Customer Reviews

Have I Offended Someone?

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a great cd! Most of the tracks have either been remixed, remastered, edited or totally reconstructed by FZ himself. Dumb All Over is a live never before released gem with a great FZ guitar solo! The sound is fabulous. Zappa perfected a genre that could be called song-stos or short stories in song, using the rhapsodic techniques he had developed. The interest of the listener is kept through myriad changes in the drum meters, riffs, fills, background vocals, special effects, unusual chord sequences, swift tranformations in mood and tone, and the like. It's a powerful genre, and Zappa's researches point out a new direction for American operatic form. There is something in this collection to offend everyone - ..., Jewishes princesses, feminists, Christains, satanists, record executives, the Musicians union, young women from the San Fernando Valley, partisans of the Parisian toilet kiosk, insecure young men who like to dance in clubs, Jimi Hendrix fans, and punkers with chops, to mention a few. Satirical anthropology, pure and simple.

Forget the Commercial Ballehoo of Stictly Commercial: The best of Frank Zappa that humorless pot of unemotiolnal Frank. If you want to learn about the real Frank Zappa buy this album. Not only does it have Zappa classics like Bobby Brown Goes Down, Dumb all over and Titties and Beer (The theme song of saturday nights with the guys) it also has liner notes about the real Frank Zappa. THe Caring Zappa. The Zappa that wants to do away with Censurship of any kind. So just forget about purchasing his greatest hits and get this album. You won't be disappointed.

This is about as good of a compilation as one could ask for, at least on one cd anyway. Some will say that Frank had a lot more "offensive" stuff than what is on here, but whether or not you find it to be offensive, well, I guess that just depends on what kind of person you are. Let's see, I'm not Jewish, I'm not Catholic, I'm not gay, I'm not a Conservative, and I'm not a religious fanatic. Even if you are a member of one of those said groups, chances are you won't be offended either. Everything is done in such a light-hearted fashion, it's really hard to get stirred up over anything that's here. It's all in good fun. Much like "Strictly Commercial" and "Cheap Thrills" this is great for newcomers and like another reviewer said, if you have any musical integrity whatsoever, it will inspire you to dig deeper. It's good for anyone really, whether you're just a casual fan or a die-hard. This is essential.

This was the first FZ compilation that got me hooked into his music. While by no means definitive it's a great starting point for anyone who just wants to get into his prime material featuring his razor-sharp satire. And the music itself is impeccably mastered (most of the tracks were remixed prior to FZ's demise).

After this disc you'll always want more FZ albums. And once your FZ collection grows I'm certain that someone you know who may not be familiar with FZ will want a nice introduction to his huge catalog. This album is perfect for that task as long as the person isn't a prude (I'd recommend "The Yellow Shark" and FZ's "Guitar" albums if this stuff is too rough).

The standout track here is a different live version of "Dumb All Over" with a truly searing guitar outro. The remix of "Dinah-Moe Humm" in a reconstructed remix with an extra added minute within the bridge (with a couple extra lines of lyrics) is a very close second. The rest of the tracks sound much better than a lot of the other CD's in my collection (FZ was a master audio engineer). This ranks up there with the pristine mix of "Broadway The Hard Way" is you want to impress people with your sound system. Or even Steely Dan's "Aja" for that matter.

The album is good for shock value, of course. And it's a worthy addition to one's collection of FZ. The mixes alone make it different enough to compare side-by-side with the original sources.

If you're a Jewish girl, Catholic, Gay, Religious, or live in Southern California you may well be offended. But if you have a good sense of humor, you shouldn't be. One again, Frank shows us how to laugh while blowing us away with his great arrangements and mind-blowing guitar playing. This is not the definative Frank Zappa album, but does give you some insight to his brand of humor. For more serious musical appreciation of this gifted artist, try some of his other numerious works.

Same problem as Strictly commercial: you think that you have essential Zappa songs, but if you have any taste / musical integrity, you'll end up wanting more Zappa albums. This one has the added benefit of many new mixes and two new live versions, so you might consider it essential anyway

Politically correct, humorless, or morally conservative (political conservatives might actually like quite a few of the songs on here.) There's nothing all that objectionable provided you treat this as it's supposed to be treated, as a joke.

