The songs are as sparky and charged as anything Zappa wrote, although the album flirts with racism in its portrayal of the Black victims, monstrous in appearance and speaking in caricature negro parlance. The concept album Thing-Fish ( 1984) concerns Mutants created by a Tuskegee-like secret government experiment, and was originally intended as a Broadway show.

Joe's Garage ( 1978) is a sprawling rock opera that has a good deal of knockabout fun with L Ron Hubbard's Scientology religion – on the album these become L Ron Hoover and the 'First Church of Appliantology' in which adherents are taught how to have Sex with domestic machines like toasters and dishwashers. Zappa was always happiest juxtaposing avant-garde classical, experimental, chart-pop and popular culture more generally, as in his extended jazz-fusion 'King Kong' (on Uncle Meat, 1969), a version, obviously, of King Kong. Of Zappa's seventy-five albums (many credited to 'Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention') some include references to Pulp-magazine heroics and monstrosities that are recognizably sf. (1940-1993) US composer, singer and guitarist.

Zappa rock opera