#2: (That time I wrote 2,500 words about) "Brown Shoes Don't Make It" by the Mothers of Invention
Those of you who know me well are smiling because they know that I am incapable of blogging about my 150 favorite songs without mentioning Frank Zappa.
A slightly off-topic preface: At a party a few months ago, I found myself in a deep conversation with my dear friend A. about how I haven’t been that pleased with my gap year. A. is fond of Ani diFranco and has a bottomless vault of Ani diFranco quotations in his head for any life situation, and so he recited:
“Maybe you don't like your job
Maybe you didn't get enough sleep
Well, nobody likes their job
The worst day of your life
But, you know, there's no escape
So just suck up and be nice”
I replied with a pertinent quote from today’s song:
“BE A LO—YAL—PLAS—TIC—RO—BOT—FOR—A—WORLD—THAT—DOES—N’T—CAAAAAAARE!”
This line cuts to the heart of “Brown Shoes Don’t Make It”, a critique of mainstream society and its adherents; this critique runs through Zappa’s prodigious discography, especially during the Mothers of Invention era.
(NOTE: I am doing this song a disservice by isolating it from the context of the “M.O.I. American Pageant” suite on side two of the Absolutely Free LP (1967) for the purposes of analysis. To this I will merely say that I promise to analyze the rest of the suite, which is equally engaging, as one “song” at a later date.)
Despite the fact that I do not agree with everything he did (this parenthetical was going to be a laundry list of things he did that I am not a fan of before I realized I lacked the space), Frank Zappa is one of the most intellectually challenging and engaging composers that I have encountered in my meager twenty-two years of existence. His work has touched me (Been In Me, might we say?) and will always have a place in my heart. “Brown Shoes” to me is a microcosm of everything I love, do not love and feel guilty about loving about this man—notoriously, at the core of this song is a rather vivid description of hebephilia/child molestation (see how I worked a trigger warning in there? so clever).
His secretary during that era, Pauline Butcher, questioned this aspect of “Brown Shoes” after being made to transcribe the lyrics of Absolutely Free for a mail-order libretto as her first assignment. As related in her memoir, Freak Out!: My Life with Frank Zappa, a book which I highly recommend, he begins to rationalize the entire album, track by track, as Butcher jots down his words in shorthand. According to Butcher, he offers this explanation: “‘“Brown Shoes Don’t Make It” is a song about the unfortunate people who manufacture inequitable laws and ordinances, perhaps unaware of the fact that the restrictions they place on the young people in a society are the result of their own sexual frustrations. Dirty old men have no business running your country.’” (p.22) A textbook example of Zappa’s curious ideas about various aspects of society, which he would collate into The Real Frank Zappa Book around twenty years later.
“Brown Shoes” begins with a bluesy rock romp somewhat reminiscent of “Why Don’t’cha Do Me Right?”, a song recorded in the same period and unceremoniously dropped between the two sides of the album in the CD reissue. I will admit that I have no idea what they mean when they begin to sing “Brown shoes don’t make it!” The other line in this section, “Quit school! Why fake it?” is pretty self-explanatory, falling into place with Zappa’s well-known stance on formal education, as laid out in the liner notes for the first Mothers of Invention album, Freak Out! (1966): “Drop out of school before your mind rots from exposure to our mediocre educational system. Forget about the Senior Prom and go to the library and educate yourself if you've got any guts. Some of you like Pep rallies and plastic robots who tell you what to read…”
There is then a quick transition to the next section. In order to properly describe what is going on musically, I will cite the heroic Kasper Sloot, whose remarkably extensive documentation of Zappa’s every musical move can be found on http://www.zappa-analysis.com. Thank you, Mr. Sloot. He describes this next section thusly: “The riff changes overnight into a section with straight rhythms in a 4/4 movement. It starts with a sequence that is chromatically repeated instead of within a key. Thus the key changes with every bar using a different scale…The scales, when taken as major, are in following order C, D flat, C, B flat and A.” Despite this relative complexity, enhanced by the roleplay seen in the varying voices of each Mother, the lines are innocently straightforward in their simple trochaic structure, giving a fragmented description of the life of a young member of mainstream society: “TV dinner by the pool” – dining on that iconic symbol of convenience and mass consumption while enjoying the centerpiece of a bourgeois suburban household; “Watch your brother grow a beard” – passively observing the impact of contemporary counterculture while remaining unaffected by it; “Got another year of school” – better to pay attention to your own priorities; “You’re okay, he’s too weird” – again, stubbornly remaining unaffected by the counterculture. Before I go on to the plumber bit, I just realized that this is a sort of call-and-response quatrain with an A-B-A-B rhyme scheme, and each A line reflects life in mainstream society and each B line reflects mainstream society’s removal from the counterculture and insistence on normalcy, the same insistence on normalcy that will lead our protagonist down depraved paths.