In point of fact, to take offense at some of these songs is frankly pretty shallow. I can sort of see how somebody would find the doo-wop "He's So Gay" (which actually is out to spoof gays AND really infuriate homophobes) or the pretty rude "Jewish Princess" offensive. But who found "Disco Boy" objectionable? "Valley Girl?" Even "Goblin Girl", with its pretty subtle sexual innuendo (for the US) is nothing next to "Dinah-Moe Hum" or some non-Zappa songs.

Zappa has been on the receiving end of a lot of abuse, but as the liner notes point out, he's hardly defending the characters singing the songs. It helps to realize that Zappa's songs were basically short stories narrated by characters. Zappa himself was a weary liberal, who found most liberals to as big hypocrites as most conservatives, and it bugged him. The selections here reflect that. More thoughtful than most, and, if you've got a sense of humor, hysterical.

I rate this a 3. Heavy with offensive language, if this CD was a movie it would be rated R. Good example of Zappa at his best though. Musical arrangements that sound great, that anyone would like. It's the lyrics that Zappa slaps you with. Everyone gets blasted here.

This album illustrates an interesting point about the humor and satire in early and late period Zappa (for the purposes of this review, the dividing line is around 1976). From 1966-1975, Frank did plenty of music that was considering shocking, and some that was considered offensive. But with one exception ("Dinah Moe Humm"), none of that music made it onto "Have I Offended Someone?" The reason might be that the humor from this earlier period tended to be more surreal, and there was less distinction between Zappa's "arty" music and his "satirical" music. Also, in his earlier period, the satire and humor tended to stop short of what the mainstream culture would have called "obscene," even when the lyrics were about having sex with teen-aged groupies ("Motherly Love," 1966) or boyhood experiments with various types of human waste ("Lets Make the Water Turn Black," 1968).

With "Don't Eat the Yellow Snow" (1974), Zappa found that there was a big audience for a more blunt, less avant-garde brand of Zappa humor. "Dinah Moe Humm," from 1973 and the one pre-1976 track included here, is another example of this style, but the risqué "Dinah Moe" had no chance of becoming a left-field hit like "Yellow Snow."

The humor and satire pieces from 1976 through 1988 were more in the vein of "Yellow Snow" and "Dinah Moe," and it is that style of song that is featured here, and which has led people only vaguely familiar with Zappa's work to classify him alongside Weird Al Yankovic as a novelty songwriter. (No slight intended towards Weird Al, whose parodies have amused me greatly at times.) The targets of the later Zappa period include caricatures (or stereotypes, take your pick) of Jewish women, Catholic women, French women, kinky women, gay men, union members, TV preachers, disco dancers, and more. Mostly absent from this compilation are songs targeting politicians, though they too were frequent targets.

Zappa claimed in a 1978 Downbeat Magazine interview that his original boomer audience had settled down by the mid-70s (and were attending less shows), and that his concert audiences were skewing younger in the late-70s and 80s. Whether or not that's the reason he began writing more of the type of material on this disc is an open question, but its clear that there was a conscious decision to do more of this type of song, and to separate it (for the most part) from his "highbrow" orchestral and Synclavier projects. With "Valley Girl" (one of the mildest songs on this disc), that strategy paid off handsomely and gave Zappa the luxury of spending $400,000 of his own cash to hire the London Symphony Orchestra and record two albums worth of his orchestral pieces.

I bought this because I remember listening to the song "bobby brown goes down" off of the shiek album. I was a teen at the time and the song was so scandalous and nothing like you would here on the radio. I remember the feeling as being like finding your dad's secret stash of playboys in the back of his closet. Frank Zappa was the Howard Stern of music before there was a Howard Stern. Many years later, after giving this material another listen, it's either that I'm mostly desensitized to these adolescent provocations of societies B.S. or I just grew up. At least Zappa's tauntings always done with humor and without self importance. Now Playboys seem tame and harmless comparatively, as does Frank Zappa. So if you want to occasionally regress to a time in your life when all you could do is hang out with friends and joke and brag about sex because none of you were getting any. This album has it's place.