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:
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“To aim to convert a man by miracles is a profanation of the soul. A true conversion, a true Christ, is now, as always, to be made by the reception of beautiful sentiments.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“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)