We Need More Cheepnis: Zappa, Nietzsche, and How Failure Fuels Art

Mookie bloviates solo today on a theory he's been sitting with as he watches friends, colleagues, and family members age into quiet regret, the sense that despite raising kids, holding a job, and doing everything right, they still somehow missed the mark against a culture that only counts wealth and fame as success. His answer isn't to chase that standard harder. It's to dive straight into the opposite: the cringe, the humiliation, the flat-out fuck-ups that feel completely irredeemable, and turn them into art instead of hiding them.

He builds the whole argument around Frank Zappa's 1974 live album Roxy & Elsewhere, specifically the song "Cheepnis," Zappa's loving tribute to low-budget monster movies where you can see the zipper on the costume and the wires holding up the spaceship. Zappa's insight, as Mookie reads it, is that the visible seams, the cheapness itself, aren't a flaw in the art. They're the actual point, the honest, unpolished scaffolding that makes the whole thing feel real. Mookie extends that idea into sex, attraction, and desire, arguing real chemistry often lives in the unglamorous and specific, not the airbrushed ideal, and pulls in Nietzsche's demolition of Platonic perfection as the same idea wearing a philosopher's coat.

From there Mookie takes aim at two very different targets that share the same disease: AI slop, which he calls a predictive engine autocompleting what it thinks beauty already looks like, and a lot of today's human writers on Substack, who he argues are doing the exact same thing, just slower. His prescription for both: more mess, more vulnerability, more willingness to show the actual, embarrassing, human wiring underneath the work. He closes with a real challenge, if the machines are about to inherit everything else we've built, a genuine sense of humor about our own failures might be the one thing worth making sure they never lose.

