‘Commercial Album’: when The Residents sold-out
For over half a century, San Francisco art collective The Residents has been conjuring some of the most subversive and confounding avant-garde to ever orbit the mainstream. Too acerbic for the hippies and out-iconoclasming the punks, the eyeball-masked incognitos cut a seriously unorthodox reputation in the world of alternative music, releasing a string of bizarre LPs across the 1970s that would prove influential to artists across Devo, Primus, and Ween.
Operating under their theory of obscurity, the members that surrounded the group’s ‘representatives’ Hardy Fox (who died in 2017) and Homer Flynn remain committed to their anonymous shroud to this day.
Following Eskimo‘s chilly, immersive, long-form narrative, The Residents decided to give the pop world exactly what they wanted. Seeking an earnestly more commercial approach, the ocular outfit conceived their next record to be 40 one-minute jingles, recommending each track be played three times in a row to craft a proper song. Released in 1980, Commercial Album boasted Brian Eno, David Byrne, and XTC’s Andy Partridge among some of the visiting guests eager to get stuck into the ensemble’s novel japery.
Their seventh LP chops up the atonal cartoon fever heard on 1978’s Duck Stab! EP, presenting their trademark wriggling synths and murky percussion scoring singer’s swampy, Louisiana drawl vocal murmurs. For the European audience, four of the album’s cuts plus two tracks left off the finalised LP ‘Shut Up Shut Up’ and ‘And I Was Alone’ were released on the Commercial Single 7″, selected for the teaser as the band thought its exclusive songs were “too trendy”.
Crafting a typically eye-popping cover, John Travolta’s and Barbara Streisand’s green-filled faces are slapped with The Residents standing upside down, forming the celebrities’ eyes. Its back cover illustrated the conceptual shenanigans even further, listing the 40 tracks in a grid similar to Billboard’s Hot 100 pop chart at the time.
Furthering their ‘sell-out’, the group label Ralph Records bought 40 one-minute advertising spots on San Francisco’s KRFC radio station, incrementally broadcasting the entire album across the channel’s commercial slots. “The conception, execution and marketing of the LP was intended to be more commercial than anything we’ve done so far,” Ralph managing director Jay Clem declared at the time. “When it came time to make the choice of a station for the world premiere, we really had only one choice since KFRC is the top-rated Top 40 station in the market and is a consistent national award-winner.
Despite the challenging nature of the material, Commercial Album came ready-made with a series of arresting videos to feed a promo-hungry MTV that awaited around the corner. The band and filmmaker Graeme Whifler collaborated on the One Minute Movies short film, sequencing ‘Moisture’, ‘The Act of Being Polite’, ‘Perfect Love’, and ‘The Simple Song’ into a promotional four-minute clip encompassing animation, puppetry, and live-action, notably including a manic snap of band acquaintance Snakefinger’s frenzied guitar attack.
The last of the ‘album era’ before the group’s embrace of stage production theatre, coupled with a sonic shift toward the digital crispness that would define their ’80s output with their purchase of the E-mu Emulator, for many Commercial Album stands as The Residents’ last ‘classic’ record, an album that still bristles with insurgent ambition 45 years later.
