Agree or disagree, these serious art school aficionados have read their Situationist tracts: an empty society produces empty music. The original songs can never be heard the same way again. Taking on luminaries such as the Beatles, the Stones, the Beach Boys, the Doors, and Iron Butterfly is no small task. the emphasis on the 'cult of personality' that makes pop music into a massive commercial enterprise. Their deconstruction of the form lays bare the silliness of the songs and our blind hero worship of the bands and the makers of the music. The Residents use the song references to comment on the vacuous nature of pop music and the egotism and arrogance of the culture that created them. At best, a single line from a song may be intelligible. Many of the tunes are thoroughly mangled under layers of sound. This album contains two long pastiches of various popular songs of the early 1970s. The documentary doesn't get very deep into The Residents' music, the appeal of which is fully present in one of their LP records, The Third Reich and Roll (1976). They've been taken seriously by the art world, for the entire The Residents collection is now housed in the Museum of Modern Art. Their music has influenced bands like Talking Heads, Devo, Primus, Ween, Half Japanese, and The Art of Noise. Their early videos played in rotation on MTV for years. Everything was done on a DIY crafts level, even the printing on their record jackets.Īlthough operating completely outside the music industry, The Residents have been a noted presence for more than four decades. The group then formed its own label, Ralph Records, and began a highly prolific music business on the artistic fringe. The group had erroneously assumed that Warners would welcome them, because it had signed Captain Beefheart. Music when their demo tapes were returned, which just said 'Residents' with an address. The group name came from the shipping label used by Warner Bros. Their early records were recorded on consumer equipment.
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They were stopped neither by a lack of musical ability nor professional resources.
At that point their emphasis shifted to music production with a strong visual sense in support. Although they constructed fanciful sets and costumes for their visuals, the chosen medium of early half-inch reel-to-reel video just wasn't up to the task. They found that video and film production was too expensive. For the receptive audiences in San Francisco in the early 1970s, The Residents' sound and vision filled a void as had no other group before them. The Residents composed electronic soundscapes, songs, and complex sound collages to amplify their vision of strangeness. Using the mixed media of 16mm film and early consumer videotape, the four produced uniquely quirky, dark, and humorous videos that evoked the ornate fantasies of Méliès, Cocteau, and German Expressionism. As a group they originally intended to become avant-garde filmmakers. The founding members ended up living together in a house that became a communal studio to facilitate the production of art with a capital A.
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The Mecca of San Francisco was calling, with its hippies, drugs, free love, and general lack of boundaries. This much of the group's history is known: in the late 'sixties four multimedia artists from the Shreveport, Louisiana area decided that the South was not the place to be. The anonymity angle is a game that most viewers can figure out for themselves. The story of The Residents is told by other rock musicians and performing celebrities, with more input from self-described businessmen and others that assisted the artists along the way. And because Theory of Obscurity does not disclose this information, we may never know. No one can say with authority who were the founding members or how many of the original members remain with the group today. The title Theory of Obscurity: A Film About The Residents puts this defining principle right up front. A collective group without individual personalities, little is known about them because their history has been intentionally obfuscated by the group itself and by their overarching aesthetic, functional anonymity. During that period they have collected a large, international fan base. The Residents' reign spans fifty years and has produced over sixty albums and numerous music videos. These masked men are the avant-garde band and multimedia performance artists known as The Residents.
We've all seen the image: four tuxedoed men in eyeball masks with top hats and canes.
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