1. Are You Hung Up?
2. Who Needs the Peace Corps?*
3. Concentration Moon
4. Mom & Dad
5. Telephone Conversation
6. Bow Tie Daddy
7. Harry, You're a Beast
8. What's the Ugliest Part of Your Body?
9. Absolutely Free
10. Flower Punk
11. Hot Poop
12. Nasal Retentive Calliope Music
13. Let's Make the Water Turn Black
14. The Idiot Bastard Son
15. Lonely Little Girl
16. Take Your Clothes Off When You Dance*
17. What's the Ugliest Part of Your Body? (Reprise)
18. Mother People
19. The Chrome Plated Megaphone of Destiny*
B+
This is another of those "I guess you just had to be there" albums, I think. It's a good album, with some clever songs and some impressively strange and challenging music, but I think to really get it you'd have to immerse yourself far more deeply in the social climate of the late 1960s than I have any intention of ever doing.
The big sticking point for a lot of people, I'd imagine, is the album's structure. A parody of concept albums and psychedelic excess, it consists of a variety of short, satirical songs intercut with music concrete, whispered monologues, electronic mucking about, and bursts of noise rock that rival early Boredoms for sheer oddness and abrasiveness. Still, this is kind of cool - listening to the album the first time through is sort of like falling down the rabbit hole. You never really know what's going to happen next, and while it's a frequently jarring experience it's also a great deal of fun. The sudden changes and weird asides are so frequent that after a while they seem to become the point of the album, and largely negate the possibility of almost anybody finding this album a comforting listen. The result is an album the simple existence of which becomes a political statement, even before you start digging into the lyrics.
As to those lyrics? Well, Frank Zappa wrote "Trouble Every Day". This album doesn't feature anything as complex and incisive as that song, unfortunately. I've encountered criticisms of Zappa that deride him as sophomoric and misogynistic, and this album is certainly open to both charges. "Harry, You're a Beast" is an attack on the vacuousness of American womanhood that ends with a rape played for laughs (although I should qualify that statement by saying that it doesn't condone said rape). I'm not one for edgy comedy for the sake of being edgy, and it's kind of unfortunate that people of a certain time thought these kind of jokes were cutting satire.
But putting that one song aside, there's a lot of good stuff here. The standout is "Who Needs the Peace Corps", which is about a youth setting out to have the quintessential hippie experience, which has become standardised and commodified to the point where he can plan the whole thing out in advance. As the title states, it contrasts the youth's expectations of the hippie experience - basically, to go to San Francisco and get loaded and fuck around - with people who are reacting to the problems of the world by actually taking concrete steps to help people and effect social change. Another good song is "Flower Punk", which is about someone planning to start a psychedelic band so they can sell records, make a tonne of money, and go into real estate. And then there's "Take Your Clothes Off When You Dance", which is basically a monologue from the POV of some exponent of peace and love about how we'll conquer all the evil in the world, that suddenly shifts to an observation about how some people are unfortunately so mired in poverty that they can't afford fashionable trousers - but it's OK, because one day we'll progress to a point where you can take your clothes off when you dance.
I have little experience of genuine hippies (thankfully - what little I've had has been more than enough), but I think the focus in this album on the commercialisation and commodification of youth culture in general is what keeps it relevant. I think back to when I was in my twenties, when hipsterism became a global phenomenon and people were obsessed with listening to the right music, wearing the right clothes, taking the right drugs and so forth. Of course, a lot of people were just kooks with far-Left views, but I genuinely knew people who researched the phenomenon so that they could fit into it. It was pretty depressing. I even tried to be cool, once or twice. It did not end well.
In the end, I guess this album is sort of baffling, and frequently kind of annoying, and I probably won't listen to it again. But it's a meticulously crafted work of art, and manages to balance a critique of phony lefties with an astute understanding of the repressive social conditions which created them. It's also pretty amusing that such a defiantly non-commercial work would be titled We're Only in It for the Money, only for it to go on and become a modest commercial success. I think the electronic stuff has probably proven most influential over time, but it's a smartly written album with some good points to make. It is also, at times, borderline unlistenable. But then again, making the listener uncomfortable, and resisting easy categorisation, is kind of its point.
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