At any rate, then comes a couplet marked by its boneheaded internal rhyme, both giving society’s expectations and once again singling out the bearded brother for criticism: “Be a plumber, he’s a bummer/He’s a bummer every summer”. This couplet builds up to the vehemently plaintive line that I quoted at the beginning of this post: “Be a loyal plastic robot for a world that doesn’t care.” The didactic tone continues but with an added tinge of frivolity, in the jingle-like “Smile at every ugly!” (mockingly echoed by the accompaniment in a different key) followed by “Shine on your shoes and cut your hair!”, which ends the second section. I doubt that the similarity of the melody of this line to the ending of the Looney Tunes theme is at all coincidental; it highlights the Mothers’ disdain for conformity.
We re-enter the bluesy-rocky bit, where our protagonist embarks on adulthood after shining on his shoes and cutting his hair. Societal expectations take the form of blunt call-and-response chants, here in a caricatured working-class New York accent (it is worth noting that Zappa by contrast was based in southern California), conveying the bustle of a large city filled with busy people: “Be a joik! (Go to woik!)…Do your job and do it right!” The emptiness of such a life is evident in the irony of “Life’s a ball! TV tonight!” and the fatalism of “Do ya love it, do ya hate it, there it is, the way you made it.” The section ends with a “Waaaaaaaahhhhh” and an elaborate boom-crash before the next section.
This section is nightmarish. The music slows into an ominous 3/4 piano with a minimal guitar riff as we are re-introduced to the protagonist as the pervy politician. The Mothers take up the role of a Greek chorus, singing the exposition with dour theatricality: “A world of secret hungers/Perverting the men who make your laws/Every desire is hidden away/In a drawer, in a desk by a Naugahyde chair/On a rug where they walk…and drool! Past the girls in the office!” Sloot points out that this passage gets more and more atonal. I would say that this reflects how animal-like these politicians and their desires are beneath their shined shoes and cut hair, as does the next passage of foul-sounding, flatulent panting.
This panting brings us to a case study of “the back of the City Hall mind”, accompanied by a sparse, tense orchestral bit which Sloot helpfully characterizes as an “intermezzo”. And what is in the back of the City Hall mind? “A dream…of a girl…about…thirteen!” The stakes have been raised – the mention of the “girls in the office” has up to this point led us to believe that the objects of these politicians’ lust are their secretaries, who would be at least in their late teens. But instead we have launched right into the sex offender theme in more graphic terms – “Off with her clothes and into a bed” – and even more graphic terms, sung in a deranged voice: “where she tickles his fancy all night long”.
I am now somewhat uncomfortable analyzing this song in the context of a blog about my favorite songs. Perhaps there is a difference between being fascinated by a song and the song being your favorite. While I take a break, as a side note it is worth mentioning that coincidentally one of the Mothers at the time of Absolutely Free, Roy Estrada, is currently serving a lengthy prison sentence for child molestation that is not even his first conviction. As another side note, we can draw a parallel between how Zappa here uses shocking images of child molestation to attack moralizing politicians and how Zappa elsewhere uses shocking images of rape to attack American ideals of masculinity (“Would you go all the way for the USO? Lift up your dress if the answer is no.”)
