I splurged on most merch that released during that time-t-shirts, hoodies, and whatnot. Thus I was able to get in and snag the core of my Residents collection for a song (ahem, still a pricy song, mind) and I become a devotee-not a release hit The Residents' webstore that I didn't get one of. It wasn't long after my initial discovery of their music that I was online and discovered that their record label at the time, East Side Digital, was quickly becoming NOT their label and was having a last sale to purge their stock. Before The Residents released the album, they had it played on San Francisco's biggest Top-40 radio station-by buying 40 minute-long ad spots. Because pop/rock songs are typically one minute of ideas repeated for three minutes, The Residents were like, "Let's just strip the repetition out." Verse, chorus, and repeat. It's a record with forty songs, each one minute long. One of my favorite Residents stories, which isn't featured in the doc, surrounds the release of their 1980 release, The Commerical Album. The next day I toured each of the used cd stores in the area (rip, all of them), amassing another handful. From the opening of " Constantinople", with its nursery rhyme sing-songy stutter mixed with something dark and ominous, I was a fan. They were glorious years, starting when I found Duck Stab, Freak Show, and Cube E Live cds at the used record store (shout out to CD Warehouse, rip) as a late teenager. My days of obsessive Residents fandom are over. Fact and fable are two sides of the same coin when it comes to The Residents. But just because it's official history doesn't mean it's true. So this documentary about The Residents? It's true-at least, true in the sense that this is currently the official story The Residents and The Cryptic Corporation are putting forth. The thing to know about The Residents is, the truth about their history and the mythology of it have become so intertwined that I'm not sure even The Residents themselves know what reality is (or was) anymore. ![]() ![]() ![]() The two guys had no idea their random musing had been answered by a stranger and even today they're probably as clueless as to the identities of The Residents as I am. The author, eavesdropping on this conversation and who knew the band personally, said the four names out loud and went on his way. They were talking about how no one knows who The Residents actually are, and were debating possible people behind the eyeball masks. In one of those books-god knows which anymore-the author talks about a time, probably in the 80s, where he was walking somewhere random (say an airport) and happened to overhear the guys in front of him talking about The Residents. In some box I have a ton of books about The Residents.
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