Rockissue

Stage Settings: The Residents' Commercial Album, Lost in Non-Music

A Nickle if Your Dick's This Big, released in 2019, serves as the official release of two early Residents artifacts: The Warner Bros. Album and Baby Sex (or B. S., as it is titled on this release for all the predictable censorious reasons). The first of these was originally a demo sent to Warner Bros. Records in 1971. With the band's previous moniker, Delta Nudes, having been abandoned in favor of anonymity (only to return as one of four "fake" band names used on their debut official release, the Santa Dog E. P.), label executive Hal Halverstadt returned the demo to the "residents" of the address in San Mateo, California, where the band lived and worked, leading eventually to a new moniker. Before the name change, though, a live performance on October 18th, 1971, at San Francisco spot the Boarding House, as well as another live set at the wedding of their collaborator Snakefinger, were cobbled together with studio material to form Baby Sex, using the name, Residents Uninc., under which Santa Dog would come out in late 1972 (besides Delta Nudes, the other band names used for the individual tracks on that E. P. were Ivory and the Braineaters, the College Walkers, and Arf and Omega (Featuring the Singing Lawn Chairs)). Most accounts of the demo album only claim that portions of the Boarding House show were used for Baby Sex, not the wedding, but the liner notes here, written by Jim Knipfel, refers to both shows. A Nickle also includes the unadultered recordings (or what remains, or what is remotely listenable) of both of these gigs plus a third gig (that track called ‘Chris' Party’, because it indeed took place at a party). And let us not forget that the Warners Bros. Album had been released in remixed form, as W.B. RMX in 2004. And it had first been officially released as a vinyl-only Record Store Day rip-off in 2018. Confused yet? Welcome to the Residents' discography.

The two-C. D. set's liner notes handily set the stage for appreciating early Residents music. Knipfel writes, "The Residents' long-held claim that they didn't know how to play their instruments was no cheap fabrication for the sake of publicity. [...] They did, however, know how to play a tape recorder." The "Pre-Residents," as Knipfell calls them, were a loose circle of friends interested in the visual arts, especially filmmaking, who had moved to the San Francisco area after attending (or at least living in the vicinity of) Louisiana Tech, in none other than Ruston, Louisiana, the same small city that twentysome years later produced another raft of exiles in the form of the Elephant Six Recording Company—except those exiles mostly went to Athens, Georgia. In the Bay area, these young men, part of a large wave of migrants to the famed "flower power" epicenter, tried to pursue their visually-inclined interests until, as Knipfel would have it, fate intervened. First, in the form of another Louisiana arrival, Ronald Sheehan, who came to stay for a summer, accompanied by a trove of musical instruments. Around the same time, another generous non-Resident, a former soldier of the Vietnam war, befriended by one of the "Pre-Residents," gave the budding group a good-quality two-track reel-to-reel tape recorder.

Are we to conclude that, if they had come across free or cheap filmmaking equipment, they would not have emphasized music as much as they did? Not necessarily.... Turning to Ian Shirley's book Never Known Questions: Five Decades of the Residents, a history as detailed as any that honors the band members' famed anonymity is likely to be, we find plenty of evidence that the "Pre-Residents" began to branch out from their earlier visual-arts interests into music concurrently or before any efforts at filmmaking. And those musical pursuits were extensive; they let the individuals involved get to know each other and hone each others' interests; and were pursued with at least some professionalism in mind, thus the demo being sent to Warner Brothers in the first place. On the other hand, Shirley relates that as soon as the band moved to San Francisco in 1972 their large studio space was equipped for both sound and film. Sheehan, quoted extensively by Shirley regarding these early days, also points to the Residents' broad conception of their art, "more toward theatrics and film," as a reason why he did not stick around the Bay Area. After Santa Dog, they began working on a film, Vileness Fats, that was never finished, in part due to limited cinematic means at their disposal. This strong early interest in the audiovisual foreshadows their theatrical side becoming increasingly dominant in later years, to the point where at times the musical portion of their concerts have sadly seemed liked an afterthought.

