Twin Peaks Meets SimCity

The Residents' Freak Show was widely hailed as the best CD-ROM ever. Now the eye-cons of anonymity are about to strike again. Make way for Bad Day on the Midway.

The Residents' Freak Show was widely hailed as the best CD-ROM ever. Now the eye-cons of anonymity are about to strike again. Make way for Bad Day on the Midway.

It's not surprising that when The Residents burst onto the San Francisco music scene in 1972 (four masked mutants announcing to an unheeding world that the party was over), they were met with unwavering indifference. San Francisco was a city still grooving in a perpetual summer of love that showed no signs of waning - the music of the time was pleading to just "Let It Be" and "Give Peace a Chance." In sharp contrast, The Residents' first single, an insidious little ditty called "Santa Dog," featured deliberately ungroovy lyrics like Santa Dog's a Jesus fetus. "Santa Dog" was meant to unmistakably signal that change was in the air: the end of the summer of love was fast approaching, to be swiftly followed by the winter of discontent.

The Residents represented a new kind of rock-and-roll malcontent - an anonymous group that fused the deconstruction of pop music with an absurdist and often pessimistic view of mankind and society. This band combined the surreal, intergalactic rhythms of contemporary artists like Sun Ra, Frank Zappa, and Captain Beefheart with the dark insights of literary writers like Celine and Baudelaire. The Residents' form of rebellion didn't rail against the government, the Army, or the status quo, but against what they perceived as the faulty nature of mankind - the dim-witted mob of apes that only recently learned to walk upright, let alone think. With another band, such a combination of artistic influences and message may have sounded ponderous and pretentious, but with The Residents it was offset by a wicked sense of humor, and bizarre, joyfully anarchic music.

From those humble beginnings through a 23-year career of consistently prescient insights and willful obscurity, The Residents have remained a seminal underground band. They are a unique rock-and-roll creation: an anonymous band featuring no beloved personalities or celebrities. Instead, they've exploited their uncanny ability to anticipate and deploy new technologies several years ahead of the curve, to become the ultimate "mediated" rock band. Although best known for music, they've been equally active in pioneering the mediums of narrative musical video, multimedia performance art, and now CD-ROM.

Today, The Residents find themselves at the strangest stage yet of a twisted career: their early adoption of interactive CD-ROM technology has brought the group critical acclaim and popular acceptance. With this new format, The Residents have struck pay dirt, finally alighting on the ideal format to combine their multimedia talents.

Their first CD-ROM release, Freak Show, delivered a completely new kind of interactive experience. Rather than provide gaming action, this disc transports users to a foreign and hallucinogenic world where the only objective is to step into the lives of characters and bear witness to their most intimate thoughts and memories. Freak Show's success sent a shock wave through the interactive world. The possibilities of the new medium had finally been blown open, and The Residents had made it happen.

Suddenly, the group is appealing to a broad audience, one that's not only ready to hear their message and gaze through the lens of their demented vision, but that hails them as prophets of the Next Wave. The band is receiving high praise both from its faithful following of underground weirdos and from entertainment executives who want a piece of the digital pie. With contracts signed at interactive publishers Voyager and, most recently, with the Warner Bros./Home Box Office-backed Inscape, The Residents find themselves in an unusual position: their two-decade insistence on making art the way they see it, rather than the way the market dictates, has become a bankable commodity. The world's most insistent subterranean band is having a day in the sun.

Behind the Eye

Despite the recent attention, The Residents remain fundamentally unknown - they've never appeared in public without a costume or disguise. You may recognize them by sight - those detached enormous eyeball heads covered by top hats tilted at a rakish angle, the elegant tuxedo attire recalling a more gracious yesteryear - but you don't know their names. Just four puzzling humans hidden behind giant masks, always staring back at you.

These rockers may be stars but they have no beloved personalities. No Mick the bad boy, Morrissey the painfully sensitive, or Kurt the profoundly disturbed. The Residents refuse to follow the traditional rock-band models - revered backup personalities and requisite sexy, charismatic lead singers. Instead, they provided us with a demented group sense of humor - illustrated by such past efforts as a smiling Dick Clark dressed up as Hitler, adorning the cover of their album The Third Reich 'N' Roll (a statement about the fascism of pop music), and The Commercial Album, The Residents' own Top-40 compilation (40 one-minute songs from the hit parade of some alien, depraved culture). For those hankering for a visual association, The Residents offer only the symbol of the eyeball, an icon in place of celebrity.

This persistent anonymity is founded on a clear philosophical principle. The Residents call it the "Theory of Obscurity," formulated in the band's early days in San Mateo, California. According to the official biography (with scant information provided by an absurdist band that takes perverse pleasure in distorting reality, you can regard this only as possible truth or definite mythology), The Residents were attempting to migrate from Shreveport, Louisiana, to San Francisco in the late 1960s, but never quite made it to the City by the Bay - their truck ran out of gas in nearby San Mateo. Taking this as divine intervention, the band launched its career in this unremarkable suburb. Though they eventually moved to San Francisco in 1972, it was in San Mateo that The Residents met N. Senada, a shadowy figure who looms large in the band's self-created mythology. According to legend, "the mysterious and influential Bavarian N. Senada," one of their earliest mentors, was responsible for launching The Residents on the road to antifame by helping formulate the Theory of Obscurity.

