Andrew Hickey
speaker
2,253 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 3 Sep
Andrew Hickey’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.
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A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs · Song 185: “Peaches En Regalia” by Frank Zappa · 21 Jul 2026
podcast
He would also write a lot of material with literally meaningless lyrics, and whimsical story songs about talking mountains and smelly feet.
Rather later, in the 80s, he would also make a lot of political attacks at the religious right.
But in general, for someone with a reputation as a satirist, Zappa was not very interested in the kinds of topics that most people associate with satire.
But this album was different.
Where Only In It For The Money set its sights on two very different but interlinked targets.
These days, what stands out the most is the attack on the hippie movement in San Francisco, people for whom Zappa had little but contempt, seeing them as people who could have chosen to change the world, but instead sat around in their own filth, taking drugs that were destroying their minds, listening to terrible music, and thinking that they were doing something important by doing so.
Deciding to mock the hippies would seem to fit Zappa's normal mode of attacking youth subcultures as they came along.
But other songs were about the authoritarian right who were prominent in Californian politics at the time.
People like Ronald Reagan, the then governor.
And they're far closer to the anger of a track like Trouble Every Day from Freakout.
You only have to listen to Concentration Moon to hear the real anger in the song.
Frank Zappa had a complicated set of political views, and for most of his life he was pragmatically a Democrat, though he supported mostly libertarian political standpoints, and was quoted as saying he might have preferred to vote Republican if you could remove the pernicious influence of the religious right.
Reading his autobiography, and listening to his later work, he seems to have had a tendency to a conspiracist worldview, and he talks about the possibility that AIDS was a bioweapon engineered to eliminate minority populations.
Nobody, of course, can know what he would think about the world today, and the political landscape has shifted a lot since his death, but his positions were all over the political map, as, truth be told, are those of most intelligent people for whom politics is not a primary interest, which it only tended to be for Zappa when it affected his own work.
But that conspiracist tendency actually does him a favour when he's looking at the way the culture was changing in the late 60s.
Many of the specific things Zappa is writing about in the album –
things like rumours that concentration camps were being built in California to round up all the hippies, are paranoid nonsense.
Given that, though, it's all the more notable that a song like Mom and Dad was written three years before the Kent State Massacre.
As the saying goes, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you.
There's a fair bit of confusion about the credits for We're Only In It For The Money.
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