Being an experimental art and media project, researching The Residents is one of the strangest but most interesting experiences you can have online. I don’t think we’ve even touched the the tip of the iceberg on this one. Their whole project appears to be at once a riddle, a hoax and some kind of high concept obscurantism. To quote from liner notes of the album below, “The Residents don’t support racism, Catholicism, fascism, Judaism, cynicism, realism or journalism.”

The Residents are an avant-garde music and visual arts group largely shrouded in mystery and myth. They formed in 1969 but after several decades in music business, and still actively creating and producing to this day, they have never revealed their names or faces. Their best known device for preserving their anonymity has been covering their heads with giant eyeballs tastefully accented with top hats and tuxedos. On trying to find names for the constituent members of the band you are met with a cryptic message of: ‘If the question is “what are the names the parents gave to the people making up The Residents,” then I would say that those names belong to individuals and not the group. The group doesn’t have names within its structure. If the question is the real “who,” meaning the philosophy and outlook, then that is all clearly stated in the work. I would find it difficult to summarize.’ However the same official website does helpfully surmise that the people who started the group are exactly the same as now although the number of people who have been in The Residents is probably over a hundred at this point and still growing. The FAQ of the website (how many bands have a frequently asked questions page?) explains the disguises and refusal to be subjected to interviews thus: ‘Say you have a tank of goldfish. Say you have given each goldfish a name. A stranger wanders into your house and sees your tank of goldfish and wants to know who they are. Considering that he is a stranger, you tell him it is a tank of goldfish.’

Like any artist there is early work. However, they consider anything released prior to 1974 as not being by The Residents, but by people who later became The Residents. They claim some older, unfinished and experimental recordings were stolen from studios and a demo tape sent to Warner Brothers was stolen and bootlegged (and now easy to find on the internet). Legend has it that the group sent this reel-to-reel tape to an acquaintance of Captain Beefheart at Warner Brothers, which was sent back with a rejection letter to “the residents” of the house (giving the band their name). As is true for all artists not just The Residents, they prefer not to release stuff that is unsatisfactory or they feel does not represent them. However, the band obviously appreciate the flaws for the beauty they might contain as they still offer many pre-1974 recordings for sale.
Historically, one of The Residents primary obsessions has been the creation of “alternative worlds”. This is usually accomplished with sound, often with live performance and sometimes with video. Their most renowned video project is the world of Vileness Fats. The unfinished film consists of a village, a cave, a desert and a nightclub, populated by one armed midgets. The group spent four years between 1972 and 1976 shooting most of the feature length video. As the project headed towards the final stages of production they suddenly abandoned its “all time underground masterpiece”. The dissolution of the production was put down to internal conflicts, technological challenges and post-production problems. Others point to the fact that, since there were no distribution channels for half inch black and white video in 1976, the group’s original naiveté was finally overcome by reality. There are two versions of the unfinished picture Whatever Happened to Vilenes Fats? and Vileness Fats (Concentrate). Both come across as artifacts from some sort of hellish yet mildly amusing nightmare
Much of The Residents work can be challenging but a few titles are particularly so. Their early albums have been compared to Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa’s more conceptual and experimental albums as well as the work of Steve Reich. The music consists of deconstructions of countless rock and non-rock styles which are grafted together to create chaotic and formless compositions. You can download The Third Reich ‘n’ Roll here. It is their second (officially) released album and is a parody of 60s pop music and commercials. The album generated much controversy due to its cover (seen above) featuring a popular TV entertainer of the day (Dick Clark, presenter of American Bandstand – the first US national rock program) dressed in Nazi regalia holding a carrot while surrounded by swastikas and pictures of Adolf Hitler in both male and female dress. The German version of the album was marketed in the 1980s which heavily censored the cover art by covering every Nazi reference with the word “zensiert”. The original album contained only two tracks of intense, deconstructed versions of hits of the day. The band found themselves isolated from mainstream bland radio friendly rock, and soon concluded they had created an album about fascism and in particular, the fascism of rock ‘n’ roll. It’s bizarre collection that will appeal to adventurous listeners who are interested in Picasso’s dictum that all artists kill their aesthetic fathers. Find more outsider music here.

I found her crying in the morning
Sitting in a chair
She was wrapping something up
And wrapping it with care

I did not mean to hurt her
When I fell asleep last night
I was just exhausted
From the act of being polite

Yes, I was just exhausted
From the act of being polite

Tags: 60s, 70s, 80s, Avant-Garde, Captain Beefheart, Dick Clark, Fascism, Frank Zappa, Nazi, Outsider, Rock, The Residents

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