Historical

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Mole Trilogy The Census Taker
Mark of the Mole(1981)
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After the New Wave music press decided that The Residents weren't any fun anymore, the band began to feel angry, confused, and frustrated. Deciding that "a disaster was in order", they set about composing an album which told the story of a culture driven from their homes by a storm and forced into a confrontation with another people. This album was the first part of a planned Mole Trilogy.
The Mark of the Mole draws on various tales from the Great Depression, such as John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. It opens with a radio broadcast (narrated by Penn Jilette) of a warning about a storm brewing over the lands which contain the tunnels of the Mohelmot. The Mohelmot are strange race of cloaked figures who prefer to live underground and who are known as "Moles" as a result. The storm arrives quickly and floods the Moles out of their homes, forcing them to migrate across the desert to the sea where the Chubs live.

The Chubs are a chubby, vacuous people who live for pleasure in a cozy pop culture. They embrace the arriving Moles, seeing them as a good source of cheap labour. The hard-working Moles soon alienate the Chubs, however. The latter start to complain about the Moles taking all the good work and marrying the Chubs' daughters -- all the usual redneck complaints about immigrants, of which The Residents had heard plenty when they were growing up in Louisiana. The tension between the two groups comes to a head, breaking out in a short war which resolves nothing. Afterwards, everything reverts to they way it was before the fighting, with the situation just as tense as ever.