A Short History of the Residents

The Residents are all about obscurity. They sun the mainstream, shun the audience and shun attention. They want to be judged on the music alone. Tricky when the band shuns the media-based promotional infrastructure.

There may be four members of the Residents. They may be based in San Francisco. That's as far as a biography goes. They have been around since 1974 and have released their own music, videos and multimedia on their own Ralph label. Their early albums, like 'Meet The Residents' from 1974, and 'Third Reich And Roll' from 1976, used original material and covers from various counter-culture anthems to highlight just how un-oppositional these supposedly oppositional songs were when taken out of any context. They just end up as nostalgia and nothing more, just cash cows for the re-written fads and retro revivalist marketing campaigns. It must be stated though that the Residents had to pay royalties to the very record companies who owned the rights to these retro cash cows. 'Satisfaction' comes over all naive and irrelevant when stripped of its youthful revolutionary energy. Especially when the singer worries about which cigarette brand is the right one to smoke.

Their 1975 album was called 'Not Available' and it was not available anywhere. It was left unreleased and nobody got to hear it. 'The Eskimo' followed in 1978. The band used the cheapest instruments they could find but recorded the songs in the most expensive studio they could find. It sounds a bit like a polar wasteland in its ambience and the album included written short stories which the listener could read as they listened to the music, thus getting a feel for Eskimo life.

'Commercial Album' was released in 1980. It was a collection of forty songs, each a minute long, possibly to highlight the lack of ideas in popular music. What the Residents achieved, though, was to show just how good they were at writing concise and clever short pop songs. They have continued to juxtapose style and form with albums which have included covers by totally different artists, like Hank Williams and James Brown, as well as a set featuring the songs of Elvis Presley.

So what is it all about? Why do the Residents do what they do? They've managed to avoid any notion of personal fame and their work can be judged on the music alone without anything like manufactured image of commercial promotional campaigns getting in the way. Fair enough, but when the music actually comprises of almost one-dimensional jokes and quickly forgotten scams is there really much point to the ellaborate subterfuge necessary in maintaining their artistic hermit like existence. They do play live however, but they are only ever seen in top hats and tuxedos with eye-ball masks covering their faces. A little bit like the Wombles I guess, though that is a bit unfair. The Wombles sang some great songs and tried to stop everyone dropping litter. The Residents sang some dodgy songs and tried to pretend they didn't exist. That's performance art for you I suppose.