Talk:The Radio Is Broken

An interesting thing about this song is the recurrence of the 'My Sharona' bass lick, in this case, the instrumental interlude with the fast guitar lick, e.g. underneath the lyric 'SPACE WARP'). This lick assumes a kind of a serial nature on the album; it's also on 'Tink Walks Amok', which on the original album came just before 'The Radio is Broken'. I also heard a rehearsal tape somewhere that had a very elaborate. atonal sort of loop melody, the basis of which is that 'Sharona' lick. It sounded like a variant of 'The Radio is Broken'.

Problem number 734...

it's also on 'Tink Walks Amok', which on the original album came just before 'The Radio is Broken'.

Having split things down to song titles we have painted ourselves into a corner and we do not have a satisfactory way to present the variations, interpretations and cross referencing that Zappa used. Some may say that we just keep expanding by adding articles and categories but that mostly adds to the hundreds of dead end/orphaned pages that are of little value to anyone.

So how do we tie all this together in coherent readable articles?

Duncan (talk) 00:41, 27 November 2020 (PST)

I don't see any way to organize this other than in our minds, although an essay on the topic would be good. But this is something Zappa did all the time - a theme would recur serially but often so subtly that you don't notice it. This was especially effective in this case when the two songs were adjacent, but Zappa himself changed the sequence, so..whatever (he also sabotaged touches like this frequently, but with the assumption that the listener would remember both versions - for example, 'Little Umbrellas'). I thought it was worth mentioning, since I didn't see that anyone else had spotted it. There are lots of other examples, but the fact that it's 'My Sharona' makes it particularly hilarious.