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)
“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)
“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)