on the beatles
To the Residents, the Beatles symbolized everything good and everything bad about pop, the mind-evpanding potential of studio-based psychedelia versus pop's tyrannical, mind-controlling ubiquity...
-Simon Reynolds
Bands and performers we like have been popping up with distressing frequency in commercials, although that might say more about my tendency to watch too much television. The Clash sells Jaguar automobiles with "London Calling." Modest Mouse music is the soundtrack for . . . well, for many things, including beer and minivan commercials. The Shins are selling M&Ms. Moby and Fatboy Slim are happy to license their music, even the parts that weren't originally their own. And possibly the worst examples of misappropriation are Janice Joplin's (her estate, actually) posthumous endorsement of Mercedes Benz and Woody Guthrie's (again, his estate's) similarly shocking posthumous shilling of the Nissan 300Z sportscar with "Let's Go Riding in the Car." Like many other readers of a certain age, we learned Guthrie's sing-along folk music version on long family car trips and only in adulthood learned of Guthrie's connection to the song, just as we had not realized that "This Land is Your Land" was Guthrie's. But the complete lack of irony in Benz's presentation of Joplin is staggering, and we wonder what earlier music we have hummed along to unaware of original intent or context.
The Residents would be happy to sell out. Consummate amateurs, the Residents simply aren't able to find a buyer for the sounds they produce. Their Commercial Album may be seen as an ironic poke at themselves. However, the collection of 40 one-minute tracks are 40 concepts for broadcast commercials and indicate the Residents would very happily sell their sounds if only they could find someone willing to pay. The album seems to invite business interests to peruse a portfolio of work that defies commercial application. The Commercial Album is a very sly and perhaps infuriating commentary in keeping with the perhaps apocryphal but nonetheless entertaining story of the band's name. Deliciously, twenty years later an underground artist like Moby will be able to realize what the Residents were only able to ironize.
We might be able to ask: are the Residents a band, or only a band, anymore? What other band offers two immersive video game worlds? And what other band appears on gamer sites, complete with cheat codes? Masterfully, these non-musicians render a believable, immersive, and sticky world in Bad Day on the Midway, where your attention is captivated by characters and situations that draw you in to this world consistent with the Resident's decidedly un-Disney world view.As stated above, music was secondary for the Residents, who started off as an artistic collective making films. Their films were not selling enough to support the collective, and they sought other saleable items to support their collective. Their first project was a movie, they have always asserted that they are not musicians at all. As Simon Reynolds continues his narration of the Residents:
Their music's wonderfully angular melodies and jerky rhythms seemed unprecedented, but the Residents did have musical influences. They were just unrecognizable simply because, as [Homer] Flynn [of Cryptic Corporation] pointed out, "the Residents weren't capable of rendering them that faithfully." (Reynolds, 200)
As we reacquainted ourselves with the residents, in particular with Eskimo and the Commercial Album, connections to the ambience of Brian Eno's work became quite clear. But surprisingly, we began drawing more connections to They Might Be Giants, particularly the "Dial-a-Song" phone number [(718) 387-6962] where fans anywhere could dial a number for free and listen to songs in progress, snippets of forthcoming recordings, or musings by the band members, John and John. The giveaway connection: the Residents' "Fingertips" from the Commercial Album lovingly recreated by They Might Be Giants in a six-second track recorded in homage complete with the same name, "Fingertips", in a collection of sound snippets ranging from 5 to 50 seconds long. Homer Flynn might be right that the Residents couldn't render their musical influences accurately, but many bands influenced by the Residents faithfully reproduce their kinship and debt to the Residents and tehir giant eyeballs.
How many bands, after all, have cheat codes? Cheats, and knowledge of how to take advantage of these insider codes, are a prime form of coolness currency in the gaming world. Bad Day on the Midway has cheat codes, as well as entire websites devoted to mastering the game world invented by the band.
