It's crazy how prescient, how aware Frank was of his position on the American musical landscape. He decides to raise a little money to finance some of his more challenging, more interesting projects and, like a flipping a switch, he produces Overnight Sensation, and - Cha Ching - the cash rolls in! Cynical extremists fault this album's obviously calculated posture, but they refuse to acknowledge that even the most gifted artists are able to surpass their own intentions. There's nothing here that you could accuse of pandering to a less sophisticated audience. No one can honestly call any of these tunes pop. It's not just a respectable Zappa specimen, but it's also a marvelously compact, terrifically potent distillation of so many of his greatest concepts and impulses. It plays like a whirlwind tour of Zappa-land, featuring succinct samples of his irrepressible humor, his compositional ingenuity, his guitar wizardry, and his ambitious - quixotic - conceptual integrity. Dinah-Moe Humm is hardly radio friendly. And Montana is so subtly sarcastic that it could not help but confuse the masses. I'm the Slime is so viciously contemptuous of mass entertainment, who would pay for it? No song here is anything like common, crass or corny. Yet the album sold quite well, Frank got his roll, and thankfully some more absurd, brilliant, unique projects were subsidized. These are not minor, deficient, inconsequential commercial trinkets. They are succulent nuggets of Zappa's masterful madness. It's all part of his ongoing continuity.