The Audacious Musical Saga of a Misogynist Jock’s Sexual Upending
Ah, the 1970s. For those of us who lived through it, the decade was a swirling kaleidoscope of cultural collision, where the counterculture met the corporate, and the sexual revolution was still settling its accounts. Into this mix strode the singular Frank Zappa, a composer, guitarist, and satirical provocateur whose work was as challenging as it was entertaining. And then came “Bobby Brown (Goes Down)”, a track from his 1979 double album, Sheik Yerbouti, that caused an absolute uproar, especially with its explicitly raunchy lyrics.
What a strange beast this song was. In Zappa’s native United States, the explicit content—detailing the devolution of an “All-American” male chauvinist jock named Bobby Brown into a “sexual spastic” embracing S&M and golden showers—was deemed utterly unsuitable for airplay. It was, in effect, banned from most radio stations, ensuring it was a deep cut for American listeners.
Yet, travel across the Atlantic, and the story shifts entirely. This wildly risqué musical satire became a surprise mega-hit across parts of Europe, achieving a commercial success that must have both amused and perplexed Zappa himself. “Bobby Brown” shot to Number 1 in both Norway and Sweden, reached Number 2 in Austria, and peaked at Number 4 in West Germany. For a twelve-bar blues structure loaded with the kind of language that would make a sailor blush, this was an astonishing chart performance, confirming that Zappa’s brand of absurd, no-holds-barred social commentary resonated profoundly with the continental European audience. He was reportedly so astounded by the Scandinavian success that he suggested his label hire an anthropologist to figure out why.
The story behind the song is pure Zappa. He reportedly wrote it as a response to an encounter with three male journalists who, in the early days of the women’s liberation movement, were performing exaggeratedly “feminist” attitudes solely to impress their girlfriends and, presumably, to get lucky. Zappa viewed this as opportunistic posturing, and Bobby Brown became his fictionalized, cautionary tale of where such inauthenticity might lead. It’s a biting satire, a grotesque caricature of a misogynistic jock—the quintessential American dream gone sour—whose sense of self is utterly destroyed after a sexual encounter with “Freddie,” a powerful, lesbian woman involved in the women’s liberation movement.
The meaning of “Bobby Brown” is multifaceted, though drenched in Zappa’s characteristic cynicism and dark humor. On one level, it’s a brutal satire of the “American Dream” archetype, which Zappa paints as a repulsive cocktail of jock arrogance, sexual entitlement, and moral vacuity (“Oh God, I am the American dream, I do not think I’m too extreme”). On another, it’s a commentary on the unsettling effects of the sexual revolution and the women’s movement on the traditional American male ego. Bobby’s transformation is a comical, albeit shocking, emasculation and subsequent descent into an extreme, and arguably shame-filled, sexual existence, ironically thanking Freddie for his “sexual spastic” state. It challenges the listener by using politically incorrect, shocking language to deliver a message: the old order of male superiority is crumbling, and the fallout is ugly and absurd. It’s Zappa’s high-art low-brow genius at its peak—a crude, hilarious, yet complex piece of socio-sexual commentary set to a deceptively simple tune. It remains one of the most widely recognized, and certainly one of the most controversial, tracks in the vast Frank Zappa catalogue, a nostalgic, albeit politically charged, throwback to the late ’70s.