How does it compare to the artist's other releases
Outstanding
Value for Money
Good
Advantages:
One of the most subversive albums of all time
Disadvantages:
Original artwork is concealed within the booklet
Recommend to potential buyers:
yes
Full review
Browse through the Z section of your local music store and you may come across a record that looks very similar to the Beatles's Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Only instead of the Liverpool's favourite sons and their psychedelic muses, a tall man with a handlebar moustache stands in a purple velvet dress. Don't be alarmed, head straight to the counter and buy this record. Congratulations -- you've been ZAPPAed.
By 1968, the Sixties was dying a very real, spiritual death. Musically, hand-holding, on-the-shoulder-dancing Rickenbacker-wielding mop-tops had been replaced by serious moustaches and sitars. Vietnam was raging into its 11th bloody year and at home in the US, flower power had begun to twist into dark and sinister shapes far from a loving ethos. Dropped-out, tuned-in, mind-bent kids littered Haight Ashby. We're Only In It For The Money (WOIIFTM) is very much the soundtrack to this disintegration, and in many ways, was the herald for the death of the decade. Despite being recorded between August and October 1967 and released the following January, WOIIFTM places me into a particular year ('68) better than any other record.
WOIIFTM was initially conceived as Our Man In Nirvana, a collaboration between the Mothers of Invention and Lenny Bruce featuring their music and his comedy routines. Bruce had died in 1966 from a suspected morphine overdose and was a cultural hero to the 'Underground' scenes of New York and Los Angeles. Work was just beginning in the preparation of the album when Frank Zappa first heard a little record called Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Zappa liked the record enough, but the levels to which the album was quickly embraced by the hippy-trip populace surprised him. Further spurred on by the music press' proclamation of Pepper as the first 'concept' album (Zappa's first two releases Freak Out! and Absolutely Free predated Pepper and were endlessly more 'conceptual' than anything the Beatles had put out, a fact later acknowledged by Paul McCartney) the Mothers of Invention set about creating a lampoon of Pepper's hippy adoption and the dark turns`60s popular culture was taking.
In just 2 months Zappa and the Mothers produced an album of cacophonous dissonance that is by turns amusing, disturbing, beaty, sexy, angry and downright weird. Fuelled by anger and frustration, Zappa was never again so biting and satirical.
WOIIFTM is the most 'sixties' of all my choices. It flirts between genres from track to track, its constant changes, from surfer to folk, from doo-wop to heavy psychedelic rock, lambasting the 'far out' tunes that were being embraced by the culture.
Ultimately, where WOIIFTM succeeds is in its dissection of not only straight culture but also the hippy movement. Whilst the norms' sheer immovability fuels the album, Zappa tears into freak power's 'counter culture', marking it as just another system of, well, drags. Essentially, Zappa paints both the straights and the geeks as ridiculous mirrors of each other.
I first discovered WOIIFTM in a haze of narcosis at the age of 19, a time when I considered myself, as all teenagers do, to be apart from the buckle-down attitude of my parents' generation. It presented a sobering note of criticism to my rebellion but above all, it gave me a burst of sixties music different from the Beatles and Pink Floyd. It opened up the decade to me and, with every play, it still does.
Highlights:
What's the Ugliest Part of Your Body?/Absolutely Free: a traditional rock `n' roll tune which turns into a stark attack on oppressive systems that work against the young, and misguided, hippies. "A plague upon your ignorance"
Nasal Retentive Calliope Music: a psychedelic audio-scape, full of strange noises, distorted voices and Eric Clapton exclaiming "God, god, I can see god..."
Harry, You're A Beast: A whimsical tune with yet another attack on the young, this time "American Womanhood."
Let's Make The Water Turn Black: Youth culture and the pain of growing up in small minded America is the target for this surprisingly catchy track.
The CD is commonly available in most good record shops (and some really bad ones too) and replaces the iconic Sgt. Pepper pastiche with a photo of the Mothers. The original photo is in the booklet, so with a little origami the record can be displayed as Mother Nature (of invention) intended.
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