We’re Only in It for the Money

Listen up you mothers... invent this!

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If I ever get the urge to experience a fever dream without the pesky illness to go with it, I'll just throw this album on.

Awful album. No redeeming features whatsoever

1. Complete waste of time

2. What?

3. What?

4. What? Why?

5. Ridiculous

I can't go one by one anymore. I read the Wikipedia article. I understand the joke, but I don't think it's a great joke. Or at least I'm so far removed in time or uneducated about the times/events being satirized, the joke isn't relevant to me. The music isn't very enjoyable by itself and because the joke is lost on me, I'm not enjoying this album at all.

I think even if I heard this when it was relevant, I wouldn't care for the music the messaging comes wrapped in. Too many backwards passages, weird hard left/right panning, strange noises, nonsensical spoken word passages for me to be able to enjoy this.

I don’t know that I can put a number to that.

I’m typing this one right after finishing the album for the first time – not giving myself any time to reflect or really think about what I just spent the last 40 minutes on, and I am… sort of just lost. Not in a bad way, not in a good way, but in a way that just feels ethereal & liminal, and oddly discomfiting and perhaps a bit lonely. This is another one of Frank Zappa’s counter-culture “the 60s kinda suck and this whole hippie thing is bullshit” albums, but it’s done in such a way that lends no respect or credence to the material it mocks in the first place, save for maybe the Hendrix parody that I’ve never heard the original track of.

This feels like a GTA radio station from hell, mixed with a TV show that I’ve seen/shown once before during the Thursday variety streams: it lasted one episode, from 1969, and it’s called Turn-On. The point of that show was just strange rapidfire, short form satirical comedy with an absurd bend, weird electronica fever dream music backing it, no time to breathe, think, or ponder, & it would ultimately just slap you in the face with whatever punchline it wanted to give – rinse and repeat in 30 second bursts for 28 minutes. It was cancelled promptly because nobody got it, shortform was scary, and the material was… very, very strange for 1969. It’s a show I respect even though I found it awkward to sit through, a little dated, and certainly a bit surreal.

This album gives me that same feeling in musical form – maybe a bit more intentional & designed to elicit such a harsh and jarring response. It’s certainly more forceful than Turn-On is. As such, I have no idea if I can put a number to this. It’s not a 5 – it’s too avantgarde and I think some of the concepts / material within this album are a bit curmudgeonly, even as a satire of the 60s that Frank seemed to fucking despise. It’s not a 1 or 2, if only because I respect what this is going for, even if I tend to disagree at times. I guess I'm at a 3.5, but I don't know whether to bump it down to a 3 or up to a 4. Putting this on the same level as that Bill Callahan album we just got feels strange, wrong, and awkward, as with any album this might be compared to that I also gave a 3. Bumping it up to a 4 also feels weird to me, because I'm not sure it's that deserving of one, even for how much I admire this.

All I know for sure (and I’m not even sure if I do know anything at this point) is that Frank Zappa succeeded at realizing some sort of vision on this album. I’m just not sure if it’s a vision that was worth realizing; this is, by far, the strangest album we’ve gotten so far. This classifies as music, and there are some good tracks here, but for the most part, I’m left with… something.

I hesitate to bring up the “art gallery” comparison again, but I think it’s somewhat earned here: this feels like someone smashing a Banksy piece to bits and pieces just to try and paint over it and “fix” the art themselves. I feel like if that happened, most people would say the Banksy piece is a better, more technically sound piece of art, beloved to some degree. To smash it, however, provides a new canvas, perhaps uglier than the original, but one that might be appreciated all the same, if the attempt to “fix” it is good enough. I can’t say whether or not this album is “good enough” in the artistic sense – that’s for other people to mull about and debate over for years to come, but I do think it’s “good enough” in the sense that Frank Zappa got to make his art, regardless of opinion. It’s a 3.5 that, unfortunately, I'll bump down to a 3 for me – it's certainly worth listening to, but it just didn't strike me as well as it could have.

Almost unlistenable. There's not been many on the list that I've just given up on completely before the end, but this one made that particular list.

2.75
It's an experience, that's worth something.

legal pra caralho esse, hein.

achei divertidaço. bem caótico e confuso, assim como os hippies eram mesmo.
achei top. curti bastante os cortes bruscos e os barulho. escutarei novamente no trabalho.

