Frank Zappa, the composer and bandleader who never fit a single genre, released Them or Us on October 18, 1984. The album arrived on his own label, Barking Pumpkin Records, and it was not a simple studio project. Zappa had recorded material for it between November 1981 and June 1984, and he mixed hard rock, progressive rock, comedy rock and doo-wop into a seventy-three-minute package that pulled from both the stage and the tape vault. The album runs seventy-three minutes and was recorded at Zappa's Utility Muffin Research Kitchen studio. Zappa produced the record himself.
Borrowed bookends and studio overdubs
The record opens with 'The Closer You Are', a song Zappa did not write. Earl Lewis and Morgan Robinson composed it for the doo-wop group The Channels, and Zappa turned it into the album's first statement. The record closes with 'Whipping Post', a cover of an Allman Brothers Band song written by Gregg Allman. Between those borrowed bookends, Zappa built a strange bridge of live recordings and studio overdubs.
Many tracks on Them or Us began as concert tapes, but Zappa added layers of studio work on top of them. The album's liner notes never mentioned those overdubs, so a listener had no way to know what was live and what was manufactured. That blurring was the point: Zappa treated a concert recording as raw material, not a document.
That blurring was the point: Zappa treated a concert recording as raw material, not a document.
Backwards vocals and recycled fragments
The clearest example of that method is 'Ya Hozna'. The song uses vocal parts played backwards, and those reversed voices come from 'Sofa No. 2' on Zappa's 1975 album One Size Fits All. The track also includes fragments of 'Lonely Little Girl' from We're Only in It for the Money, released in 1968. Zappa was pulling pieces of his own past into a new collage, decades after those original recordings. The track 'Planet of My Dreams' came from the score of Zappa's unproduced 1972 musical Hunchentoot. Other numbers from that project later appeared on the 1991 CD reissue of Sleep Dirt.
Them or Us also took aim at the music industry around it. 'Be in My Video' mocks the visual clichés of music videos, and it specifically parodies David Bowie's 1983 hit 'Let's Dance'. Zappa saw the video boom as a formula, and he wrote a song that poked at its most predictable images while the format was still new.
A distribution deal with EMI
The album's release had a complicated backstory. Zappa's previous record, Thing-Fish, ran into trouble when MCA Records refused to distribute it. He then made a deal with EMI Records, and under that arrangement both Them or Us and Thing-Fish reached American stores through Capitol Records. Zappa did not treat the deal as a chance to play it safe.
Instead, he printed a warning on the inner sleeves of both albums. The warning said the records contained material that 'a truly free society would not fear or suppress'. It also offered a 'guarantee' that the lyrics would not cause eternal torment 'in a place run by a guy with horns and a pointed stick'. Zappa put that message on the packaging itself, turning a distribution setback into a declaration.
The same warning appeared on Frank Zappa Meets the Mothers of Prevention in 1985. The album is a strange object: a record built from live tapes, backwards vocals, borrowed doo-wop, and a parody of a David Bowie video, all wrapped in a sleeve that told the buyer exactly where Zappa stood.
Forty-two years after its release, Them or Us still sounds like a single artist refusing to separate his concert work from his studio experiments, his comedy from his politics. It opens with a doo-wop love song and closes with a southern rock anthem, and in between it plays tapes backwards and mocks the newest format in pop music. That is the record Zappa made when a major label turned him away.