappa. Incidentally, I have a signed Zappa KSJO sticker signed at a Campbell, CA venue and its newspaper clipping provenance... going to get it framed and probably sell it on FleaBay at some point.

Frankly it’s bizarre. He was a fantastic rock musician who seemed to forget where delta blues, jazz, bluegrass comes from. They drew on older traditions but were distinctly American culture. Maybe his point was really that it’s not popular culture but you can criticize any country’s pop culture.

edit: I'm surprised at the downvote. I'm a huge Zappa fan. I know that he was into many kinds of music. That is why I find it strange that he doesn't even consider the rich tradition of American folk music to be part of our culture.

So which is it, am I wrong that he was a great musician? Am I wrong about the rich tradition of American folk music? Am I wrong about pop culture in other countries? Is it because I didn't mention country music?

I didn't downvote you (just upvoted, since you got me to stop and pay attention to that parent comment).

I understand and agree with your point that certain genres of music have significantly evolved, if not been entirely created in, the US, and that it's weird for a professional musician to take the stance that that isn't the case.

At the same time, I've often thought similar things to what Frank Zappa said (despite never hearing/reading that interview before, or knowing much about him at all). I often think about how a lot of the social/racial/religious/etc unrest we have going on in the US is because we have no national identity. We are a melting pot, but we're also just a melting pot.

Similar to convincing people to stop perpetuating racial issues in the US, when race used to be connected with nationality (and still is in some places)-- or convincing people to stop raking modern-day Americans over the coals for people 250 years ago taking the land from Native Americans-- it's going to be difficult to convince people to draw a line at a point in time where we stopped "stealing" or "being influenced by" other countries' music and started legitimately creating our own. It will simply never have been "from scratch," and people will either figure out how to accept that and (critically) move on at some point, or they'll keep being upset about it for eternity and we'll keep tearing ourselves apart.