In the meantime, though, music remained the band's focus. The early Residents albums: Meet the Residents, 1974; The Third Reich Rock 'n Roll, 1976; Fingerprince, 1977; Not Available, mythically recorded after the first album then not released until 1978 per the band's "theory of obscurity," but as Shirley suggests likely recorded over a wider expanse of time; Duck Stab/ Buster & Glen, 1978; Eskimo, 1979; and Commercial Album, 1980, remain for many unobsessive fans the "go-to" listens of choice. Beginning with the first "Mole" album in 1981, the band's history and discography would grow more complex as its theatrical and filmmaking endeavors grew more significant. The many multi-volume endeavors, live albums, audiovideo projects, and merchandising tie-ins that came later retrospectively give the earlier albums, in contrast, a special status as distinct projects, reified by their "just the music, m'am" presentation.

If any sort of consensus exists regarding the Commercial Album, it goes something like this: a provocative and amusing concept brilliantly brought to fruition, making for one of the band's "classic" albums. Sadly, that consensus is at best only half-right. To be fair, the half-right portion is more important than the half-wrong: an album of 40 songs, each roughly one minute in length, definitely was brought to fruition, offering plenty in the way of intriguing songs, often little more than sketches, but backed by sounds more developed. This feat alone seems to have ensured the album its continued salience as a cultural artifact; I am reminded of the Magnetic Fields' Stephen Merritt asserting that of course his triple-album extravaganza 69 Love Songs garnered a glowing critical reception—give writers something easy to write about, they thank you in turn. But the forty songs of the Commercial Album can hardly be said to match the supposed concept behind the album, which itself seems simplistic to the point of self-parody. Critics, though, have never let that bother them; they have parroted the concept's set-up ad nauseum over the years. Moreover, without this ill-fated concept with its self-imposed 40-songs-40-minutes mandate, a better album could have resulted, an excellent culmination of a decade of work, in contrast to the actual album foreshadowing the band's "over-thinking" and gimmick-prone/ video-centric output to come. But would it have received so much attention? Fingerprince and Duck Stab, and later Mark of the Mole and its sequel, The Tunes of Two Cities, are all better albums, but are talked about less, so I guess not.

To understand why the songs, in my estimation, do not match the supposed concept behind the album, and moreover why the concept itself, such as it is, was poorly thought-out, turn to Knipfel's notes for the Commercial Album's entry in the same Residents Preserved reissue series that brought us A Nickel. Having chopped up and reformed several pop ditties for Meet the Residents and Third Reich, he argues that the Residents discovered that distillation was the key to crafting an effective uniquely-Residents approach to the art of song. Because, he writes, "Pop music is mostly a repetition of two types of musical and lyrical phrases, the verse and the chorus," and because "these elements usually repeat three times in a three[-]minute song, the type usually found on top-forty radio," one can "cut out the fat and a pop song is only one minute long." In turn, "One minute is also the length of most commercials, and therefore their corresponding jingles," and "jingles are the music of America." The final two points are such broad sweeps—and I simply do not care about advertising. So put them aside once you spend maybe 10 seconds pondering them and realize that many commercials are shorter than a minute, that the jingles do not play for the entire length of many commercials—and who wants to say things like something is the "music of America" except moronic politicians anyway? (Yes, music critics do too. Look at that self-mockery maneuver at work.)

