Borrowing in the Music and Art of The Residents

by Greg Dixon

This paper presents an overview of borrowing in the music and art of The Residents. The Residents lack of identity is highlighted by their tendency to use borrowed materials and these borrowings contribute to their public reception. The borrowing of the The Residents will be categorized into the following: Visual Borrowing, Borrowing Interjected, “Cover” Songs, Remix, Collage, and Cultural/ Stylistic Borrowing. These various categories are not necessarily independent of one another but may often work in tandem. However, this study generalizes The Residents tendencies so that their musical borrowing can be interpreted in a more direct and understandable form. When looking at The Resident’s ouvre, borrowing is such an important trait and so often employed that it might seem that everything they have done is borrowed from some form of song, style, or culture. However, The Residents’ employ musical and visual borrowing to synthesize completely new works of art unique to their style.

One of the most interesting artistic decisions that The Residents have made is to always maintain anonymity, which consistently gives their art a mysterious element that subverts many of notions of what it means to be an artist. When the artist has no gender, face, or personality it becomes hard to get to know or remember him or her as an individual. Consequently, it is very difficult to know the accurate history of the group and what has been revealed can only be taken as a legend or a myth. The only information that can be considered to be truthful about The Residents has been provided by interviews with the spokespeople for the Residents- their friends and business partners called The Cryptic Corporation.

According to the “myth”, The Residents are a collective group of artists that originated from Shreveport, Louisiana, but it is surely true that they spent the majority of their career working in San Francisco. The members of the group are said to have known each other since they were young kids and their collaborative relationship transcends certain boundaries due to their very close relationships. The Residents have made over 60 albums along with pioneering music videos, performance art, CD-ROM, and DVD. Their works have stayed on the cutting edge of technological innovations throughout their career.

The mythology surrounding The Residents continues with their likely made up interactions with a mystic Bavarian composer, Nigel Senada, who is said to have been introduced to The Residents by frequent collaborator guitar player/ violinist Phillip Lithman. Lithman, played guitar with The Residents throughout the 70’s and 80’s and was dubbed by The Residents as “Snakefinger” when they remarked that his finger while playing violin looked like a snake. The two main philosophies of N. Senada that The Residents have followed are the Theory of Obscurity and Theory of Phonetic Organization.

The Residents cite the influence of N. Senada’s Theory of Obscurity stating that “The plan called for the creation of complete projects that were literally not intended to be heard by anyone other than its creators. The Residents realized the truth in this ideal: that music really was difficult to record without considering the audience. They thought the experience gained by completing such a project would prove worthwhile toward achieving an independent attitude toward music. N. Senada had also been quick to point out that such a project reduces the amount of artistic clutter that is quickly swallowing the planet.”

The Theory of Phonetic Organization was not written down by N. Senada and eventually had to be explained by the press group, Cryptic Corporation. According to Ian Shirley’s book Meet The Residents Cryptic Corporation publicist Jay Clem stated that “it’s an abstract concept, rather than literal. It’s like a ‘phonetic spelling’ approach to music; not so much a notation, more a method of playing. If you can’t read music, you don’t know what it’s supposed to sound like, so you structure it according to how you feel it should sound. It’s a more natural way of playing music.” In his book, Shirley claims that in some ways The Residents used this theory as a way to hide their lack of proficiency with musical instruments.

The Residents early works are much more examples of studio composition proficiency rather than musical instrument dexterity or proficiency. Chris Cutler in his book File Under Popular explains that The Residents music developed “not from a knowledge of the various (musical) ‘rules’ of construction, but from a highly developed listening familiarity.” The tape machine became The Residents’ instrument of choice as shown in such early albums such as Meet the Residents and The Third Reich n’ Roll.

Much later in their career (1997), The Residents allegedly premiered N. Senada’s composition from 1936-37, Pollex Christi ("The Big Toe [or Thumb] of Christ"), a collage containing musical quotations from many different sources, most notably Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and Orff’s Carmina Burana. Pollex Christi is described by The Residents as one of Senada's "blueprints."