According to this philosophy, artists do their purest work in obscurity, with minimum feedback from any kind of audience. The theory adds that with no audience to consider, artists are free to create work that is true to their own vision.

Homer Flynn and Hardy Fox, directors of The Cryptic Corporation, The Residents' mysterious management organization, will tell you plenty about obscurity, anonymity, and antifame. The two, who also hail from Louisiana, describe themselves as childhood friends and "babysitters" for The Residents, who, Fox and Flynn say, have such a hopelessly artistic attitude they're incapable of handling anything else. The Cryptic Corporation is therefore responsible for all business and other down-to-earth, real-world concerns.

Both Flynn and Fox claim that the Theory of Obscurity was the group's founding principle. "By creating this blanket persona to shield them," Flynn says, "they can avoid the petty ego concerns of 'How big is my name going to be in this type?' and 'How many times is my picture going to be on there this time?'"

Rather than place the group in the same context as a pop band, Fox explains, it makes more sense to think of them as a company - a few creative types united to make a product. "It's more accurate to compare The Residents to a multimedia company like Macromedia," says Fox. "Macromedia's a group of people who think together and create products. The Residents are also people creating products in a variety of media, the latest being CD-ROM. Macromedia makes Director; we make Freak Show."

The whole sense of what a rock band is, Fox claims, must change with the advent of a new age. "The concept that just because artists create musical products they should somehow conform to the same rock-and-roll template is outdated. It's a '60s or '70s template, and while some people still conform, it's quickly disappearing. Why should creating art be about personality? That's for Tiger Beat."

And why should that art be subjected to the outmoded hype systems that have created rock celebrities for decades? Eschewing the usual promotion schemes and publicists, The Residents have their own approach to packaging, every aspect of which they control. The only spin masters at work here are The Residents, controlling every cog in the rock marketing machine: They own Ralph Records (the label that originally produced them and other underground favorites like Fred Frith, Renaldo and the Loaf, Tuxedo Moon, and Snakefinger), as well as their management company The Cryptic Corporation; they create all Residents artwork through their company Pore Know Graphics. But of course, the ultimate packaging is the band: those dapper but mysterious anthropomorphic creatures with those overly developed ocular heads.

Music of the orbs

Although The Residents may not have faces, their sound is unmistakable. First there's the voice, unrelenting in its efforts to get right under your skin. Through a wide range of vocal styles - strangled, menacing, gibbering, pleading, and speaking in unknown tongues - the voice delivers stories from the uncharted territories of the psyche. According to Dave Fricke, senior editor at Rolling Stone and a longtime Residents fan, "The most defining aspect of their music is their vocal style - it's completely peculiar to them."

The music is equally distinctive. Against a complex electronic landscape comes a barrage of ambient and industrial sounds: clattering toy pianos, nasty buzz-saw guitars, lush symphonic breezes, atonal assaults, and unidentifiable noises, distortions, and percussion that sound as if The Residents ran around the studio banging on household appliances. Their compositions challenge every preconceived notion not only of rock and roll, but music itself.

In fact, The Residents insist they're not musicians at all and have no real interest in musicianship. "They've always regarded instruments," says Flynn, "as input devices to get something into the recording studio to start manipulating. The Residents never learned to play instruments, except well enough to get a song recorded." As soon as the music was recorded, "they basically forgot how to play it. For The Residents, the recording studio has always been their primary instrument."

In place of musicianship, The Residents manipulate technology to produce a new kind of sound and artistic identity. According to Flynn, they purchased the first 4-track, 8-track, 16-track, and digital recorders as soon as they came on the market. As longtime Residents collaborator and fellow technophile Penn Jillette puts it, "The Residents have always been willing to take any technology right away and start working with it - the day they can get their hands on the stuff."

As far as the eye can see

As The Residents explored new technologies for creating music, they also became interested in finding new tools to develop the visual aspect of their work. The medium they chose, video recording, was fairly unexplored at the time. According to Barbara London, associate curator for video at the New York Museum of Modern Art, the band defined narrative music video. "The Residents were among the first to develop in tandem the visual and musical elements of a piece," says London. "What they did with their early videos was so vital and exciting because they defined wide-open terrain." The band's "Land of a 1,000 Dances" video (developed for The Third Reich 'N' Roll), and their "One Minute Movies" (from The Commercial Album) are both included in the museum's permanent video collection and Rolling Stone's Rock-Video Hall of Fame.

Although MTV-style rock videos now have the artistic imperative of an extended TV commercial, The Residents defined the medium in a typically subversive fashion. Their first video, "Land of a 1,000 Dances," featured four guys in costumes made entirely out of newspapers, topped with Ku Klux Klan-style newspaper hoods, accompanied by viciously squealing Safeway shopping carts. The video ended with giant veal chops stomping a swastika, The Residents' gleeful destruction of fascism.

