The Economist January 8th 2022 Books & arts 75Performance artThe eyeballs have itI
n may 2020, shortly after the coronavirus
struck, America’s weirdest rock band re-
issued one of its hits. The new video for
“Die! Die! Die!”, a shrieking, nihilistic num-
ber re-recorded with the front man from
the Pixies, featured tumbling viruses and a
blond effigy of Donald Trump mouthing “I
want you to die, die like a stranger...like a
rat.” The caustic chanting and surreal
graphics were a biting reminder that the
cult phenomenon known as the Residents
remains as subversive and strange as ever,
half a century after the group was founded.
At a gig in Los Angeles that kicked off
the 50th-anniversary tour, diehard fans be-
decked in Residents merchandise howled
their approval. The performers were
swathed in fabric imprinted with hun-
dreds of eyeballs, their signature image.
Their anonymity, guarded by eyeball-
themed masks, has been key to their suc-
cess. Of the four young men from Louisi-
ana in the original line-up, two dropped
out in the 1980s, whereupon the group
became a revolving collective with two
main leads, the “Singing Resident” and the
“Musical Resident”. Hardy Fox, one of the
last original members and the main com-
poser, outed himself before he died in 2018.
The current four carry on behind their dis-
guises, as fans go along with a wink.
But the band’s improbable longevity isalso “a triumph of perseverance over tal-
ent, which they never believed in anyway”,
says Homer Flynn, the group’s spokesman
and co-owner of its marketing arm, the
Cryptic Corporation. “It’s not like the Resi-
dents were ever very good musicians.”
Unlike most bands from the heyday of
rock, they don’t just trot out golden oldies,
but incessantly create new material and
repurpose old songs. The ongoing 50th-
anniversary concerts reprise the character
of Dyin’ Dog, a Southern blues singer pos-
sibly of their own invention.
The masks safeguard their creative free-
dom as well as their identities. From the
moment the original quartet mounted
their first guerrilla raid on a folk-music
club in San Francisco in October 1971, they
understood that performing anonymously
“gave them a lot more space underneath to
be whoever they wanted, or do whatever
they wanted”, says Mr Flynn. An early at-
tempt at a record deal failed when their de-
mo tape was sent back by a Warner Broth-
ers scout, addressed to “Residents”. It was
the perfect moniker for a group based on
what they call “the theory of obscurity”.
Their lyrics are wilfully impenetrable,
the music a barrage of sound. To admirers,
part of the appeal is “trying to figure out
what they’re saying”, allows one 30-some-
thing concertgoer in la. Covid-19 aside,their dyspeptic commentaries are rarely
overtly political. Their entertaining half-
century of narrative games include an
elaborate tale of underground mole peo-
ple, gruesome takes on fairy tales and Bible
stories, and discordant covers of songs by
artists from James Brown to the Beatles
and the Rolling Stones.
The fanbase is impressively wide: more
than 100,000 people follow their Facebook
page. Long before he created “The Simp-
sons”, Matt Groening extolled the group as
“the most significant pop-music ensemble
of the 20th century”. And for a west-coast
underground sensation, their tentacles
reach surprisingly far—many male baby-
boomers in America, Europe and Australia
own a Residents disc. Much to their gratifi-
cation, fans emerge in each new genera-
tion. “There will always be people who
aren’t really interested in what the mass
market is trying to shove down their
throats,” says Mr Flynn.
Naturally, the internet has helped. But
it is the Residents’ own grasp of evolving
technology that has made them the inno-
vators they are. Experimenting with the
first multichannel recorders, advanced
synthesisers and sampling technologies
allowed them to create an overdubbed
sound that they could take on the road.
Four-track, 8-track, cds, dvds, Midi—the
group has surfed each successive wave.
The latest is retro: Cherry Red Records in
London is issuing vinyl sets of newly
remastered tapes and unreleased material.
Mr Flynn formed a graphic-design firm
to help the Residents with film-making,
often using elaborate sets. By the 1980s, he
says, they were pioneers of music video
and a fixture on the new cable channel
mtv. “Technology evolves faster than cul-
ture,” he observes. “So there’s a gap, a place
where they could experiment.” The “Com-
mercial Album” of 1980 was made up of 40
one-minute songs, some later turned into
60-second films: TikTok before TikTok.
One such film, “The Act of Being Polite”, is
now the group’s first nft(non-fungible to-
ken), minted last autumn and auctioned in
a fund-raiser for the Burning Man festival.
This faceless art collective masquerad-
ing as a rock band, with its mad theatrical
performances, attracts oddballs and out-
siders across the globe. After over 60 al-
bums, innumerable videos and an “Ulti-
mate Box Set” housed in a refrigerator at
the Museum of Modern Art in New York,
the cast is glad to be earning a living. What-
ever comes next, they are sure to stay
ahead of the curve—and in disguise.
On the “Wonder of Weird” tour of 2013,
the “Singing Resident” rasped these lines:We have left our lives/We have left our land
We have left behind/All we understand
Now we must cry out/As we make our stand
We will die/Pretending to be a band. nLOS ANGELES
After 50 years, an anonymous cult art-pop group is still on the road