The propositions about popular music are nearly as bad. The first, about verses and choruses (the word, refrain, which I prefer, will be used interchangeably with "chorus" here), obviously ignores the existence of bridges and solos, both infinitely common in pop music, but also elides the crucial fact that the subtle, intricate variations on the verse-refrain dynamic serve as the primary appeal of popular song. More important still, the repetition of these two "phrases" (that Knipfel would define verses and refrains as phrases may say more about the limitations of Commercial Album, as we will see below) three times, or two or four times, or however many times, is also crucial to successful songs; and of course refrains are often repeated more often than that, and quite regularly more often than there are number of verses. Granted, parodies often take the form of caricatures; the Residents are not offering here a treatise on the compositional methods of songs. But "proof is in the pudding," and one can easily imagine better parodies of popular song at its simplest and most anodyne taking the form of John Oswald Plunderphonics-like excisions of the "fat," as Knipfel puts it, from original recordings. Then see if the results actually work. Guess what? They would not. For good reason, Oswald's work tends toward collage not satire (or collage-as-satire, closer to Meet the Residents and The Third Reich Rock 'n Roll).

In other words, however effectively the Residents reformulated Rock music on Meet and Third Reich—at the peak of the genre's popularity no less—with Commercial Album we enter into the territory of self-parody or at least parody-gone-awry, turned in on itself and thus resulting in simply a bad version of the parodied. Knipfel proclaims that Third Reich made a "deeply subversive point about the role the recording industry and Top Forty radio played in brainwashing America's youth," only leaving this reader to conclude that Knipfel himself has fallen prey to brainwashing. (And, more importantly, that any "point" Third Reich could make would surely be a bore compared to the brilliant music.) The notion that any Residents album is "deeply subversive" is about as ridiculous as the exaggerated claims that had been made at the time about the revolutionary changes wrought by Rock music, or that Punks wearing the Nazi symbol, like the Residents putting Dick Clark in a Nazi uniform on the cover of Third Reich, were fighting anti-Semitism. No, they were just being silly. People can be silly, they try to provoke. And popular music did not change the world, but it certainly was a major part of commercial, mass culture embodying and furthering the possibilities of post-Second World War democracy, anti-imperialism, and anti-racism—itself a bold-enough claim that I would defend. Bolder, outlandish claims... the Residents supposedly mock them—or, as Knipfel would have it, "subvert" them—with albums like Third Reich. The Residents, having, as Knipfel writes, attempted to write pop songs on Duck Stab/ Buster & Glen, thus engage in self-mockery... self-subversion? And of course we can presume with reasonable assuredness—and not disrespectfully—that Residents fans anywhere, and a whole lot of critics, would gladly ironically embrace the notion of self-mockery to espcape from their ideas facing any serious scrutiny. For example, in his liner essay, Knipfel reverts to ridiculous exaggerations ("pop songs are just bloated commercial jingles used to sell t-shirts" or asserting that the songs on the Commercial Album are "outrageously catchy"), a blurring of the lines between sarcasm and seriousness that would work fine if his essay was at all amusing.

The way that the Commercial Album's conceptualization and production is described by Shirley in Never Known Questions unfortunately does not make the process seem any less misdirected and hubristic. Jay Clem, who alongside John Kennedy was one of the several individuals identified as members of the Residents' company, the Cryptic Corporation, who also may have been a Resident himself, at least a secondary player to the two main composers, Hardy Fox and Homer Flynn, is quoted by Shirley to the effect that the Commercial Album critiques the superficiality of popular music by "incorporating more substance in one minute than most pop songs do in three or four." This ideal sounds nice, but as we will see below the success of the Residents in actually achieving it certainly remains debatable. Fox himself explained that the songs were not originally so brief. They were composed without regard to length, then edited down and otherwise electronically manipulated to make the final one-minute compositions. Upon reading this, I cannot but groan. If Fox, Flynn, and company had done the same thing to Duck Stab/ Buster & Glen, they would have ruined one of their best albums. The songs on there are short enough. There is no "fat" on them, or, to be precise, fat that one would cut away, except perhaps on ‘Birthday Boy’. Are we really to reach the agonizing conclusion that the better tracks on Commercial Album could have been presented in their earlier, longer forms? Sadly, yes.