Continuing their pursuit of the next visual platform, The Residents went on their first tour in 1981 with The Mole Show. Through artfully woven elements of music, paintings, video, animation, dance, sets, and lighting, they demonstrated technological prowess again in a new form: live multimedia performance.

Having led the way in so many different media, it was inevitable that the band's next great unexplored frontier lay in interactive media. Here was the ideal platform to realize their desire to blend storytelling, music, video, and performance. These latest projects are the efforts that have brought the still-faceless band, in a sense, up from the underground.

Freak Show, their first interactive project, was based on an eponymous album released in 1991. Michael Nash, now president of Inscape (a company he founded in 1994 with backing from both Warner Bros. and HBO), was instrumental in giving The Residents their first CD-ROM contract.

A Residents fan since his days as a media arts critic in Los Angeles, he was working as a producer at The Voyager Company. While he crafted a deal for The Residents with Voyager, the band met up with legendary illustrator and animator Jim Ludtke. With Nash as executive producer and Ludtke in charge of graphics, the Freak Show production team was formed.

Freak Show lets you explore the sad and exotic nether world of the freaks, visiting the characters' trailers to discover their tragic histories. The Residents turn the fun-house mirror back on the audience, taunting, "Everyone comes to the freak show to laugh at the freaks and the geeks ... but nobody laughs when they leave."

CD-ROM made it possible for The Residents to create an inhabitable universe where the audience could walk down its streets, gaze into its back alleys, and see life from The Residents' big-eyed perspective. Fricke observes that the Freak Show vision has always been visible throughout the band's career: "Everything The Residents have done has been a product of creating their own universe and drawing you into a world that's not like the one you go through in real time. They create their own real time. It's the ultimate theme park - but it's not just cheesy rides and overpriced souvenirs, it's a Coney Island of the mind."

The disc was both a critical and a financial success. It made the "Top CDs" lists of many magazines, including Computer Life, MacWeek, and NewMedia, and was written up in a mix of other publications - Rolling Stone, The Wall Street Journal, Time, Entertainment Weekly, and Publishers Weekly. NewMedia proclaimed it the "best original CD-ROM piece around," while Entertainment Weekly declared "Freak Show sucks you in with its hypnotic sympathy for the damned."

Freak Show's success was also a wake-up call to the interactive development community. With its first CD-ROM effort, this wacky art band had completely redefined the possibilities of the medium, providing a much-needed shot in the arm, not to mention a rush of investment dollars to the fledgling community. "Freak Show is so phenomenally good because their sweat and attention is on every single frame," Jillette enthuses. "You won't find that on any other CD-ROM. It's the opposite of shovelware; it's obsessiveware."

In the years prior to Freak Show, says Nash, "People in the interactive development industry were mainly thinking of CD-ROM as the new book or film. Then Freak Show came along and created a powerful experience that was really driven by how the CD-ROM medium works. It enunciated the possibility of combining a narrative-, visual art-, and music-based experience that could be so immediate and so powerful people would get it."

Give my regards to Siliwood

Bad Day on the Midway, The Residents' latest CD-ROM, will be produced by Inscape and released on Halloween of this year. It reunites the Freak Show production team of Nash and Ludtke. With Bad Day, however, The Residents have made another shift in the development process: this disc was initially conceived as an interactive multimedia project, with all of the elements, including music and narrative, developed in tandem.

Advertised as a cross between Twin Peaks and SimCity, Bad Day continues the exploration of carnival characters. The comparison to SimCity comes from Bad Day's new programming technique, a probability-based engine that will vary the possible sets of interactions with each new play. Based on your decisions when interacting with characters, you'll be presented with unique and varying results. Nash describes this randomizing as "an environment that is turning in on itself. Things that you do or don't do, or what does or doesn't happen to the characters affects where you'll be able to go as the day moves toward its various conclusions. It's a vision of the consequences of choice and decision as a kind of digital karma."

And, Nash says, Bad Day introduces Ludtke's next-generation animation techniques, with "otherworldly characters that are somewhere between actors and animations. They come up and talk to you and really establish a bond."

While The Residents created their own label in the music industry to circumvent mainstream distribution, they are also in a unique position in the CD-ROM industry - they have three deals with three different labels. As opposed to the world of music contracts, which demands exclusive rights to an artist, the structure of CD-ROM deals is still wide open. Flynn believes this multiple-label structure works in the band's favor: "What it means is that there are three different groups all out there trying to push The Residents' product for their own reasons. If one label had it all, I don't think the total push would be as great," Flynn says.

So, after 23 years of reaping the artistic benefits of antifame, The Residents have suddenly been thrust into the limelight. Does it mean these underground subverts are in danger of selling out, of letting the almighty dollar turn their eyeball heads?

It's an unlikely scenario when you consider that the corporate suits are buying into the Residents' "outsider" outlook, one that has already given the band its unique take on the CD-ROM industry. While corporations pour investment dollars into an industry criticized for lacking vision and direction, The Residents possess both and they know how to steer.

Rolling Stone's Fricke says there's an important lesson for artists to learn from The Residents' career: "The fact is, you don't have to sell yourself down the river. If you say what you mean and mean what you say, then somebody will get it; the more you do it and the more you stick to it, the odds are people will pick up on it."