Tune(s) of the Week: The Residents

The Residents are an avant garde arts group from Louisiana that specialize in conceptual musical recordings and performances. In the 1979 the group came up with the concept of making very short, jingle-like songs. They decided to strip back their compositions to about a minute apiece, following these four points:

Point one: Pop music is mostly a repetition of two types of musical and lyrical phrases, the verse and the chorus.

Point two: These elements usually repeat three times in a three minute song, the type usually found on top-40 radio.

Point three: Cut out the fat and a pop song is only one minute long. Then record albums can hold their own top-40, twenty minutes per side.

Point four: One minute is also the length of most commercials, and therefore their corresponding jingles.

Point five: Jingles are the music of America.

The result was “The Commercial Album”, a collection of 40 one minute songs. Featuring secret guest appearances by likes of David Byrne and Brian Eno, The Residents showed how that they could tackle traditional song writing as well as they could long-form conceptual pieces.

To promote the album the group paid for 40 advertisement slots on the most popular rock radio station in their native San Francisco. The station ended up playing the entire album over the course of three days. This ended up getting them additional promotion through an editorial in “Billboard” magazine in which the campaign was questioned as being art or advertising. I think it is easy to see it as both.

Here are three pieces, making up the equivalent of one pop song: