HOOKERS - "What You Need" (Cold Crush mp3 download)

Begins with a nasal male voice (think Gordon Gano without the poise) saying, "Some kinds of hookers give you what you want. We're the kind of hookers that give you what you NEED...

"And what you need is rock'n'roll!"

I may not have gotten rock'n'roll, but now I have 4 more megabytes free on my hard drive... could be worse...

FRANK ZAPPA - Sheik Yerbouti (Ryko) +2 listens

I get the impression that Zappa essentially bought Freud's description of sexual development but thought it only applied to stupid people -- fetishes and the subconscious are all over his work, almost exclusively as objects of contempt. Even the good songs on this record feel like they would have sucked if not saved by Zappa's arrangements; his motivations stray too far into the petty.

Interesting part: I ought to loathe "Bobby Brown Goes Down" (dull arrangement, "satirical" lyrics deriding effeminate men) and yet I think it's a good example of Zappa doing something right he could just as easily have blown... the first time around, the chorus is as lame and obvious as mockery gets, with Bobby talking about how great he is as the music swells. On repetition, though, the first line ("Oh God I am the American dream") proves multivalent and one gets the sense that instead of jamming a "comedy" routine into song format, Zappa wrote something whose narrative structure involved coming back to a refrain.

I haven't figured out how his venom for women and gay men (or rather, straight men who acquire gay desires) fits into his convincing enthusiasm for personal freedom and freakery; I imagine I'm reading some, if not all, of the lyrics on these topics incorrectly.