10 Concept Albums That Make Absolutely No Sense
9. Thing Fish - Frank Zappa
No one is really expecting everything to make all that much sense when going into a Frank Zappa record. Across his entire discography, Zappa has practically made a career of things not making sense, whether it's the weird eccentricities of Freak Out! or the jazz rock stylings of Hot Rats. Insanity might be the name of the game, but you're really starting to push it on Thing Fish.
The most polarizing part of this album is that...well...it's not supposed to be an album. Written around a story structure, Zappa's original vision for this story was fashioned as a play, where this deplorable main character tries to find a chemical that will eradicate all other races and homosexuals from the world. As it stands though, the random pieces of dialogue interspersed with the jolts of instrumentation feels incredibly disjointed when playing off of each other.
While you can gawk at it and even appreciate some of the tongue in cheek humor of the whole project, this long journey will just make you wonder what the hell influence Zappa was under to even get something like this off the ground. Compared to the incredibly high benchmark of weird he already set for himself, Thing-Fish is so off the wall and insane that it oddly almost deserved kudos from the Zappa faithful.