This album is intentionally hilarious, and I'm here for it. Literally made me laugh out loud. Also hugely influential in the Rock In Opposition movement Henry Cow started a few years later, and you can even hear that influence in more modern bands like System of a Down.

this album is full of half baked ideas and random noises. at one point i had to pull over because i thought something was wrong with my car but it was just the violently annoying sounds Frank decided to put on the record. the last song on the record is 6 and a half minutes of random sounds and yet somehow it sounds more coherent that some other parts of the record. i appreciate that it is satire and the few song ideas that feel more fleshed out arent bad but overall this was more annoying that enlightening. +1/2 star for the album cover

I'm starting to think this Zappa guy makes music that isn't exactly normal🤔

It's certainly one of the albums of all time

Ah fuck it it's a fun one

Everyone needs to listen to this!

Ok, not nearly as bad as I thought and expected after reading some of the comments. I like some of Frank Zappa's music, but I can't get into a lot of his stuff. In this respect, I feared much more shrillness. I understand the satirical aspect and it's funny. But in the end it's not music that I really listen to. 3/4

I like Frank Zappa but... What the hell was that? I'll add one star because the lyrics were funny.

With so much good Zappa to choose from it's a shame that this mediocre satire album gets recognition. Hippies certainly deserved the mockery but this is Zappa at hist most annoying, taking on the worst tendencies of the flower power psych pop he's parodying and combining it with his own worst tendencies for fussy over-writing and irritating instrumentation. Apostrophe, Joe's Garage, Roxy & Elsewhere, Zoot Allures, Jazz From Hell, Sheik Yerbouti...these are all far more deserving than this one, who's main value is as a reminder that even their contemporaries thought hippies sucked.

We’re Only In It For The Money
I looked back on what I wrote for Freak Out! And I think I feel largely the same about this, even if my patience for Frank Zappa has maybe worn a little thinner since then. I get the feeling he resented the hippies becoming a part of mainstream culture, not out of ideology, but because he wanted to be the popular outsider, so he just took the piss instead. On the one hand I like that idea of satirising hippies and ’straights’ pretensions and phoniness equally, but on the other his relentless cynicism is can be a bit tiring, particularly on the first side of this, where that joke is rather one note.

That’s not to say it’s not funny in parts though, Who Needs The Peace Corps and Flower Punk are probably the most successful plays on the concept and there are some other great lines and amusing punchlines and images scattered throughout, and his dryly sardonic descriptions of violence I guess were kind of prescient for what happened in the rest of 1968 in the US. I also like the multiple ‘I’m Jimmy Carl Black, the Indian of the Group’

Musically I think it's a bit more interesting than what I can remember of Freak Out, although musical excellence isn’t the point obviously, particularly on the more skit like tracks. There are passable, deliberate approximations of Beach Boys, Jimi Hendrix, Vaudeville and Acid Rock/Blues bands, and there are some nice musical passages and playing elsewhere; Concentration Moon’s bass and organ are pretty good, and Mom & Dad’s fuggish atmosphere is nicely delivered by the bass, organ and drums, The Idiot Bastard’s Son’s Doors-esque organ is very good and the riff on Lonely Little Girl is great.

I suppose the question is what criteria to use to rate this. Of course on a pure musical level there isn’t a great deal of interest, so I guess it comes down to the tolerance/appeal of the surrealism, cynicism, contrariness and iconoclasm, and the ambition and intent to do something different and poke at things. Rather like Freak Out I do like that intention and that someone is out there doing this kind of stuff, and I think that appreciation just about outweighs some of the tiresome aspects. I gave Freak Out a 3 and I’ll give this the same.
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Playlist submission: Who Needs the Peace Corps

Eén grote amuzikale gimmick. Dacht dat dit een muzieklijstje was.

188/1001

Geez, I already said Freak Out kinda sounded like a child of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (which this current album is parodying) But it was still a shock to see that they had pretty much recreated it's album art for We're Only In It For The Money. As for the album itself, I hate it. While Freak Out! had some good moments at the start, this one had no good moments at all. Every weird or unique thing it tries to do always comes across as jarring, annoying or both. And of course, you can't have a Mothers Of Invention album without the obligatory track of just nothing but laughing and random noises and this album has it. I like some weird albums but this one just proves the point i made in my Freak Out! review, Just because it's satire, doesn't mean it gets an excuse for being bad.
Best Song: Lovely Little Girl
Worst Song: The Chrome Plated Megaphone Of Destiny