693 The Residents - Meet The Residents (1974)

Studio Album - Avant Garde

About the Act:

"The Residents are an American art collective best known for their avant-garde music and multimedia works". So says Wikipedia.  A group of high school friends in Shreveport Louisiana started making amateur home recordings in 1965. In 1966 they decided to travel to San Francisco to join the budding hippie movement. However, their truck broke down in San Mateo, California, so they decided to stay there. They named themselves "The Residents" after a rejection slip sent to them by Warner Bros.

Over the years they have made many Avant Garde art works of varying strangeness, including releasing around 50 albums. Who they are is a secret, they don't give interviews, and at times their work has been deliberately provocative.

About the Album:

This was their first album, and was recorded in a home studio, in mono, using many overdubs. Some of the tracks are very mangled versions of otherwise recognisable songs, for example "Boots" is rooted in "These Boots are Made for Walking".

My History with this Album:

None

Re-useable statement on musical weirdness:

Some music is weird. When I am reviewing something that is, I often feel the need to say the same things, and so, this re-useable statement is born.

Quality is a strange thing, whenever I try to get to grips with it, it fizzles away like mist. There are many different qualities we look for in music, some objective, but many are contextual. For music that steps outside the mainstream, an additional quality is added, that of subverting the form. From a pure skill perspective, some modern art paintings could be described as "a child could have painted this" - to which the presumed response could be "Exactly. Isn't that great?". Some of the most influential Avant Garde music deliberately demonstrates what stepping out of convention can sound like. Given the many dimensions of music (form, harmony, melody, rhythm, performance, lyrics, production, and probably more) there are many ways of stepping out of the circle of "normal".

This means that "being weird" can be an easy win. Sometimes unusual music is clearly highly skilled, sometimes it seems to reject the norms of skill also. Where is the boundary between bad and deliberately bad? Is there a boundary? Is it all about perception? Sometimes it seems like artists can do anything at all, and it will be accepted as ground-breakingly subversive, as long as the artist takes it incredibly seriously, almost making people applaud it by force of will. There is a dichotomy here, because in order to have acclaim, the music needs to be accessible enough to enough people to gain that acclaim, while the nature of "being weird" is, by its nature making it less accessible. 

There are some people who seem to deliberately embrace things that are difficult or inaccessible to others - and in music this can be the most challengingly unusual, loud, aggressive, sweary, or nice parts of music. I'm OK with this, but I struggle when they then give the impression that it makes them a connoisseur, a better listener than other people, because they "get" the weird music. I deplore this attitude, and don't think anybody should be looked down on because they don't like Frank Zappa, or Rammstein, or Henry Cow, or Patagonian Nose Flute music, or anything else for that matter. However, I'm not immune to this musical elitism, so if you really like Baby Shark, please don't tell me.

I have found that I like some unusual music, but not all, which makes me wonder what are the qualities I enjoy in the stuff I like. I have no clear answer to this, but I think I am more open to it being unusual if that is not all of the music, so unusual sections in the context of more "normal" music seems to impress me more. Maybe because it becomes clear that the musicians can play well.

At the end of the day, regardless of something being ground-breaking, challenging, subversive, ironic, clever, badly-recorded, experimental, deliberately tasteless or just aggressive, the bottom line is whether I enjoy listening to it. It's all about the listener experience.

Review:

In 1974 this would have been very weird. It is still very weird. It is difficult listening, and falls under the category of things that sound unskilful, but that's probably deliberate. There are a lot of non-musical sounds, including voice pops. There's quite a bit of looping, probably using tape loops (looping seems to be a feature of this sort of weirdness, Pink Floyd used it a lot). There are musical elements, horns, a piano, drums, and other instruments. In the main these are out of time, out of tune, often in different keys and seemingly badly played. The whole thing sounds badly recorded as if it was recorded from a tinny speaker in a tv, and is in mono (a stereo version was released in 1977, apparently). Quite a bit of the vocals are done in an absurd, parodying way. Apparently the lyrics are "Dadaist" - I don't know what that means. Critics compared it to Captain Beefheart and The Mothers of Invention. I can hear that similarity, but that may not mean much to you.

In the absence of evidence to the contrary, I feel like they have used being unusual as a cover for being rubbish. Strangely, I think I might have enjoyed it more if it was better recorded. It is interesting in some ways in its unusual-ness, but ultimately, I feel like the relentless breaking of the norms of music is really all that it has going for it, and in other senses it's basically The Emperor's New Clothes. As a listening experience it didn't repulse me, but it didn't particularly engage me either.

5.5/10

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/7kcmbVtZSqpBAK5kPiMYfW

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7E7318AC48FA5BF5

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meet_the_Residents