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In the 1967 song "Status Back Baby" by Frank Zappa, some of the lyrics go:

The other night we painted posters
They played some records by the Coasters
BOW WOW WOW WOW!
A bunch of pom-pom girls looked down their nose at me.
They had painted tons of posters; I had painted three.

What does "painting posters" refer to here? Surely they had photo copiers/presses in the late 1960s? They had to "paint" posters manually? I get the mental image of a bunch of jocks and cheerleaders sitting around in a room in their school and manually painting large paper posters with paint, probably related to some kind of event in their school and/or for the community.

Was it like a "social thing" to paint them manually or what? They could have copied them, but that felt too "dead" and maybe cost too much? Am I way off? Is this even what's being referred to? Or is "painting posters" yet another "code phrase" which really just means "making out"? Like "doing homework" apparently meant that as well?

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    It would be completely normal to "paint" a banner of sorts to advertise a dance or some such. How would you "copy" a 6-foot color poster, when the only copiers were black-and white & limited to 8-1/2 by 11 inches?
    – Hot Licks
    Commented Mar 28, 2020 at 15:17

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The song you reference, from Absolutely Free (1967) by The Mothers of Invention, satirizes "school spirit" as a blind adherence to the norms of high-school life. This was the '60s, and the album presaged the general dissatisfaction with and disaffection from received norms, which by the end of that decade became the norm for a vast segment of the population.

Painting posters was what high-schoolers who had "school spirit" did to support the various sports teams and other school activities. It involved big sheets of posterboard and lots of tempera colors. The messages displayed were of the "Go Team!" variety, and kids earned "status" based on how much they supported those efforts. Here's a recent example, showing the practice is still current:

enter image description here

That whole album, and Frank Zappa's music in general, may be viewed as an assault on normal, "straight" (meaning, in the parlance of the era, adhering to normative societal principles) society.

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  • That also makes sense of the term "pom pom girls" because the school cheer leaders would, presumably, have the greatest "school spirit" and, would, therefore, paint lots of posters.
    – BoldBen
    Commented Mar 28, 2020 at 21:49
  • @BoldBen: Exactly. And another word for "pom-pom girls" is "cheerleaders."
    – Robusto
    Commented Mar 28, 2020 at 21:55

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