Frank Zappa Have I Offended Someone? CD

Recorded between 1973 and 1985. Includes liner notes by Edward Sanders.
Personnel: Peter Wolf (keyboards).
Liner Note Author: Ed Sanders.
As the title suggests, Have I Offended Someone? contains all of Zappa's notoriously tasteless parodies and satires, from "Bobby Brown Goes Down," "Catholic Girls," and "Jewish Princess" to "He's So Gay," "Titties 'n Beer," and "Dinah-Moe Humm." Nearly all of the tracks are presented in new remixed versions, and two songs, "Dumb All Over" and "Tinsel Town Rebellion," have never been released before. Tinkering with the sound of the songs doesn't change their impact at all -- this is the material that made Zappa into an adolescent favorite during the late '70s and early '80s and, in a sense, that makes Have I Offended Someone? a best-of collection, even though only "Valley Girl" was a hit. In other words, for some Zappa fans, this collection is everything they loved about him, and for most of his detractors, it's everything they always hated about him. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine
This collection celebrates Frank Zappa, the cultural fly-in-the-ointment. It was assembled by the man himself in the last years of his life. The lyrics take on everything from Christians to Jews, and from record company executives to feminists. While raising hackles was often the end result with the dropping of these numbers onto the cultural landscape, Zappa's motivations were to point out hypocrisies and to prick over-inflated senses of self-importance. He preferred to separate fashion from true public needs (let's recall that in the '60s Zappa was one of the first to poke fun at the hippie movement, a strata it was perceived he was a part of).
The accompanying liner notes are by Ed Sanders, founder of The Fugs and no stranger to controversy himself. He concludes by saying, "... we need a few Frank Zappas each generation to stand up for freedom against the torches."Q (5/97, p.144) - 3 Stars (out of 5) - "Compiled by Zappa shortly before his death in 1993, this provides fresh and alternate versions of a series of Zappa classics..."