So the album fails to match Duck Stab. That fact itself does not mean that I am not giving the songs a fair shake. After all, we can ignore the concept, forget that these 40 pieces are claimed to be (by someone somewhere... maybe the artists themselves—does not matter) perfectly-distilled songs. Did I not say above that some of the music itself is good, even if the concept falters? After all, the band's anonymity allows for the deflection of any conceits ascribed to them, before we even come to any backtracking onto the irony defense. The apparent failures to adhere to the strictures that the band may have imposed on themselves detract from appreciating the music. They do not impair the music, however, once that distraction is put aside. What does: for the most part, the Residents here have not distilled full songs into one-minute gems, meaning that the large number of songs means that too many of them are subpar, distracting from the potential of the also-many that are not subpar. They are fragments of songs, short story-songs, and a few instrumentals that could have come together to form a larger whole but instead often seem abandoned. Another way of stating this, and putting the band's artistic failure here in stark relief: sure, they were a few years ahead of Roger Waters and his Rock-music-as-fascism concept, but at least The Wall is only slightly tedious. Commercial Album, extending Third Reich's notion that Rock music had been imposed on listeners, become akin to advertising in its indoctrinating, subliminal power, is persistently tedious, any momentum it gains as a cohesive listening experience falling apart due to the arbitrary temporal restriction at work. On top of that, the veneer of spirited, arch humor that the band's spokesmen and many critics have bestowed upon the record is not matched by much in the way of humor in the songs themselves, again in contrast to Third Reich and especially Meet the Residents.

A plausible interpretation for the Commercial Album's conceptual difficulty, based on reading Shirley's book, goes like this: the band, having devoted such extensive work to Not Available and Eskimo, but also engaging in numerous other promotional and community efforts, were wearing themselves thin. They—to be exact, and maintain their treasured anonymity, the Cryptic Corporation that supposedly represented them—established their own record label, Ralph Records, releasing music by Snakefinger, Fred Frith, the Art Bears, M. X.-80 Sound, Tuxedomoon, Renaldo and the Loaf, and Yello. They were making short films. Having made a promotional clip for Third Reich, they commissioned Graeme Whifler to make videos for the Residents and Ralph Records artists. Whifler and the Residents would go on to make several videos for Commercial Album tracks. And they were making connections with British writers and artists who helped tremendously in creating the whole mystique of the Residents. Jon Savage, later the author of one of the finest books on Rock music, England's Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond, took the lead here, followed by a host of critics at the weekly music magazines that gave U. K. popular music such a frenetic energy in those days. In short, in Shirley's narrative, financial concerns and social networking come to the fore quite suddenly around 1978. It's called "getting old."

But let us return to the music. From the first track of the Commercial Album, the concept's pretenses do not hold up under scrutiny. Why does the first track have an extended instrumental introduction that is repeated pointlessly as background when the vocals come in to do their run-through of the same melody? Why does the second track repeat its instrumental introduction? The fourth and fifth tracks are examples of those that could easily have been shortened by excising some of the lyric. At other times, the band does succeed in creating a composition without needless repetition, e.g. the seventh track. Running through the album track by track, we find that most of the songs have little in the way of what any listener would consider a chorus. And as in most of the Residents' early work, the rhythms are simple, at times stilted—not so much a problem on the earlier albums, on which such rhythmic retardation accords well enough with the willful primitivism of the music (or, on the other hand, the experimentation with tuning systems and minimalist forms heard on Fingerprince). In short, while we have some solos and plenty of bridges, there are few of the rousing refrains and rhythmic subtlety that give the repeating structures of popular song their alluring power. And Knipfel's claim that each song has a verse and a chorus is downright odd.

‘Easter Woman’: a good start, if only because this could be considered a song with a chorus and no verse; either way, the singing comes later, on top of—as noted above—a repeat of the instrumental portion that begins the track. There is a sort of bridge after this intro: the portion with a lyric, "way down."

‘Perfect Love’: largely instrumental, with a verse that is topped off by a sort of tag line. The verse melody is different from the underlying melody accompanying the rhythm base that begins the track; could that be a chorus? Seems more like a riff.

