The Mothers of Invention: "We're Only in it for the Money"
Zappa is one of those artists I find most challenging but ultimately rewarding – his music may not be pretty, but the more time you invest in it, the more you get back. His early albums with The Mothers are, in the context of the late-60’s musical culture, like naughty kids in the corner: while everyone else was singing about peace and love, embracing Indian culture, dropping out and wearing flowers in their hair, Zappa was waving a two-fingered salute to them all.
That’s where this counter-counterculture album comes in: it’s an obvious lampoonery of the late 60’s hippie culture, but it’s hardly conservative and conformist. As mentioned before, it is like a naughty kid in the corner – isolated from everyone else just for acting differently. It made heavy work for the censors who stripped out anything that could offend crooner-fed conservatives or fuel the rebellious spirit of the era’s youth; while musically, it was unclassifiable. Slabs of skewed rock and pop were sandwiched between mangled tape effects, dialogue and orchestras – seriously wild stuff.
The stand-out track for me has to be “Let’s Make the Water Turn Black” as, when you stand back and take a look at the lyrics, what you get is a song that is very radical, if rather disgusting. Behind the catchy two-minute ditty is a song about two friends who set fire to their farts, store urine in a jar and wipe boogers on a window until it turns ‘dysentery green’. Only Zappa could’ve written a song like this at such a pivotal time AND gotten away with it.
The elements of musique concrète make the album less instantly-appealing than their debut, “Freak Out”, but since when was Zappa out to write catchy pop tunes? The album is still as interesting as it was brave and has remained peerless and highly respected for 40 years and counting.
Rating: 10