I think I’m ready to continue. So there is this lazy, foot-dragging swingy section where in a nasal monotone our Greek chorus explains: “His wife’s attending an orchid show. She squealed for a week to get him to go.” A saxophone mimes the wife’s squealing with a protracted yelp. And then, in a lighter tone, reflecting the husband’s bliss at having opted out – “But back in the bed, his teenage queen” – a honeyed strings section sets a romantic scene – “is rocking and rolling and acting obscene!” We then hear a one-dimensional, pantomimic aural representation of sex, a feminine voice chanting “Baby! Baby!” followed by a faster version of the flatulent panting heard earlier, then again “Baby! Baby!”, then again flatulent panting. The girl, being coerced into the act with the help of the politician’s age and authority, robotically enacts her role as “lover”, calling him “baby” while experiencing no pleasure; the politician, meanwhile, is enjoying himself like the animal he is.
The panting continues before another transition to a little starry-eyed doo-wop bit that spares no irony. This is first made clear in the first few lines, where the romantic medium of doo-wop is used to call attention to the animalistic, physical reactions of this man’s unappealing body: “Oh, he loves it, he loves it, it curls up his toes/She bites his fat neck and it lights up his nose”. I wonder if the next line, “But he cannot be fooled, old City Hall Fred” might mean that she is trying to hurt him to get away but he is interpreting her bites as erotic? And then the foul “She’s nasty, she’s nasty, she digs it in bed.” Then another one of these intermezzo things, where trumpets blast out some sort of twisted fanfare, before a disconcertingly sentimental lounge bit on the piano: “Do it again, and do it some more/That does it, by golly/It’s nasty for sure/Nasty, nasty, nasty”. And, again reminding us that she is thirteen, you can almost see the vile City Hall Fred wiping a proud tear as he enthuses “Only thirteen, and she knows how to nasty.” The Greek chorus joins in as the upbeat melody continues, taking up City Hall Fred’s viewpoint that the decidedly underage girl is simply “A dirty young mind, corrupt and corroded! Well she’s thirteen today, and I hear she gets loaded!” City Hall Fred seems to approve with complacent humming in the background.
The next section is one of the most disturbing, so I am going to go get a snack and think about puppies and rainbows and collect my thoughts. So it gets sparse and nightmarish again, this time with weird synthy noises. “If she were my daughter, I’d uh…” someone, presumably Fred, intones, decisively at first before trailing off. The stakes are raised again when the voice of an even younger girl (I read somewhere that the daughter of Zappa’s manager Herb Cohen did the voice at seven) responds “What would you do, Daddy?” He repeats “If she were my daughter, I’d…” a few more times, and each time he repeats it he disconcertingly seems to warm up more and more to the idea of molesting his own daughter. Meanwhile, the same innocent “What would you do, Daddy?”
And then the Greek chorus launches right into a blithe swing ditty that is also most troubling section of the song: “Smother my daughter in chocolate syrup and strap her on again, oh baby! Smother that girl in chocolate syrup and strap her on again! She’s a teenage baby, and she turns me on! I’d like to make her do a nasty on the White House lawn! Gonna smother my daughter in chocolate syrup and boogie till the cows come home!” I confess that I have often gigglecringed at this part because it is so terrible and so well-executed – we think the worst possible line has been crossed with such a vivid depiction of a grave sexual taboo and that this is as far as “Brown Shoes” will venture, and that incest would give our legislator pause. But no, our pervy politician is willing to commit underage incest and is into food kink and would commit underage incest in public at the seat of the United States government.
It is here that we are called back to reality from these unnerving scenes with a slow, bare-bones lounge tune sung by a single voice: “Time to go home, Madge [a name often used in Zappa’s work for frumpy wives; see the Zappa Wiki Jawaka entry] is on the phone.” And, as if he were the choragos of this piece, our Greek chorus clarifies: “Gotta meet the Gurneys and a dozen grey attorneys.” Of course. Then the motif of “TV dinner by the pool” returns, this time rhymed with “I’m so glad I finished school.” This represents a regression to the desires of the suburban kid who didn’t want to be like his bearded weirdo brother. This suburban kid is now self-actualized as a powerful adult, abominable sexual preferences and all, and however much these politicians might be “dirty old men” who “have no business running your country”:
Then that frenzied 5/8 coda before the album closes out with “America Drinks and Goes Home”.
You know, I thought yesterday that doing a song as simple as “52 Girls” was like squeezing blood from stones and that doing a Zappa piece would give me more to comment on, but it just gave me the opposite problem. If I’m not still fatigued tomorrow, I will do a simpler song for #3.