According to The Residents, “A ‘blueprint’ is a set of instructions on how to construct the piece out of existing works. Essentially, Senada steals bits from other people's compositions and has the performer assemble them into a "house of bricks”, much as some of the composers being plagarized used existing folk music to build their own works on. The difference is that not one note of Senada's composition is original. ” “N.Senada's blueprints often had "holes" in them, meant to be filled with whatever the performers felt should go in. His reasoning, based on his "house" metaphor, was that the people should contribute to the construction of their homes.” “Pollex Christi was deliberately made very difficult to play, because Senada wanted mistakes. They introduce "unimaginable variations" into the music, he said. "If the audience wants perfectly played music, let them listen to angels. Human music should stumble along most pitifully." N. Senada’s theories may be completely falsified, however they provide insight towards The Residents aesthetic towards musical borrowing and collage.

In terms of musical and visual borrowing The Residents almost always incorporate popular cultural and iconographical elements into their art. Within my first categorization, Visual Borrowing, this can be shown in The Residents work starting from their early days as a collective. Their first album cover displayed on, Meet the Residents, was a parody, in the vain of Duchamp’s “L.H.O.O.Q.”, of the album cover of The Beatles’ Meet the Beatles. In the picture each of the Beatles faces are defaced as if with a permanent marker. Of course, the identity of The Residents remained subverted through this parody of the cover artwork, which also cleverly suggests a visual distortion of the common and clearly recognizable mainstream rock iconography. Throughout their career, The Residents consistently create art that refers to mainstream iconography, however they distort this visual material so much that it is something completely original and unique. Other examples include a notorious picture of The Residents naked with paper masks of The Beatles covering their faces. In the photo their genitals are purposefully obscured allowing their anonymity its most bizarre and extreme implications. Along with the frequent visual references to The Beatles, The Residents also incorporated popular references in their artwork such as Residential distortions of American including The Statue of Liberty and Mount Rushmore.

The Residents throughout their career have along with fixed visual art also been very interested in film. In fact, they were one of the first artists to create music videos as an artistic medium before MTV. Their own visual work, along with collaborations with the Cryptic Corporation’s Porno Graphics and film director Graeme Whifler is extremely lush and incredibly personal. In this way, The Residents video work, while utilizing many popular icons, remains a completely fresh and unique vision that does not often rely on pre-made or stock source material. Interestingly, recently The Residents have released a series on YouTube based on several narratives from Timmy, a character originally created for the CD-ROM Bad Day on the Midway, set to sequenced video materials presumably pulled from various public domain video archives. With The Residents Timmy YouTube series, we may be seeing a new side of The Residents video productions that is sympathetic to their “cover” songs and collage-based albums containing borrowed musical materials.

The Residents technique of Borrowing Interjected is when a song, often from popular music is used as a musical motive, but not the basis of the song. There are many times that The Residents also use one of their own musical motives to interject into several different songs. Some examples of this technique are the interjection of the melody from “Hello Dolly” at the end of the song “Hello Skinny” from 1978’s Duck Stab and the persistent incorporation of the melody from The Swingin’ Medallions’ “Double Shot (Of My Baby’s Love)” in the dramatic album, God in Three Persons.

The Residents create “cover” songs that are better described as recreations of the originals that hold on to their lyrical and rhythmic scheme. For the purpose of this study, a Residential “cover” song is a specific song written by another individual than The Residents, which The Residents play/ record and attribute with that songs original title. In this study, I would like to make a delineation between what I see as clearly “cover” songs by The Residents and their collages of borrowed or “covered” materials or songs. What most people casually expect as a cover song is a song that attempts to sound like the original. The Residential take on a cover song is a completely different matter and often all that is held traceable to a particular song is its loose overall structure, lyric, vocal rhyme scheme, or rhythmic patterns, if at all. The Residents “cover” songs are a variation on popular songs that, once passed through The Residential eye or filter, are completely alien to the tone and intention of the original song.