‘Picnic Boy’: guitar solo as a bridge between two verses, with an intensification of the instrumental backing toward the end of the track.

‘End of Home’: only verses, very sing-song, melodically deficient—and tiresome; the non-vocal portions are better, but not by much. This is the first of several tracks that could have been set aside if the concept of 40-songs-in-40-minutes had been rejected.

‘Amber‘: an instrumental bridge between two verses; synthesizers take the lead during the outro. The verse melody could have functioned as a refrain with better development of this piece.

‘Japanese Watercolor’: minimalist repetition of, and slight variations on, a melody, with some guitar embellishments; no vocals. Arguably, our second song that deserves a place on the cutting-room floor.

‘Secrets’: the opening instrumental portion is distinct from the vocal melody that mid-way through is added atop the former; again, one could hardly define the latter as a refrain. There is enough going on here that one would not want to cut it. The track ends abruptly and, as such, could have useful as a "glue" track in a revised version of the album.

‘Die in Terror’: verses only; a fragment of a song but the relatively-complex instrumental structure overall makes this a compelling if inessential track.

‘Red Rider’: again, verses only; the melody of the underlying instrumentation is plenty catchy and could have been used as a refrain as well; some modulation of this instrumental backing in the outro.

‘My Second Wife’: and again, verses only, with the instrumental backing closely following the melody. The lyrics offer a dumb short story. Reject.

‘Floyd’: an instrumental with little development but a propulsive feeling that could make the track useful as a pace setter.

‘Suburban Bathers’: finally a proper refrain ("I see the sea"...); sadly the singing is dreadful and this refrain has the melodic dexterity of the very "murky depths" that the lyrics refer to. Perhaps the worst track on the album.

‘Dimples and Toes’: verses split by the instrumental passage that serves as an intro, bridge, and outro. Effective enough as an expression of awkward male sexuality, but this is a rare instance on the album of the vocals outshining the instrumental support.

‘The Nameless Souls’: same structure as the previous track, but without an outro. Synthesizer sounds embellish the track to good effect, but the melody is blunt and annoying.

‘Love Leaks Out’: one the better instrumental melodies on the album as the main attraction to start; then a half-formed verse. Perhaps the instrumental portion could have been combined with something better.

‘Act of Being Polite’: another narrative delivered in a sing-song style. A nice array of overlapping keyboard lines forms the base of the track and could have been better used in another setting.

‘Medicine Man’: an instrumental that repeats itself with minor variations. Filler.

‘Tragic Bells’: another "tag line" concluding the verse, both in an instrumental version that starts the track and its matching vocal counterpart.

‘Loss of Innocence’: a narrative; more of a recitation than a song; as with many of these tracks, the non-vocal elements vastly outshine the desultory vocals.

‘The Simple Song’: verses (or choruses with no verses) with matching instrumental outro over a distinct instrumental backing. Again, the vocal portion disappoints.

‘Ups and Downs’: a verse and an instrumental bridge followed by a second verse, with instrumental melody underlying the entire track being distinct but not worthy of a refrain.

‘Possessions’: the vocals follows instrumental melody; again, no refrain. At this point in the album, too many of the songs sound alike. The stilted rhythms and mealy-mouthed vocals certainly do not help.

‘Give It to Someone Else’: a verse repeated twice with instrumental backing having distinct elements; then comes an intensification of the verse that could count as a refrain.

‘Phantom’: another non-vocal track; switching back and forth between two sections, so perhaps somewhat of a refrain. Another track that could have been "glue" on a better album.

‘Less Not More’: a repeating instrumental motif on top of which is a verse ending with a mantra of sorts, “less not more”, a philosophy that could have helped this album if put into practice more consistently.

‘My Work Is So Behind’: another refrain—finally; plus an instrumental outro after this refrain. The singer suddenly grasps the concept of... singing. A highlight.

