Situating The Residents

Rumored to have emerged from northwestern Louisiana intent on expressing their artistic vision and producing what might be called either a complicated deconstruction of the entire history of Western music or simply a self-styled version of the Cajun music of their native region, The Residents have established themselves as one of the most prolific art collectives of the last forty years. They are a group of multimedia artists who have been pressing the boundaries of technological expression since at least 1972 and who continue to do so to this day. The Residents' labyrinthine Web-based auto-documentation demonstrates the development of their wide-ranging creative methods and productions. Starting in the 1970s with self-produced audio releases on vinyl singles and albums packaged in silk-screened sleeves; adding Super 8 film and analog video works throughout the 1970s and 80s (including public access TV and music videos); proceeding to DVRs in the mid-1980s; and moving into DVDs, Web works, and MP3 files in the 1990s and early 2000s and Internet TV today, their creative expressions engage a wide range of media forms and practices. One curious result of their rich production strategy even resulted in the broadcast of five different "music video" pieces by The Residents on 1 August 1981, the very first day of MTV's existence. The emergence and distribution of their work through this soon-to-be definitive/redefining channel of distribution raises as broad a range of questions as it once raised a broad collection of eyebrows. More than thirty years later, their work is now being displayed in special collections and presentations in the Museum of Modern Art in New York while generating continuing critical acclaim and awards. Unlike many other early video collectives, The Residents not only continue to produce work but also continue to explore and exploit the critical artistic possibilities made available by emerging technologies. From Super 8 film to Internet TV, only the future will reveal what this group will make of, and with, twenty-first-century technologies.

The Residents established their collective in the San Francisco area in the late 1960s. In a move foreshadowing the core practice or method of this collective, they adopted the name "The Residents" after a demo tape they had submitted to Warner Brothers Records arrived by return mail, stamped, "Residents, 444 Grove St." According to musical collaborator and critic Chris Cutler, "their lack of a name named them." He goes on to propose that "ma[king] a positive fetish of not revealing their identities became the pivot on which their identity (as 'The Residents') turned. If they had said 'who' they were (whatever fiction that entails in the world of pop epistemology) no one would have cared" (78-79). Cutler's book File under Popular: Theoretical and Critical Writings on Music focuses on the virtual geography of "pop music," and indeed, The Residents' entrance onto the cultural stage takes place in that very environment. The identity politics of popular music has historically revolved around an ideology of romanticized, artistic self-expression and the meticulous cultivation of an aura of personality. Resistance to this traditional approach signifies a key component of The Residents' methodology. Thus, Santa Dog (1972), the first two-disc single record released by the collective now known as The Residents, came packaged "in a hand silk-screened gatefold sleeve which was printed to look like a Christmas card from an insurance company" (Cryptic Corporation).¹ With this first piece, The Residents fuse fine art practice with capitalist practice and popular form. This combination and recombination of fine and popular art practices with popular/capitalist forms and methods continues to be The Residents' core methodology today.

Written by a voice ironically identified as Big Brother (The Residents' archivist and publicist generally understood to be The Residents in an alternative form), the FAQ at residents.com poses and responds to questions about the group's identity that often circulate in the speculative environs of the Internet. The Residents' playful yet active thwarting of the phenomenon of identification so carefully cultivated by the pop industry machine is made manifest in...