Cheap Foreigner (Music) (Cat Stevens) Price

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This fact is why not many consider this to be one of Cat's better albums.

I beg to differ. While it is not his "best", its creativity and instumentation, and different-ness make it very unique and worthy of repeated listenings.

Obvious highlight: the title track - with it's many tempos/moods. Other highlighs include: Hurt, and 100 I Dream.

Bottom line: get this after his more popular albums Tea For The Tillerman, Teaser & The Firecat, Mona Bone Jakon, and Catch Bull At Four.

Not his best work
I guess quite a few Cat Stevens fans got excited when this album was released, but I wasn't one of them. I can't give it fewer than four stars, just because it's Cat Stevens and for its time (and its place in his career) it's rather daringly experimental. But it's not one of my favorites.

For one thing, "Foreigner Suite" itself seems to me to be much ado about nothing. My reaction, then and now, was about what it was to Jethro Tull's _Thick as a Brick_: hmm, this is interesting, I guess.

For another, the four shorter songs are mostly unremarkable. Three of them just sit there. The best of the four, "The Hurt," would have been better if it had been better produced, but it's always sounded to me as though the instruments are out of tune with one another.

Paul Samwell-Smith would never have allowed that to happen. But Cat produced this one himself, and I think his production was far less successful than on the later _Numbers_.

Cat completists (of whom I am one) will want this one, and it _is_ worth listening to. But to my own mind, it seems to be much overrated and too self-consciously "progressive."

Now here's a little history for the uninitiated:

"Cat Stevens" was the stage name of Steven Georgiou, who was born in the U.K. in 1948 of a Cypriot father and a Swedish mother. Something of a musical prodigy, he released his first two albums well before he was twenty years old and was on his way to becoming a "pop star." He then fell victim to a terrible case of tuberculosis. When he returned to singing and songwriting, he had taken a decidedly more reflective turn and found himself delivering absolutely beautiful stuff with no apparent commercial potential. That was fine with him; he was no longer particularly interested in commercial success. But, perhaps ironically, his delicate confessional songs and his deliberate avoidance of "commercial-ness" turned him into a huge international star.

Well, he eventually (1977) became a Muslim and adopted the name "Yusuf Islam" (after the biblical dream-interpreter Joseph). At about that time he also left the music industry. He has since recorded a couple of albums about Islam, but his last collection of commercial music was _Footsteps In The Dark_ (ostensibly a second volume of his "greatest hits," but in fact a set of lesser-known favorites and a handful of tunes not available elsewhere).

You can feel safe in ignoring the comments from people who think he has become "rigid" and/or "intolerant." The simple fact is that nearly every Cat Stevens album (the exceptions being his first two) is filled with "spiritual seeking," and he eventually found what he was looking for in Islam. His "recent" (actually, 1989-90) remarks on Salman Rushdie were not what you probably think they were (and in particular he didn't call for Rushdie's death). He's no more "rigid" or "intolerant" than the rest of us; he's simply a religiously observant Muslim, that's all. There's a problem here only for people who think seekers should never get around to finding, or that traditional religion is more "dogmatic" than irreligion.

His songs don't need to "transcend" their creator in order to be great; there's no need to run down Yusuf in order to elevate Cat. And since they _were_ written during his "seeker" stage, they're suitable for everybody -- future Muslims or not.

2 hits on this album
This album was hard to swallow after Teaser and Tillerman. The only two decent songs out of five are The Hurt and Later. In fact, Later is the one I always yearn for when I think of Cat. Why? I'm not sure but you will see for yourself. The other three songs are just plain forgettable.