Who Are The Brain Police? Lyrics

Lyric discussion by kevin11827 

Cover art for Who Are The Brain Police? lyrics by Frank Zappa

Zappa said in reference to it: "A lot of people police their own brains. They're like citizen soldiers, so to speak. I've seen people who will willingly arrest, try and punish their own brains. Now that's really sad. That's vigilante brain policism. It's not even official, it's like self-imposed. ... It's hard to pin it down to one central agency when you realize that so many people are willing to do it to themselves. I mean, the people who want to become amateur brain police, their numbers grow every day – people who say to themselves, 'I couldn't possibly consider that', and then spank themselves for even getting that far. So, you don't even need to blame it on a central brain police agency. You've got plenty of people who willingly subject themselves to this self-mutilation." I think he uses plastic and chrome/chromium to mean both what we generally think of as being solid(ly) (chrome) real or reasonable and what we feel is more pliable or we're less sure about (plastic) is all 'melted', meaning we've lost the ability to stand on or accept our own ideas or convictions we've come to through perfectly logical reasoning if it sounds too controversial or may be outside the box of what polite society thinks.

[Edit: I wanted to clarify my point.]

Negative
Subjective
Sadness
Self-policing
Conformity
Self-censorship
Vigilantism
Mental Control