‘Birds in the Trees’: a call-and-response verse with instrumental backing offering perhaps the best sounds, in terms of timbre, on the album.

‘Handful of Desire’: the instrumental backing and verse are unique. A worthy, if not exemplary, inclusion.

‘Moisture’: a verse and guitar-solo bridge followed by a second verse—again, do the Residents consider a bridge to be a refrain? Nonetheless, a fine track overall.

‘Love Is...’: an instrumental melody breaks away to a short chanting vocal part then returns with some variation. Maybe a song that would have worked better as part of one of the band's narrative albums.

‘Troubled Man’: a verse, hardly noteworthy, develops out of a decent instrumental backing. Not much to this, arguably reject-worthy.

‘La La’: an excellent non-vocal track, modulating between two portions... so somewhat of a refrain?

‘Loneliness’: two sing-song verses over distinct instrumental backing. The vocal is the opposite of compelling.

‘Nice Old Man’: a verse matching a keyboard melody, broken up by repeating stabs of a monolithic keyboard sound.

‘The Talk of Creatures’: a verse intensifies as the song progresses, with distinct instrumental elements backing it, making for one of the better-developed songs here.

‘Fingertips’: a verse with a nice instrumental background (the violin, or violin-sounding something, presumably played by Snakefinger, adding some sorely-needed variety) that leads to guitar-solo instrumental break.

‘In Between Dreams’: a pointless instrumental track; little to no development of initial melody.

‘Margaret Freeman’: one of the busiest productions on the album, with an up-tempo base with lots of pleasant noises on top, accompanied unfortunately only by a non-descript verse.

‘The Coming of the Crow’: yet another non-vocal track; a guitarist playing over another noisy base of sounds that is pleasant enough.

‘When We Were Young’: the guitar takes the lead on another instrumental track, after a keyboard melody begins the piece; that melody returns at the end. Not much of a closer; rejectable.

The song miniatures of Commerical Album not only pale in comparison to Duck Stab. Stepping further away, we would be remiss if we failed to mention the Minutemen. The post-Punk trio from San Pedro, California, as their moniker indicates, tended to keep their songs short. But in doing so, they did not seem to have any delusions about achieving what the standard popular song does more concisely and (thus?) more effectively. Comparing Commercial Album, hardly the Residents' exemplary work, with Double Nickels on the Dime, not only the Minutemen's best album but one of the best of its post-Hardcore/ American Indie era/ genre, is unfair. Nonetheless, the urge to compare them overwhelms. As with many of the tracks on Commercial Album, the Minutemen do not offer a distillation of the verse-chorus (or verse-chorus-bridge-solo) structure. They built up each piece individually, not taking any standard approach as a given. The difference being: the Minutemen seem well aware this is what they are doing, the Residents do not. The original Double Nickels double-L.P. release features 45 tracks in under 80 minutes. In other words, despite their moniker, the Minutemen rarely, if ever, purposely restricted the length of their compositions to one minute, even as good deal of them do end up being very close to a minute. The brevity of any given piece also rarely turns into an excuse for a song's truncated development, as it too often does on Commercial Album.

The notion of an alternate Commercial Album, wherein the band presented somewhere between 10 and 20 songs with relatively-predictable structures, though a flight of fancy on my part, cannot be easily dismissed. This album could have been a culmination of a roughly a decade of work on the Residents' part. With the exception of Brian Eno, no other music artist in the Seventies made sound recording as central to their work. Again, the Residents "knew how to play the tape recorder." Shirley's book points to a short essay by Chris Cutler in his book File Under Popular that captures well the unique position held by the Residents. Their initial interest in the visual arts and especially filmmaking, as Cutler puts it, "carried over into their sound work [...] neglecting 'musical' syntax for a more direct targetting of the social and psychological responses engendered by, for instance, tone of voice, or the cultural conventions of film and TV soundtracks." Later, in explaining the "prodigal creativity" of the early Residents albums, he adds that the band "belong to the story of the investigation of what is productively unique in the medium of recording. They came, not as composers or performers seeking to extend their skills, but as artists, in a crucial sense musically unattached but able to see—indeed fascinated by—the largely ignored potential of the new technology. The Residents were, above all, a group born, educated[,] and nourished in the recording studio. [...] They quickly recognised what a studio was and how it could be used to compose, construct[,] and carry from conception to completion soundworks that had little or nothing to do with played music." Not to beat a dead horse here... but Commercial Album, in light of this apt interpretation, seems like an unfortunate step away from such deft exploration of recorded sound in favor of a concept too clever for words—and, at times, sound.