The Residents bizarre renditions of popular songs emphasize traits that are recognizable as the original and crafted in a way that causes a juxtapostion in the listeners casual experience with the other “normal” format of the song and the new radical re-interpretation. The Residents take the original song and its subject material and distort it to project a different image or storyline entirely. Here we see that The Residents and their philosophy of anonymity benefits this “cover” song experience because aside from the techniques of distortion no preconceived notion has been made about the artist’s intentions and their sympathies towards any particular style. Their anonymity is maintained yet also exemplified by the eclectic traits of all of their chosen borrowed materials.

The Residents have covered and released recordings of their own renditions of many different kinds of popular music. This can be heard most notably in albums such as George and James, featuring covers of George Gershwin and James Brown, Stars and Hank Forever, with new musical interpretations of Hank Williams and John Philip Sousa, the live concert Cube-E that added to those works songs by Elvis Presley, along with new versions of authentic old American Western songs, and many other singles with cover songs such as, “Satisfaction” (The Rolling Stones), “It’s a Man’s, Man’s, Man’s World” (James Brown), and “Double Shot (Of My Baby’s Love)” (Swingin’ Medallions). The melody played by the electric organ from “Double Shot (Of My Baby’s Love)” would later become a prevalent musical motive for The Resident’s theatrical album, God in Three Persons. After Cube-E The Residents went on to release a concept album about the life of Elvis entitled The King and Eye that featured their covers of many of his hit songs. The King and Eye was not simply an album of covers but also included interludes featuring an aging Elvis impersonator telling the story of Elvis to young children. The continuing narrative throughout the album along with The Residential covers creates an album transformed into a more grotesque and dark story of Elvis Presley. These “Cover” songs serve to show The Residents’ fascination with these musicians’ work; a positive approach towards tapping in to the music that they admire and they are influenced by.

Perhaps the finest “cover” song that The Residents have created is the song, “Kaw-Liga,” originally by Hank Williams and Fred Rose. This song exemplifies how The Residents specifically select songs with lyrics that make certain philosophical implications when they are exposed in a new light. The original “Kaw-Liga” is an interesting song in many ways, especially lyrically. The verse is sung and played in the manner of ceremonial Native American music. Hank Williams begins to tell the story of Kaw-Liga, a wooden Indian standing by the door. But suddenly we find out the Kaw-Liga is unique and perhaps human when he states, “he fell in love with an Indian maid over in the antique store. Kaw-Liga just stood there and never let it show. So she could never answer yes or no.” The chorus of the song is chipper and happy shifting the tone away from the more serious Native American style to a faster bluegrass style. The song shifts between these two modes of serious to lighthearted music throughout. Later on, we are told of Kaw-Liga’s heartbreak as he has fallen in love, but his heart is “made of knotty pine” and all that he can do is stand still. In the end, a customer purchases the Indian maid from the antique store and Kaw-Liga is left standing in heartbreak, shame, and anguish.

The Residents’ version of “Kaw-Liga,” of course, is shockingly different than the Hank Williams version. The bass line is created from a lifted sample from the opening of pop icon Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean.” This was actually a clever inside joke as Hank Williams’ wife was named “Billie Jean”. However, what is most shocking about listening to The Residents take on “Kaw-Liga” is simply how natural the lyrics and subject matter become when placed within the Residents’ typical musical style. These lyrics and the metaphor of unrequited love in its relationship to the wooden Indian are fascinating and surreal. This provides a perfect springboard for The Residents musical imagination that often flirts with the bizarre, surreal, and inhuman sides of existence as exemplified most clearly in their work for CD-ROM, Freak Show. Freak Show was partially inspired by The Residents feeling like their public perception was often regarded as if a freak show. This freakish inhuman quality is also exemplified in Kaw-Liga. After all, The Residents anonymity promotes an inhuman quality that gives the audience no clue as to their identity. Thus, they became not unlike inanimate objects, such as a wooden Indian, which we of course don’t consider to have a heart. However, like Kaw-Liga, The Residents anonymity sits stoically unchanged but we know that lying beneath the surface that there truly are human hearts involved creating this music. Like “Kaw-Liga,” when looking at the other “cover” songs that The Residents have produced there is always this constant duality based on the lyrical meanings of the original song and how The Residents change their lyric’s original implications.

