The Mothers of Invention and "Uncle Meat": Alienation, Anachronism and a Double Variation

From Lumpy Gravy to Civilization Phaze III: The Story of Frank Zappa's Disenchantment

“… 32 Two other published studies of Zappa's early work, while not disregarding its modernist/avant-garde qualities, nevertheless assert that Zappa thought about form in ways that are susceptible to analysis in terms of traditional (or “standard”) formal classifications: Borders, “Form and the Concept Album”; and James Grier, “The Mothers of Invention and Uncle Meat: Alienation, Anachronism, and a Double Variation,” Acta Musicologica 73 (2001): 77–95. Certainly, in Uncle Meat the existence of tracks called “The Dog Breath Variations” and “The Uncle Meat Variations”—along with the “Prelude to King Kong” that is eventually followed by a full-blown presentation of “King Kong,” in several linked renditions that take up an entire LP side—makes plausible a general analogy to variation as practiced in Western music of earlier centuries.…”