Psychopathic recluses and artistic geniuses both know that a glimpse of reality can be a dangerous thing. It can force you to run away from the world, or compel you to spend your life confronting it.
The Residents have learned this fact of life all too well, as these reclusive geniuses/artistic psychopaths have done both for the last 20 years -- escaped popular culture and critiqued it. Twenty Twisted Questions is a career-spanning retrospective of contemporary music's meta-conceptual mythmongers, assessing what they've had to say about the world in which we live while they've been creating their own through music, video, performance, and Pour Know Graphics, all sampled here.
Turning rejection into triumph in 1972 when a Warner Bros. record exec sent back the group's demo tape in care of "The Residents", this Louisiana-raised, San Francisco-based ensemble took its name as a way of elevating anonymity to art, an attack on the age of pop celebrity that was beginning to kick in as rock's golden era was petering out. Fresh on the scene when pretentious "progressive rockers", egomaniacal super-groups, navel-contemplating singer-songwriters, inane AM radio opportunists, and deified guitar heroes of the FM dial dominated the pop universe, The Residents were everything that the early 1970s best-sellers weren't: wacky, weird, more inventive than they were musically adept, irreverent, irritating and -- above all -- conceptually astute. This was a band that was going to be as famous for its ideas as many of their contemporaries were to be forgotten for lacking them.
A sign of what was to come, Meet The Residents was issued in 1974 with a jacket that both honored and defaced the cover art of the Fab Four's introductory LP, Meet The Beatles. The Residents set themselves up as prankster truth-tellers waging a war of wit against ingrained cultural institutions. Winning an audience wasn't going to be easy.
While waiting for fans and record contracts to materialize, The Residents turned to feature-length video production. Vileness Fats -- an unfinished but nevertheless fascinating work -- is a tribute to their own isolation. Shot in eerie black and white video with elaborate studio sets, animated live action, fantastical costumes and a soundtrack that spoofs soundtracks, this early 1970s extravaganza hints at the theatricality that was to come in the group's live show nearly 15 years later.
The Residents began finding fans during the mid-1970s punk rock boom. In 1976, they released The Third Reich 'N' Roll LP -- a collage of familiar rock riffs and chants twisted almost beyond recognition -- and Satisfaction, a single that dragged the Rolling Stones' signature song kicking and screaming into a new phase of pop fury. The Residents established themselves as alien outcasts who rebelled against rock and the culture that created it. Ironically, an early video clip from this most iconoclastic period, The Third Reich 'n' Roll, (along with 1980s One Minute Movies), was featured in a music video retrospective presented by The Museum of Modern Art and remains in MOMA's permanent collection. How's that for credibility?
Because The Residents deliberately remained anonymous and almost never performed in the first decade of their existence, the group had to invent a different kind of visual identity. In their act of re-creation, The Residents epitomized punk's do-it-yourself ethic. Their playfully grotesque home-made videos shrieked with ambition and their shock-tactic graphics screamed from the record sleeves. The quartet became instantly identifiable when it invented the "eyeball look" for its 1979 album Eskimo, which featured a photo of the group with heads shrouded under giant eyeballs, an image that implied The Residents were not simply to be glared at: these anti-icons were watching us.
Over the next decade, The Residents became more accessible as the pop world caught up to them. Their music matured, profiting from the pace of keyboard thechnology development, and refined into an idiosyncratic style that combined the computer tools of synth-pop, the rage of punk, the drama of horror movie soundtracks, the compositional dexterity of cartoon score, the experimentation of jazz, and the excess of opera. Always arresting and immediately identifiable, their videos' visual style also became more sophisticated, evident in recent collaborations with avant-garde video artist John Sanborn and computer animation whiz Jim Ludtke. As the 1980s drew to a close, their CUBE-E tour -- a self-proclaimed "history of American music" -- anticipated the theatrical extravaganzas of Madonna and the Pet Shop Boys. Over the last 20 years, their all-encompassing art has evolved into musical theater for the video age.
But the story isn't finished. The Residents are still very much alive and not at all well, as Freak Show -- their latest and perhaps most autobiographical work -- attests. Poised to leap into virtual reality and interactive media, The Residents will go wherever technology and their twisted imaginations take them. The video and musical goodies encoded in this disc chronicle their journey thus far. It's up to you to follow. As their Ralph Records sales pitch once so eloquently stated, it's either "Buy or die!"

Notes taken from the laser disc written by Barry Walters