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We're Only in It for the Money is the third album by American rock band the Mothers of Invention, released on March 4, 1968, by Verve Records. As with the band's first two LP's, it is a concept album, written and composed by bandleader and guitarist Frank Zappa. The album satirizes left- and right-wing politics, the 1960s counterculture, the corporatization of rock music and youth culture, particularly the hippie subculture, as well as general American culture and society. It was conceived as part of a project called No Commercial Potential, which produced three other albums: Lumpy Gravy, Cruising with Ruben & the Jets, and Uncle Meat.
The album's originally intended cover artwork was arranged by Cal Schenkel and Jerry Schatzberg as a parody of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The photoshoot was financed by Zappa and featured Jimi Hendrix. However, Verve decided to package the album with the parody cover as interior artwork, with the original interior artwork (which parodied Sgt. Pepper's interior gatefold art) as the main sleeve out of fear of legal action. The original intended main sleeve artwork was later featured on the front cover of subsequent releases. Artists such as Eric Clapton, Rod Stewart and Tim Buckley would contribute to the recording sessions of the album.
We're Only in It for the Money encompasses experimental music and psychedelic rock, with orchestral segments taken from the recording sessions for Zappa's Lumpy Gravy, which had previously been issued by Capitol Records as a solo instrumental album in 1967. MGM claimed that Zappa was under contractual obligation to record for them and withdrew the album. Subsequently, Zappa re-edited Lumpy Gravy, releasing a drastically different version on Verve in 1968, produced simultaneously with We're Only in It for the Money. The album is the first "phase" of a conceptual continuity, which continued with the reedited Lumpy Gravy and concluded with Zappa's final album Civilization Phaze III (1994).
The album was unexpectedly embraced by the hippie subculture it criticized, peaking at number 30 on the Billboard 200, the highest position of any Mothers album. In August 1987, Rolling Stone ranked it number 77 on their article, "The Top 100: The Best Albums of the Last Twenty Years", and number 297 on their 2015 list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. It was also placed at number 343 in the third edition of Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums (2000) and is featured in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die along with their 1966 debut album Freak Out!.
In 2005, We're Only in It for the Money was selected for preservation in the National Recording Registry by the United States' Library of Congress, who deemed it "culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant" and "a scathing satire on hippiedom and America's reactions to it".
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