15. The Chrome Plated Megaphone of Destiny

The Mothers of Invention: We’re Only In It For The Money (Verve, 1968); composed by Frank Zappa

This musique concrète interlude concludes Frank Zappa’s parody of Sgt. Pepper and the exploitation of hippie culture in much the same way that “A Day In The Life” did the Beatles’ original a year earlier. Despite a couple of poorly aged sexist jibes, Zappa’s album is still very funny, but without ever dropping its satiric tone most of it is deadly serious. Zappa was especially scabrous about middle class kids blithely sampling mass bohemia like TV dinner entrées, because bohemia was not an abstraction to him – it took brains and willingness to face the very real risk of full-on repression that he saw coming as readily as the WWII internment camps (something he makes explicit in the sleeve notes). So what makes this album more or less unique in Zappa’s catalogue is naked empathy. The paranoid mania for ultra-controlled situations that tended to constrict much of what Zappa did for the next twenty-plus years was strangely absent here, and despite its hyper-meticulous second-by-second construction, the music on this album reflects that. So instead of ending with a majestic reverberating piano chord that eerily trails off into the sunset, this track starts with one that just oozes and throbs at you.

Note: 25 secular essays about 25 songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day during Advent (approximately).