In many ways the category of remix when applied in its loosest terms to The Residents could also apply to their “cover” songs since they are essentially new creations or arrangements. The main difference is that there are usually no traceable elements of the original recordings in The Residents “cover” songs. In this way, the remix category essentially applies to The Resident’s remixes of their previous works with only a few exceptions thus far.

The Residents have consistently been interested in re-mixing their music often into dramatically different versions. This can be seen in the various versions of their very first single, “Santa Dog,” (1972) with its remixes “Santa Dog ’78,” “Santa Dog ’88,” and “Santa Dog ’92;” Our Finest Flowers, a reworking of earlier songs in celebration of their 20th anniversary; and the soundtrack to the DVD retrospective Icky Flix which contains an option for either listening to the original soundtrack or a remixed soundtrack. “Picnic in the Jungle,” if listened to in remix mode on Icky Flix is a remix of a remix! The Residents often create re-mixes to commemorate anniversaries or for special occasions. Ironically, in their celebration of the past these remixes typically destroy or heavily distort the original musical materials of their earlier works.

The Residents typically don’t encourage their work to be borrowed or remixed by other artists and musicians. Ian Shirley writes, “Like Frank Zappa, they strongly believe that only they have the right to document their career, even if that involves tweaking old recordings and destroying master tapes to ensure that no one will be able to second guess them when they are gone.” It’s ironic that a musical group that uses so many borrowed materials would feel this way about their own material. This however suggests that The Residents feel that their material, while using borrowed sources maintains an individuality or uniqueness that only they have the right to own.

The Residents technique of Collage with respect to borrowed works is one of their trademark techniques and is displayed early in their career with the seminal work The Third Reich n’ Roll. With The Third Reich n’ Roll, The Residents create a iconoclastic tapestry of re-interpretations of American Top 40 radio bubblegum pop songs culminating into two “Suites”- “Swastikas on Parade” and “Hitler Was a Vegetarian.” The suites include such hits as Chubby Checker’s “Let’s Twist Again” and John Fred’s “Judy in Disguise.” The Residents originally recorded their music as overdubs on top of the original tunes. Finally, the original version of the song was erased from the tape leaving The Residents new interpretation isolated and intact. This technique is similar to the way Berio employed the music of Mahler’s Scherzo from Symphony No. 2 as a “river” to maintain the structure of his Sinfonia. However, unlike Berio’s Sinfonia The Residents completely obliterate the “river” leaving no trace of the original borrowed material.

The Third Reich n’ Roll was created with the intent to highlight the fascist aspects found within the commercial music world. The material is chosen specifically for its simplistic style or attitude and is distorted to sound ridiculously simple and banal. In this form of quotation The Residents use of popular music material displays negative connotations towards the borrowed materials.

The final category of borrowing, Cultural or Stylistic Borrowing, is one of the most commonly employed borrowing techniques that The Residents use. With this technique, borrowing of a specific exotic culture or exotic style of music is employed to create a new piece of music. These cultures and styles can be already established or alien/ “made up”.

One clear example of Cultural or Stylistic Borrowing is the music for The Resident’s album, Eskimo. For this album, The Residents researched Eskimo culture and musical style and attempted to emulate their music after the rituals and culture of the Eskimos. This included making their own instruments out of seal gut, dog skull, whale bone, walrus ribs, and various drums made from these animal parts. With Eskimo, The Residents create a sonic landscape or continuous soundtrack based on their perspective of Eskimo culture. In many ways, their treatment of the materials from Eskimo culture is much more respectful than the work by other composers like Amy Beach who used the culture of the Eskimos to write essentially primitive sounding classical music. The Residents music is more strictly primitive and better displays the musical and ritualistic qualities of the Eskimo culture.

