1980

COMMERCIAL ALBUM

Album

Easter Woman Perfect Love Picnic Boy End of Home Amber Japanese Watercolor Secrets Die in Terror Red Rider My Second Wife Floyd Suburban Bathers Dimples and Toes The Nameless Souls Love Leaks Out Act of Being Polite Medicine Man Tragic Bells Loss of Innocence The Simple Song

Ups and Downs Possessions Give It To Someone Else Phantom Less Not More My Work Is So Behind Birds in the Trees Handful of Desire Moisture Love Is... Troubled Man La La Loneliness Nice Old Man The Talk of Creatures Fingertips In Between Dreams Margaret Freeman The Coming of the Crow When We Were Young

HISTORICAL CONTEXT*

The Residents welcomed the 80s with "its own Top 40"—forty songs, one minute each, designed to "cut out the fat" (the repetition of musical ideas in most pop songs) and present only the most basic elements of the songs. This effectively transformed the pop songs into jingles, which, combined with the implications of a Top 40 list, gave the Commercial Album its double-entendre title.

Graeme Whifler collaborated with the Residents to create a music video of four songs, caled One Minute Movies. The video, which featured "Moisture," "Act of Being Polite," "Perfect Love," and "The Simple Song," is now on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Commercial Album received unexpectedly poor reviews from a jaded New Wave press. This critical backlash stung the Residents, and helped spur the creation of their Mole trilogy.

REVIEW

RATING: 9

Commercial Album is absolutely the epitome of the Residents. A well-thought-out concept album with forty different musical ideas—instrumentals, experiments, exotic arrangements, anonymous musical guests (Lene Lovich and Andy Partridge), Snakefinger guitar solos, and brilliant, inspired weirdness. And, at one minute per song, you get just enough inspired weirdness to amaze you without overwhelming you.

That last trait made this my first Residents album. The other traits made me a fan for life. It's a great starting point: it'll completely weird you out at first, yes. And it's not quite as consistent as Duck Stab (with 40 songs, they can't all be equally high quality), but it's eventually going to utterly intoxicate you.

In the interest of "cutting out the fat," I'll stop here and just list my Top Ten out of these Top Forty.

1. Fingertips
2. Moisture
3. When We Were Young
4. Picnic Boy
5. Perfect Love
6. Love Leaks Out
7. Loneliness
8. Amber
9. La La
10. Act of Being Polite

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