

Thing-Fish is about an opening night Broadway play. The album cover even promises that it is an "Original Cast Recording" in red over-stamped print. The master of ceremonies is a genetically corrupted mutant who goes by the name of Thing-Fish. Both name and textual references suggest that this character may be based on the Amos & Andy character Kingfish. This Broadway opening night frame is going to be employed to play back to modern bourgeois musical sensibilities, a paean against the desensitizing mediocrity of homogenous, brain-numbing "entertainment”. Against this frame of denied expectations, Thing-Fish promises to deliver something quite else.



Instead of the Central Scrutinizer, the narrator was once a Black inmate at San Quentin who has been poisoned in a bio-social engineering experiment with the AIDS virus. This is Thing-Fish. Whatever did not kill them (several of the surviving "Mammy-Nuns" are in the cast) made them stronger. In Ike Willis' dense over-played dialect, the story unfolds. In Thing-Fish, AIDS is a government sponsored experiment toward a policy to kill the gay and black population. Before unleashing this on the nation at large, however, it is tested at San Quentin by being mixed into some mashed potatoes. The tubers somehow attenuated the toxins and mutated the creatures instead of killing them outright.



The claims of this conspiracy scenario are immense, directly implicating the United States government in genocide. References to the "final solution" and "the white man's burden" invoke the Holocaust and the excesses of Western colonialism, respectively. This is monstrous enough as a mere hypothesis, but there is evidence that Zappa was presenting what he believed may well have been the case. Lest we dismiss this merely as the ranting of a paranoid cynic, it must be mentioned that the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Dr. Wangari Maathai, has also espoused a similar theory. On the very last page of The Real Frank Zappa Book, he claims that Robert Harris and Jeremy Paxman's book, A Higher Form of Killing, contains evidence that a project on race-specific biological weapons and those directed at the immune system has been initiated (Zappa, 1989, 352). That AIDS's initial profile filled this bill, and that it was sexually transmitted may have given Zappa inspiration for other aspects of Thing-Fish.



In Joe's Garage the Zappa's social critique is achieved by showing how the powers-that-be seduce us into apathy, replacing the genuine with the ersatz. The ersatz is geared to cause one to become a politically apathetic consumer, grist for the mill of fascist-totalitarian capitalism. Essentially, this is a theme of both Joe's Garage and Thing Fish



Anyone coming to Zappa's plotted works looking for answers is bound to leave either disappointed or hopelessly confused. Rather, the true value in Zappa's satire is in the questions he raises, encouraging those of his listeners who hear the call to be ever vigilant of the dangers inherent in political power aligned with any and all ideologies.



The Big Laurel Canyon Conspiracy



Everyone loves a good conspiracy theory, right? How about one that exposes Frank Zappa (among others) as being part of a huge undercover operation run by The Military-Industrial Complex™, the goal of which was to infiltrate, and subsequently neutralize the “hippie movement”?



Amira is a hyper cool Canadian chef who travels the world doing her chef thing. The Skeptical Review will soon have an update on what she does and what makes her so damn cool but for now I need to respect her news embargo. So let's just say she's damn cool. Besides being damn cool, she has a damn cool "kitchen sink" conspiracy about the musicians of the hippie generation and how guys like Frank Zappa and David Crosby were CIA stooges in an MKULTRA mind-control op



A few days ago, I was talking to a lady friend of mine and brought up Frank Zappa’s marriage and assumed philandering as a trivial argument against monogamy and for honest promiscuity. I was told that apparently a biography of Frank Zappa actually tells a story of Gail Zappa getting quite angry over some new friend that Frank brought home.



I’m curious why such slanderous thoughts never made their way to any form of print when Frank Zappa died. Surely, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that a jealous and enraged Mrs. Zappa may have waited until Frank was asleep, loaded a syringe full with cancer and then plunged it deep into his prostate without anyone ever being the wiser…

…UNTIL NOW!

edit on 3-2-2012 by isyeye because: (no reason given)



Beginning in 1966 with The Mothers of Invention debut album, Frank Zappa pushed his listeners to ask questions about the world around them. With songs like "Who are the Brain Police?" and "Trouble Every Day" , Frank put his musical talents to work to expose the social, political, religious, and govenmental issues that are problems in the world.Often using satire and humor, Frank incorporated his thoughts on conspiracies in much of his music. Probably the most obvious album dealing with conspiracy matters was Frank's album "Thing-Fish."Another great album that highlighted how the govenment controls what we are thinking is "Joe's Garage."An important thing to realize when veiwing the works of Frank Zappa is the although he may have had a great ability to find and expose social, political, religious, and govenmental corruption, Frank did not have all the answers to the questions that he put to his listeners....He simply ask the questions.With more than 60 albums to Frank's credit, it would be impossible to examine and highlight the meaning of all of his songs here. While many people that just simply know of Frank's work, but have not listened to him, think that his songs are silly or weird, they have not been exposed to the whole of what Frank placed in front of his listeners. Of course, not all of his songs had meanings that can be taken as conspiritorial, but many were, and with hundreds of songs to choose from, almost everyone can find one or two that they enjoy.....and just for an extra dose of conspiracy, there is always this:.....but that's absolutely hilarious when you have spent any time listening to Frank. If he was a part of any undercover operation, I would be more than surprised.And there is also this...I really doubt that, but I have heard several theories that the govenment wanted to "silence his voice" due to his controversial subject matter, his stance on censorship, and the rumors that many wanted Frank to run for POTUS.In closing...my humble thanks to Frank Zappa for exposing me at a young age to the wrongs in society, and to the hidden control of the govenments and religions in the world. Frank was a one of a kind individual, and a one in a million musician, and IMO one of the best that the world had, or will ever see, and the greatest conspiracy theorist in music.