Arminius:
Freak Out and Absolutely Free were parodies of the sixties psychedelic hippy rock scene, but also a shot at the record industries and the values that were prevalent over the music of that period. Frank was against censorship of any kind… though not for the reasons we might suppose. His attitude during the early Mother’s Of Invention period was two sided; he didn’t want to enter the rock scene (because it was silly and below him), but he had to, to make some money. Nobody was paying composers back then. Pop music and rock was where it was at. So what does he do? He enters the mainstream scene with a card up his sleeve. He will write music of the appropriate genre better than the rest, but at the same time make a mockery of it. A statement is made to the music consumers, music genre, music industry and the dominant values of the time with this one gesture: this is what you are, hippies… this is how simple your music is… this is how cheap your industry is… and this is how lame your values are. He didn’t want to censor these trends… he wanted to indulge them, set them loose, let them play out naturally. He used all this as material to work with in order to show people what they were. He was the master parodist.
This one was a shot at the bands of that era. You see the parody of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper album cover there. It was also a kind of tongue and cheek admittance to his being in the rock music industry for all the wrong reasons. Because this industry was a joke, he felt, he was only in it for the money.
You Are What You Is can be understood independently, but also understood within the context of Thing Fish, the concept rock-opera album of which it was a part. Independently is can be seen as a social critique of consumerism and consumer identities. As part of Thing Fish it is specifically for the purposes of criticizing American negro culture. Note the incorrect grammar; you are what you is.