Here's one that's nod (if not outright shout-out) to my young high school self, although I hasten to say that it came along a few years before I was actually in high school. But the spooky paranoia and ham-handed production effects, with the obvious themes of big-brotherist issues, suited my point of view well at the time, one of those things I hoped I would always remember as a grown-up. I forget most of the rest now. It's from Zappa's auspicious debut with the Mothers of Invention, the double-LP Freak Out, which basically signaled all the elements that were to come of his entire career: the mordant wit, the humanist intellect, the compositional experimentation, the musical chops, and, of course, the belching and farting noises. And actually, if I'm going to be honest about it, I miss all the clichés and received wisdom on display here—"plastic" as perhaps the most devastating insult imaginable, deeply grounded resentment at corporate as well as government attempts to control intellectual honesty, and a willingness to let the vectors go erratic and the mix sloppy in emulation of vertical levels of chaos. I'm pretty sure the clichés and received wisdom of our current age are far more pernicious and feeble: the vapid tightness of cool, economic bootstrapping as viable strategy for improvement to character, material wealth as the unmistakable sign of God's grace, "government is the problem not the solution." You know what I'm talking about. Sometimes Frank Zappa's death in 1993 starts to look like Hunter Thompson's in 2005, a bad sign that times just got worse in ways we never could have imagined previously. But now I'm getting sentimental.
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