You are what you is

You are what you is

Some people like to put down "You Are What You Is" for its lack of FZ guitar solos, but I've never considered it a drawback. Musically and satirically, this was Zappa's strongest LP in years. The targets of his satire were many, including: Teenage rebellion ("Teen-age Wind,") high-society pretentiousness and snobbery ("Society Pages,") the new wave/punk nightclub scene ("Mudd Club,") Country music ("Harder Than Your Husband," featuring former Mothers of Invention bandmate Jimmy Carl Black on lead vocals) and religion (the three-song suite of "The Meek Shall Inherit Nothing," "Dumb All Over" and "Heavenly Bank Account"). For those who really LISTEN to lyrics, the anti-drug message of "Charlie's Enormous Mouth" is chilling: "She's got dirt all around the hole/Where they dumped her box in/They call it THE GRAVE/Which is as good a place as any for a chump to repose in." Just another O.D. statistic.

As another reviewer has already mentioned, this CD was remastered in 1998. If you have an earlier Rykodisc pressing of this CD, you should definitely upgrade. This isn't some minor improvement only a trained ear would notice--this is night and day. I've compared the old and new Ryko CDs to the original vinyl LP. The remastered CD is faithful to the sound of the LP, with the added dynamic range and clarity of the CD format. By comparison, the earlier Ryko CD sounds TERRIBLE--one of the worst CD mastering jobs I've heard: The EQ (equalization) is completely messed-up, the vocals are out-of-phase on many tracks, there's a bad dropout on "Mudd Club" and there's a low-level background hum through the ENTIRE disc. It's too bad Ryko didn't put a "REMASTERED EDITION" sticker on the shrink wrap of the new disc. Since the outer packaging is unchanged from a 1995 release, you need to buy the disc and open it up to find out if it's the good pressing. The remastered disc is over 69 minutes long and has a notation at the bottom of page 3 of the CD booklet, stating that the CD was remastered in 1998 by Spencer Chrislu.