200 Motels: Original MGM Motion Picture Soundtrack [Enhanced CD]
Searching for this missing piece of the Frank Zappa catalog helped Rykodisc secure the rights to the United Artists and post-1985 MGM film libraries. But200 Motelsalso serves as a good introduction to the late rock icon/avant-garde composer's absurd view of his world; i.e., the pop music business.Essentially a filmed dadaist opera (the bulk of the music is performed live as the video cameras rolled,200 Motelsincorporates sporadic patches of Mothers of Inventions rock into the atonal, largely European, musical framework that Zappa was clearly more interested in. He shrewdly used contemporary pop merely as a marketing shill for the complex, often difficult, music that drove him. (For a taste of the film's uniquely skewed artistic sense, Ryko has included the original200 Motelstheatrical trailer as part of this set's enhanced-CD bonus material).As always, the Zappa of200 Motelssometimes confuses the profound with the obscene, but with every passing year, he seems more likely to take his place alongside the great American modernist Charles Ives, another composer whose work was every bit as commercially troubled and artistically misunderstood.--Jerry McCulley