Frank Zappa: Broadway The Hard Way: Live 1988

The tracks on this live album are from Frank Zappa's 1988 world tour. Zappa's crude comedy side is represented here by (then new) spicy songs like "Dickie's Such An Asshole", "Jesus Thinks You're a Jerk" and "Why Don't You Like Me", on which Zappa cynically and sarcastically castigates Ronald Reagan, mocks U.S. televangelists like Tammy Faye Bakker and also takes aim at the "King of Pop": Michael Jackson Michael Jackson. The "American way of life" is for him the "American way of death". Two cover versions make the album interesting, especially the one of the Police song "Murder By Numbers", on which Sting himself sings the lead vocals, next to a version of the jazz standard "Stolen Moments". In addition to recycled material from his own pen, the accomplished improviser Frank Zappa loosens up the pieces of "Broadway the Hard Way" with an inexhaustible number of musical quotations from "La Cucaracha" to "Strawberry Fields Forever", via waltzes, vaudeville, rap and TV melodies - the maestro effortlessly shakes a few things up his sleeve.