Reception
Initially, the album was met with mixed reviews, due to the controversy of its lyrical content. The album remains a cult favorite among Zappa fans to this day. According to Zappa (cited from several interviews) the song "Bobby Brown" was so popular in Norway that it was a #1 hit on the Norse radio charts (for a multitude of weeks), and Sheik Yerbouti and Zappa were voted album and artist of the year there in 1979. Zappa was reportedly so astounded by its success, that he hired a sociologist to study why the song became such a big hit in Norway.
Read more about this topic: Sheik Yerbouti
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“He’s leaving Germany by special request of the Nazi government. First he sends a dispatch about Danzig and how 10,000 German tourists are pouring into the city every day with butterfly nets in their hands and submachine guns in their knapsacks. They warn him right then. What does he do next? Goes to a reception at von Ribbentropf’s and keeps yelling for gefilte fish!”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)
“Aesthetic emotion puts man in a state favorable to the reception of erotic emotion.... Art is the accomplice of love. Take love away and there is no longer art.”
—Rémy De Gourmont (1858–1915)