THE COMMERCIAL ALBUM
UNCLE WILLIE'S HIGHLY OPINIONATED GUIDE TO THE RESIDENTS
The premise of this album, which contains 40 one-minute
songs, was for The Residents to create their own Top-Forty.
They very nearly succeeded. The Commercial Album takes over
where Duck Stab left off. It further distils the music of
The Residents into a stream of compact and multi-faceted
musical and lyrical gems. The songs on this kaleidoscopic
album are conveying more with less.
One of the most important aspects of this album was the
accompanying release of their four One Minute Movies. These
brought to life the visual imagery of The Residents and
spread it further than it had been before. Since they had
not yet gone on tour, these videos gave us a chance to see
what the Residents looked like. Created before MTV, they
received a lot of air play when MTV was finally invented.
In order to make easier the task of discussing this album,
I’ve chosen from their Top-Forty a list of Top-Ten songs. I
feel that these ten songs accurately capture the soul of
this album. They are listed in the order in which they
appear on the album. If you own a CD player which allows
you to program the order in which the songs are played,
program it to play them in the following order.
Easter Woman (1)
Amber (5)
Red Rider (9)
Floyd (11)
The
Nameless Souls (14)
Love Leaks Out (15)
The Simple Song
(20)
Moisture (29)
Loneliness (33)
When We Were Young (40)
The result is a ten-minute piece of music which passes
through the disturbing open doorway on “Easter Woman”, the
languid trotting whirlpool of “Amber”, the glowing embers
of “Red Rider”, the sonorous textures coaxed from the
analog synthesizer on “Floyd”, the quirky variety of
instruments on “The Nameless Souls”, the impending doom of
“Love Leaks Out”, the silly simplicity of “The Simple
Song”, the loneliness of “Loneliness”, and the nostalgia of
“When We Were Young”. “Moisture” deserves a sentence all to
itself. I believe that it is the finest song on this album
and that to write about it would be fruitless.
Due to the self-imposed time limitations, the lyrics for
each song usually consist of no more than two to three
sentences and last about thirty seconds. In spite of this
economy of words, bright, bizarre, disturbing, languid,
sad, ethereal, and silly images abound. The ability to
create such complete and compelling images with so few
words is an extraordinary talent indeed.
The idea of a commercial album by The Residents is
contradictory. It is always difficult to compare their
music with that of their contemporaries (in this case the
year is 1980) for they follow no trends and their music
disregards time and place.
It is fitting to end this section of the book with this
album, for it marks the end of an era. Soon the technology
of making music will drastically change. There will be
computers and MIDI, digital synthesizers and samplers, and
hard disk recording. Since the nature of The Residents is
to be on the cutting edge of art and technology, they will
be among the first to embrace these new changes. Besides,
looming in the distance can be heard the rumbling of the
Moles.
- David Willenbrink