THE MOTHERS OF INVENTION: WE'RE ONLY IN IT FOR THE MONEY

No, not too much on this album, unfortunately.

We're Only In It For The Money was Zappa's satirical attack and put down of the so called 60's counter culture with hippies being the main target. Are You Hung Up is the album's first track where The Mothers perform another mishmash of Doo Wop, US pop, Beach Boys motifs, etc., combined with tape effects and whispering between the first few opening tracks, to bring the familiar but artful satire of the Mothers' music.

The hypercritical stab at the hippie culture get's old fast but Frank does have some witty commentaries on police brutality, which still reverberates today, as well as revealing lyrically that the ugliest part of someone's body, in a mock love ballad, is not a nose or a face but some people's minds. Clever stuff that's immediately mixed with absurdum in a song cycle of 18 brief songs that occasionally goes into musique concrete before quickly returning to the Zappa and the Mother's style of mixed musical influences that was featured on their first album from 1966 titled Freak Out!

The closing track titled The Chrome Plated Megaphone of Destiny is an avant-garde tape effects collage that, while effective, seems as if it had been tacked on to the end of the album.

In retrospect, it seems that Zappa spent a lot of effort knocking down what he perceived as sheep following a new master, as hippiedum was over almost as fast as it started. The following year (1969), Zappa would be telling students at a British college that the new hype of street fighting in the UK was nothing more than "last year's flower power." That's was how fast music and society changed in those days, and obviously this is what dates We're Only In It For The Money the same way as it dates the album that the cover of We're Only In It For The money parodies hilariously, the Beatles Sgt. Pepper's Loney Hearts Club Band.

We're Only In It For The Money is certainly essential for Zappaholics, but to the rest of the prog and rock listening public, Freak Out! remains strangely undated, and thus, far more enjoyable.

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