Cutler also emphasizes the fictional status of the voices heard in Residents music. This factor goes hand-in-hand with the band's focus in its earlier years on recording instead of performance (or film instead of performance). Because the Residents had broken free from the conception of recorded music as documentation of performances by known persons, the listener is relatively free to accept the narrators as characters, archetypes, etc.—"relatively," because the listener is always free to do so; but without an artist's anonymity, he finds it harder to make this leap. As Cutler puts it, the Residents, instead of "an urge to self-expression," "were more interested in the invocation of characters." Amend that slightly: the characters of course serve as self-expression. What he means is that the characters in the music (and on stage, as the years went by and live performance become more significant to the Residents' work) do not correspond directly to the artists in a one-to-one relation; and the listeners do not assume the words uttered or personas put on display correspond directly to the artists' "real life" existence. Again, this perspective should be the one we take. Otherwise, would we not stupidly think that Johnny Cash really did shoot a man in Reno just to watch him die? Alas, we often fail to do so.

The downside of the Residents' anonymity comes from the tendency of listeners and critics to focus excessively on the subject, that is, on the brunt fact of the anonymity itself, rather than accepting the anonymity as an invitation to avoid what in the literary world is called the biographical fallacy. Cutler reveals and comments on this invitation: "If they had said 'who' they were [...] no one would have cared. [...] Being nameless and faceless [...] opened an enticing ground for speculation and projection." But what kind of speculation and projection? However much distance Cutler places between himself and these critics, for whom he was both subject and peer, being a musician, record producer, and writer, he is being awfully generous to critics "who needed to make their mark as self-reflecting masters rather than hack dupes of mass-culture." As suggested by the unthinking exhortations about the concept behind the Commercial Album, Residents commentators and fans are inclined to embrace the anonymity of the artists and the fictionality of their representatives (whether they be characters on stage or off: continuing to portray, as Shirley does, after all these years, Fox and Flynn not as the actual Residents, which they are, but as the men behind the Cryptic Corporation, which they also are) and to anoint this anonymity with the status of perpetual subversion of audience expectations, when in fact it is exactly what the Residents' audience expects. That is, they are as likely to be dupes as masters.

The Preserved reissue of Commercial Album offers all the bonus treats one would expect. The previously-unreleased material only further suggests than a better album could have resulted from better editing and the abandonment of the 40-tracks-in-40-minutes concept. As Knipfel relates, "ten suitable sounding, but hitherto unheard, pieces the group recently rediscovered in their archive" are included, with titles as promising as ‘Kraftwerk’ and ‘Electronic Elaborate Waste’‘, except... Knipfel only names nine songs, the tenth apparently being the next track, a Ramones cover: ‘We're a Happy Family’. Somewhat annoyingly, the portions of the Preserved series' notes that explain the provenance of the bonus tracks often come across as sloppily as this typo. Also, one of the aforementioned nine tracks, ‘Elevator Lady’, Knipfel says is an early draft of ‘Ups and Downs’. Thus we are left with eight songs that could serve as fodder for a fan's alternate version of the Commercial Album, or ten if we include the two songs, ‘Shut Up, Shut Up’ and ‘And I Was Alone’, that the band released at the time on Commercial Single, an E.P. sampler of the album.

–Justin J. Kaw, April 2022