The Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Taste for the album. Bill Rieflin and Chris Connelly instead attributed the album's sound to the band's interest in technology. For pre-production, Rieflin said he and Barker watched films for a month, sampling anything that caught their interest. Instead of writing music, they all improvised individually, rarely collaborating with each other. Connelly compared it to exquisite corpse, a Surrealist technique in which an artistic work is created collaboratively without any of the participants having knowledge of the others' contribution. Rieflin cited "So What" as the only track to feature two musicians in the studio at the same time. After playing with
This Is What You Want... This Is What You Get were not re-recorded for "This Is What You Want...This Is What You Get" (although a remixed version of "Blue Water" was included as the B-side on the "This Is Not a Love Song" 12" single). Songs on "This Is What You Want...This Is What You Get" which did not appear in any form on "Commercial Zone" are "Tie Me to the Length of That", "The Pardon" and "1981", and are the only songs on the album which do not credit Keith Levene as a co-writer. PiL was supposed to score the soundtrack for the 1983 suspense film "Copkiller", starring Harvey