Transcript

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Hello and welcome to Bald and Bloviating. I'm your bald host bloviating today about the creative engine of cringe, cheapness, and failure. As I get older, I'm noticing that many of the folks that I worked with over the years, colleagues, folks in the companies where I where I agencyed, people in other professions, other industries working in parallel, doing the adulting thing. As well as friends I've had going all the way back to elementary school, even. And family members. Folks that I just meet through new friends, their own families. As people get older, regret seems to build. You realize all the things that you wanted to do, but didn't. More significantly than that, you think about the stuff that you did do, and and you're often filled with this feeling that you didn't do everything you wanted to. That you had high aspirations, but you ended up kind of low. Let's face it, most of us aren't a Bezos or a Musk nowadays or an Altman. People judge themselves the way they judge others based on the standards of our twisted, plutocratic, consumer-driven society. You're a success if you're rich. If you made something of yourself, and if you're not rich, then you've at least made a name for yourself in some kind of way. And based on that standard, you can't help but feel like you missed the boat. All this time went, what did you do? Well, I raised a family, I had kids, I had a job, I was adulting. I did what I had to do and I did okay. But okay isn't good enough. People judge themselves so harshly. And the end result is what I'm seeing in all these people, which is ultimately disappointment. They feel they coulda, woulda, shoulda done things differently or at least better. And we all have skeletons lurking, some of them more visible than others. Relationships that went south, especially in the family. And as a culture, we don't like to share because sharing shows vulnerability, and we can't be vulnerable because it goes full circle to what I was saying earlier about being the man, being successful. A trillionaire doesn't have anything to be disappointed about. They have no weaknesses aside from what they share on almost an hourly basis on X. But we forgive them because, like a stand-up comedian, they can get away with it. That's their whole purpose, isn't it? As an icon of American success, they are absolved of the responsibilities of being human. I get it. Now, here's where I at least get myself off the hook, or I think I do. In my tender old age, reminiscing about the coulda woulda shoulda's, I find myself gravitating increasingly to the fuck-ups, to the embarrassing, cringy moments where I did the wrong thing, where despite my hard work and best intentions, I failed. I flat out fucked it up, whether with family, with jobs, even with my own creativity. How many endless hours working on stories where I was basically just spinning my own gears, wallowing in my own shit. Now, none of that's wasted. And I've rambled on about the value of all that hard work. But this rant isn't about that. This rant is about the raw cringe. Stuff that just isn't redeemable in any way you look at it. And it's not tragic. In ways, it's the opposite of tragedy. Tragedy is despite your best efforts, the world conspired and you got your ass kicked. Romeo and Juliet, was it their fault? No, not really. Love is love. That's the point now, isn't it? The thing though about cringe, and this is the essence of my point, if, as an artist, you get to dive headfirst into the thick of it, that very transparency, that eruption of vulnerability is really what it's all about. And when you dive into something that is inherently irredeemable, then there's an innate honesty to it in its reminiscence. It's like, holy shit, I did that. Not only did I do that, but I'm diving back into it. And I'm not just diving back into it, but now I'm sharing it with the world. I am I am reshaping that shit sandwich into a gourmet meal, which is a fun short story or a rant or a podcast or whatever. I'm transposing it into the characters in my books. And it's awesome! This not only makes me feel less bad about the worst moments of my life, but it's an endless treasure trove of goodies that I can draw from to liberate myself from the burden of being a human. And it doesn't do so in a way that's a cop out, it does it in a way that is just so entertaining for me. And I hope it's entertaining for you, dear listener and reader. And I am reminded of Frank Zappa's 1974 double live album, The Roxy and Elsewhere. It was recorded in Hollywood, California in December of 1973. That's the Roxy part. The elsewhere part, I think, are a few cuts off the record that were recorded at some other place. And one of the songs, I think it's one of the songs recorded at the Roxy, and not elsewhere, and it really doesn't matter, is a song called Cheapness. And Zappa Zappa spells it C-H E E P N I S. Now, I could go on for about 18 hours continuously about Frank Zappa. I love Frank Zappa, and what I love most about him is he utterly annihilates genre. So if you listen to Frank Zappa, you can hear an RB bebop that melds into a progressive jazz syncopated hard rock medley. And you could get lost in the technical bravado and forget that he's trying to be funny, or you could just focus on the satire, like Valley Girl, and forget the fact that he was a musical compositional genius, and for that matter, an awesome electric guitar player. But all that aside, his idea of cheapness, of which the song repeats, I need more of that cheapness, with a preamble where he addresses the audience and reminisces about monster movies that he loves, where you could see the strings attached, you could see how the monster is made. Zappa's idea of cheapness in this preamble setup and in the song itself is what we love about a lot of these vintage monster movies is that Godzilla literally looks like a bunch of styrofoam that some dude is wearing on a plastic set where you can see the wires and the cameras, and even the guys wincing at the camera get out of frame. And his idea is that the construct of our imagination in a meta whimsical, satirical kind of way, is almost the essence of the thing itself. That the scaffolding, that the frame, that the artifice of the art is an integral part of the art, and in ways is the core of expression and creativity. And when you extrapolate that idea of cheapness into some of his other songs, such as on Overnight Sensation, Camarillo Brillo, and you and you morph it even into kink and sexuality and culture. Zappa's cheapness is an expression of what I'm trying to get at with this cringe concept. Sometimes the hotest sex is the sex loaded with cheapness, that it's dirty, that it's dank, that it's kind of nasty. And in that sense, it goes exactly the opposite of what we would consider a classical, almost Greco-Roman aesthetic. It's like the woman isn't voluptuously beautiful, a supermodel, but she's a little round and she might be a little thick, and she's wearing a Sears Poncho, and she might have bad teeth, and she's got a pet iguana or snake, and her place is kind of rancid, and you just met her, etc., etc. That is cheapness expressed through that kind of date from hell that becomes heavenly in its kink and sensuality, and that cheapness when it comes to art is the monster movie, and the cheapness when it comes to reminiscing about one's own life and regurgitating the filth and slop and embarrassment and humiliation, and then flipping that into an awesome technical, musical, odd-timed masterpiece is really what it's all about. And that's the heart of cheapness, that's the heart of what I like exploring. That's really the essence of taking failure, capital F hashtag fail, and transposing it into amazing artistic fuel. And the converse of that is all the writers that I'm meeting and the people that I'm talking to and seeing online. It's it's just browsing on Substack, for example, where everyone is memeing and sharing, and here's my latest chapter and work. And not to say anything disparaging about my fellow writers and creative people, but I have to say that a vast majority don't get it. A vast majority are trying to emulate their heroes in a way that's utterly conventional and predictable. We're living in the age of AI Slop. And what is AI Slop but the output of a predictive transformer engine? It works by autofilling and auto-completing your prompts. And I feel a lot of today's creative people are up in arms about AI to a large extent because it's mimicking what they do anyway. And what they do is they autofill and autocomplete the idea about what they think aesthetic perfection and beauty is all about, usually realized by a singular approach to a single kind of storytelling. This goes back to the genius of Zappa, who understands that you can't get stuck in one mode because utterly and essentially you're taking yourself too seriously. Here I need to go into my other hero, Nietzsche. And what Friedrich Nietzsche contributed more than anything was this self-referential kick in the ass to the Platonic notion of truth and beauty and justice and even art and knowledge, which is you put something on the pinnacle and it's the golden mean, it's the golden ratio, and it's an archetype of beauty, it's an archetype of success and truth. And Nietzsche called bullshit on that. Nietzsche was introducing the idea of cheapness in almost the same sense that Zappa formalized it in 1974 on the double album Roxy and Elsewhere. Cheapness, we need more of it, not less. We need to break the bounds of formalized genre and convention and developmental editors who get it all right and making sure you cut your adverbs. Get the fuck out of here. Most of it sucks, and it sucks because there's a fear of embracing the vulnerability and the ethos and the pathos that lurks at the heart of art. And once again, this is distinct from tragedy per se, because with tragedy there's a sense of inevitability, which is despite how hard I tried, I got my ass handed back to me. That's not what cringe and cheapness and this view of failure is all about. Sure, you could have tried. Maybe you didn't. Maybe you're a lazy, selfish, jealous son of a bitch. Maybe you threw in the towel before the game even started. None of that really matters. What does matter is the raw lived experience of being put into these situations and enduring them to the point where you could squeeze out every last drop of your own humiliation to then turn that into a story that other people can relate to through their own unacknowledged and repressed cheapness and cringe and failure. We need more of this, not less. Every second I'm on the social platform LinkedIn, I feel physically ill. That is the bastion of the opposite of what I'm talking about. It's posing, it's a bunch of dilettants showcasing their accomplishments. Now, is there a purpose? Is there a place? Sure. It takes a village, folks. And I'm not here to say anything disparaging about the success, real or imagined, of anyone else. And I'll be the first person to admit my own failings and my own point of view. That's the whole goddamn point. But what I'm trying to get at is if you're looking for art, grinding art at its core, what really moves you and grooves you, what gets your foot tapping and your head nodding and your face smiling and laughing, that, ladies and gentlemen, and everyone in between is cringe and cheapness and failure. And like Zappa sang back in nineteen seventy-four in Hollywood, California, I need more cheapness. We all need more cheapness. And let's indulge and let's engage and let's let it loose. If we can give them any gift aside from creation itself, their birthing, that's a goddamn sense of humor. Thanks for uh listening to this bald guy bloviating. More cheapness to come.