Another example of Cultural or Stylistic Borrowing that is not as literally clear is the music from Fingerprince’s Side B “Six Things to a Cycle” and the music by the composer Harry Partch. “Six Things to a Cycle” emulates many of the unique qualities of Partch’s music including the creation and use of homemade instruments; Non-Western scales, form, and structure; and the focus on ritual and primitive aspects of music. If one listens to a chamber music piece by Partch such as Castor and Pollex side by side with The Residents “Six Things to a Cycle” the similarities in sound are astounding. The ritualistic ballet “Six Things to a Cycle” is based upon the continuous variation of the following theme:

This theme is played throughout each cycle in the instruments and is also sung by the voices with the lyrics, “Chew, Chew, Gum, Chew, Gum, Gum, Chew, Chew.” In practice, the instruments aren’t tuned in well-tempered pitches so the percussive musical motive is interpreted loosely as “high, high, low, high, low, low, high, low” for these instruments. The combined effect of all the percussion playing this pattern together creates a texture that is similar to Balinese gamelan and also the music of Partch. “Six Things to a Cycle” also uses the following melodic motive (first presented on a song from the A side of Fingerprince) and juxtaposes this motive against the other theme:

During the closing section of “Six Things to a Cycle,” this motive is played by the strings and transposed up a perfect fourth. Also, the melody is changed at the closing of the piece so that the perfect fourth relationships between the notes in measure 1 and measure 5 are changed to a tritone.

Finally, The Residents use of Stylistic or Cultural Borrowing extends into the realm of fantasies derived from their own conception of a unique or alien culture. This can be seen in the Commercial Album and also The Mole Show and The Mole Trilogy. With The Commercial Album, The Residents created several short, “commercial” recordings written with a decidedly different consideration of the commercial music’s values and target audience. The Resident’s form of commercialism found on The Commercial Album is a bizarre distillation of popular music in an attempt to create it for a uniquely avant-garde or commercially “alien” perspective. One can imagine the music from The Commercial Album as a Top 40 radio broadcast from another world. In The Mole Trilogy, The Residents created their own sub-cultures of fantasy creatures they portray that are known as The Moles and The Chubs. In this fantasy universe, The Moles and The Chubs each have distinctly different cultures and this extends to their musical tastes. Within The Mole Trilogy, The Residents mimic the musical styles of these fantasy cultures. Perhaps the most surreal concept by The Residents in terms of Stylistic and Cultural Borrowing is the made-up band and album called The Big Bubble. “The Big Bubble” is a band that is popular within The Chub culture and The Residents made the album as if they were “The Big Bubble” from this other universe.

In conclusion, The Residents lack of identity is highlighted by their tendency to use borrowed materials and these borrowings contribute to their public reception. The borrowing of the The Residents can be categorized into Visual Borrowing, Borrowing Interjected, “Cover” Songs, Remix, Collage, and Cultural/ Stylistic Borrowing. The Residents’ employ musical and visual borrowing to synthesize completely new works of art unique to their style.

Works Cited

Cutler, Chris. File Under Popular: Thoretical and Critical Writings on Music. New York: Autonomedia, 1996.

Not Available Liner Notes. Available online at http://residents.com/bh/MEETNOTES.htm

Pollex Christi. Available online at http://www.residents.com/bh/POLLEX.htm

Shirley, Ian. Meet the Residents: America’s Most Eccentric Band. England: SAF Publishing Ltd., 1998.

Uncle Willie’s Highly Opinionated Guide to The Residents. 1972- 1992. A Survey of Two Decades of Anonymous Fame Collected and Edited by Uncle Willie. San Francisco: Cryptic Corporation, 1993.