Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.

The line contrasts two ways of experiencing time: as a mechanized schedule of obligations (deadlines, due dates) versus as something made livable and meaningful through art. By calling music a “decoration” for time, Zappa suggests that aesthetic experience doesn’t merely fill leisure hours; it changes the felt texture of life, interrupting the reduction of human existence to productivity and payment. The phrasing also fits Zappa’s broader public persona as a critic of conformity and bureaucratic thinking: music becomes a form of resistance against a life organized solely around work, commerce, and administrative clocks.