I’m hippy & I’m trippy, I’m a gypsy on my own
I’ll stay a week & get the crabs & take a bus back home
I’m really just a phony but forgive me ‘cause I’m stoned
-Frank Zappa, “Who Needs the Peace Corps?”
“That album is so full of politics,” says Mikey when I put on “Are You Hung Up?” the first track of Frank Zappa and The Mothers’ We’re Only in it for the Money. The track opens with sexy, psychedelic soft…squivling. There’s no other way to describe it than to invent my own word, because it evokes the squivly nature that the hippie movement had become at that point. Before the album’s release in March of 1968, the promise of liberation in San Francisco had spread like wildfire from the corner of Haight and Ashbury Streets through the deserts and into rural towns and suburbs beyond any imagined political border—by way of post-WWII mass media, and the Interstate System.
The kids were flocking, and it was fashionable. “As the summer of 1967 approached,” wrote Peter Coyote in Sleeping Where I Fall, “[…] the street itself was no longer necessary as the primary staging area for anyone but the Haight merchants” (83). Coyote is telling us that while Zappa was working on We’re Only in it for the Money, the San Francisco counterculture had been reduced to something consumable. It was a thing—narrowly defined by the shops in Haight-Ashbury—to tour and photograph and buy to match “the crabs” you get during your stay. Despite this, We’re Only in it for the Money appeared at the beginning of a monumental year: students had yet to occupy buildings in Columbia, Martin Luther King Jr. was still alive, the Democratic National Convention in Chicago had yet to become the apex of youth frustration with the political process. But none of that mattered yet. Zappa was more concerned with phonies.
Mikey says the album is self-conscious. “It’s all about hippie culture and consumerism,” he yells from his bedroom into the living room, where the album is blaring accusatory lyrics. “Every town must have a place/where phony hippies meet/psychedelic dungeons/popping up on every street,” sings Zappa in a playful tone. It’s criticizing San Francisco. It’s pointing a figure at young white suburbanites from elsewhere, moving west to live in teepees.
And We’re Only in it for the Money as it existed then is still relevant: change the chimes of going to San Francisco instead to Brooklyn, where Indian apparel and its idealized notions of communalism are switched out for vintage novelty items and an unspoken celebration of the same scenario Coyote described as an alternative to corporate, mainstream America. In a November 12 essay in the New York Times Book Review, Mark Greif talks about Pierre Bourdieu, a late French sociologist who “set out to show the social logic of taste: how admiration for art, appreciation of music, even taste in food, came about for different groups, and how ‘superior’ taste was not the result of an enchanted superiority in scattered individuals.” In Greif’s analysis,
This may seem a long way from Wellington-booted and trucker-hatted American youth in gentrifying neighborhoods. But Bourdieu’s innovation, applicable here, was to look beyond the traditional trappings of rich or poor to see battles of symbols (like those boots and hats) traversing all society, reinforcing the class structure just as money did.
We’re Only in it for the Money echoes Bordieu but goes further. Not only is Zappa saying that the counterculture is far from superior to other forms of culture, but it is phony, misguided—just another fad.
Were Frank Zappa recording this album today, I would like to think We’re Only in it for the Money would point fingers at the youth in a changing Northwest Brooklyn and their role in gentrification.
Were Zappa sitting in my apartment now, listening to We’re Only in it for the Money with Mikey and I, he’d probably make fun of himself. I suspect that many of the more obvious features of this album are categorized as a self-reflective elevation. The simultaneously groundbreaking and satirical musical compositions and arrangements on this album put Zappa and The Mothers as supreme court-jesters in a sea of unfunny clowns. On first listen of We’re Only in it for the Money, it becomes apparent quite quickly that Frank Zappa was at least familiar, if not directly involved with San Francisco counterculture as he blends the familiar “Summer of Love” aesthetic with an LSD trip nobody else had ever experienced—or at least Zappa would have us think so. The album is so scathing he makes no reference to the more positive groups and goings-on of the counterculture movement: the Diggers, the San Francisco Mime Troupe, the “Be in” et al.
The vocals—lyrical content and overall sound—do two things. The well-produced (to the point where Mikey thought someone was banging on the ceiling for us to turn the music down) psychedelia of the guitars and filtered vocals are supposed to freak you out, while the lyrics poke fun at you. “Hey, punk, where are you going with that flower in your hand?” it asks on “Flower Punk.” “I’m going up to Frisco to join a psychedelic band,” it answers. It questions the motivations of the youth, of the dream of San Francisco and “turning on, tuning in, and dropping out.” It puts into question the myth of authenticity, where white people are appropriating Native American imagery, what Greif would call the boots and hats. Intermittently, a voice calls out “I’m Jimmy Carl Black and I’m the Indian of the group.” While I don’t believe the album is calling for the abolition of hippie culture, it is warning its participants to be cautious of what they are doing, pointing out the hypocrisies. This puts the counterculture under the lens it uses to view mainstream society, forcing the listener to see things from a distance.
When it does comment on Native American imagery in the counterculture, the portrait is of Haight-Ashbury as site of modern Manifest Destiny. There was no more land to steal, so the descendents of white settlers took a vast Native American culture, and assimilated it into a unitary idea to be pursued as an alternative to the repressive lifestyles the white settlers created for themselves. They re-appropriated the imagery for themselves, and made it something to experience, or more accurately, something to consume. Despite this scathing critique of the counterculture, We’re Only in it for the Money is not an indulgent album: it’s sardonic. It’s meta-commentary, simultaneously poking fun at itself while it calls out everyone else.
In 1968, the youth were frustrated with messages from peaceful protests falling on deaf ears. The sixties had been violent to a point, but in that year and through the next decade, direct action overtook peaceful noncooperation: violent protests, assassinations, arson, bombings, &c. The counter-culturalists began acting out in frustration against a world that did not understand. We’re Only in it for the Money began to point out the problems inherent in this burgeoning youth movement, whether countercultural tourism or a false air of authenticity. Had such an unabashed criticism of the movement itself come from within before? I suppose this is why the album is important, despite its amazing aesthetic value. It blew Mikey’s mind at thirteen (he’s twenty-one now), and is blowing my mind now. I can’t help but feel that people within my own Brooklyn youth culture attempt to create relevant cultural critiques from within all the time, but few are hitting the mark.
