SONIC TRANSPORTS: THE RESIDENTS ESSAY, PART 5

The Tunes of Two Cities

Six Of A Kind

The Tunes of Two Cities is essentially a prequel to Mark of the Mole. It consists of a dozen cuts: cultural samples, six from the Moles and six from the Chubs. The Residents alternate the pieces, cinematically intercutting the societies to pin down their characters and aspirations. And they do their work with an originality, a painstaking sense of detail, and an emotional wallop which make Tunes, for me, their finest album.

Tunes is quintessential Residents, opening new mineshafts into their humor, experimentation, allusiveness, elusiveness… Yet it’s also without a doubt their most accessible work: I’ve been playing people their music for years, and while other stuff of theirs has baffled or annoyed many of my friends, practically everyone has been knocked out by Tunes (some even up and bought it for themselves!). The expressive freedom of Mark of the Mole takes a quantum leap with Tunes, where the music wordlessly articulates the convictions that generated it.[1] Role-playing and pyrotechnics, ordinarily The Residents’ defenses against emotion, here serve to realize emotion, and this music can speak to people as no other work of theirs has.

Tunes reminds me of Citizen Kane: an original, technically sophisticated achievement that’s more than accessible, it’s downright entertaining. No easy trick, for both works are obsessed with wealth, privilege, and power; nostalgia and loss; decadence and dissolution. And as long as I’ve gone this far, I’ll confess that I find them comparable in quality: The Tunes of Two Cities is one of the triumphs of American Music, regardless of genre or era.

The Mole People

The Mole cuts on Tunes are comparable to Eskimo, in that The Residents are again inventing the ritual music of a “primitive” society. The Eskimos were non-industrial hunters, making music on animal hides and bones. The Moles are post-industrial, using spare and discarded machine parts for their wind and percussion instruments. Mole music embodies all The Residents’ reverence for tribal cultures, and to keep the soul from being eclipsed by the hardware, they use voices on all the Mole cuts. (Only two Chub cuts include vocals.) But unlike the talkative shaman of Mark of the Mole, the Mole voices on Tunes are wordless and highly stylized. Sometimes the weirdness is melodic, as in the cheerleader-like music for chorus in “Secret Seed” or for solo voice in “God of Darkness.” More often it’s timbral: “Maze of Jigsaws” has a howling animalistic chorus and a low, rippling solo voice; at the end, that voice returns in a distant ghostly reinvention that’s genuinely chilling. One of the most beautiful and novel Mole vocals is in “Praise for the Curse” and “The Evil Disposer”: an extraordinary high shimmering voice that sounds more like a singing tuning fork than the funky shaman we know and love.

Taking this vocal fixation a step further, “Mourning the Undead” incorporates a sound that ought never to have worked but does, brilliantly. The best approximation I can give of it is to say that it suggests the muffled echoey voices of a relatively subdued group of schoolchildren walking down a corridor: a surprising effect that has all the gentle dreamlike nostalgia of a tape piece by Philip Perkins. That sort of mood isn’t your typical Residents atmosphere, and they banish it by fading up a high wailing Mole chorus. Those voices propel the piece into a fury of metal percussion and machine music, the twin prerequisites for That Mole Sound.

T.M.S. reaches its apotheosis in “Praise for the Curse.” Over a constant timpani pulse, “Praise” alternates sections of wind sounds and machine music with passages of electronic grindings, screechings, and drillings. The searing industrialisms are stilled for a brief vocal solo ate the midpoint, and then the piece suddenly bolts forward into a terrible unforgettable intensity. The more you listen to these noises, the more you hear in them; The Residents combine mechanical, vocal, and natural sounds into a scream that threatens never to stop – effectively putting the Curse back into “Praise for the Curse.”

Mole music’s post-industrial atmosphere is the basis of its apocalyptic character. This half of the Tunes pie can be compared to L.Q. Jones’ A Boy and His Dog, Ralph Bakshi’s Wizards, George Miller’s Mad Max films, and a host of other movies about people trying to fathom and employ the shreds of technology that have survived World War III. But Tunes stands apart from most 1980s apocalypse art because The Residents insist that the Manichaean muscle of Soviet weaponry isn’t the danger. The end has to begin in passion, and the people we exploit have the necessary hatred to pull the plug. After all, they have nothing to lose but their you-know-whats.

The Idle Class

Not surprisingly, Chub music is every bit as apocalyptic as Mole music is. Tunes may be hung up on “the globe wrenching power of DIFFERENCE,”[2] but if you step back a little, things seem more the same than different. Almost all of Tunes is in 4, and every cut has clearly defined sections that repeat and alternate. Well, why not? Mole music is ceremonial, Chub music is pop, and that’s how those musics are often shaped. But by intercutting the two idioms, The Residents describe a commonality beyond musical structures. Mole music and Chub music are about the same thing, they serve the same purpose: the ritual exorcism of suffering.

It’s easy to read this function in Mole music, which is plainly ritualistic, and about spiritual subjects: “The Evil Disposer,” “Praise for the Curse,” “Mourning the Undead,” “God of Darkness,” etc. Chub music is about partying, sure, but Why Are We Partying? Because life sucks, that’s why. Yet even though pop – the chubs’ and ours – doesn’t think or talk about what it’s about, it’s still about it; it still arises from the urge to free and reinvigorate people. Of course, in practice it usually does the reverse because its production and dissemination are defined not by music or intelligence or spirit, but by money.

Chub music takes America’s fantasy of power, self-indulgence, and leisure, and inflates it to its logical (inevitable?) extreme, depicting an overripe society on the verge of collapse. This subject also fires the novels of the Marquis de Sade (who, come to think of it, was hailed by the Surrealists as their spiritual ancestor), and like Sade, The Residents work with an obsessive fascination, a fixed stare in which fear and loathing are indistinguishable from worship, even love. They are dissecting a corrupt doomed class, but they also show how the knife is slicing into their own hides. And because The Residents share Sade’s bone-deep sense of irony, they repeat his emphasis on polished manners and rituals, on the scrubbed and gleaming façade of their subject.

Almost all of the Chub cuts are covers of white Big Band standards. So just as Mole music is an outgrowth of Eskimo, Chub music harkens back to The Third Reich ‘N Roll. Again, The Residents are trying to discern what’s hateful, dangerous, and fascistic in pop culture; what values it betrays about ourselves. But if Reich ‘N Roll seemed self-consciously methodical and pyrotechnic, Chub music has an almost documentary coherence, a found-object integrity, because of its detail and relative uniformity.[3] The Ralph catalog describes this music as “twisted swing,” and yes, The Residents do take swing music and most assuredly twist it, harmonically, timbrally, and melodically, in ways only they can. But even so, Chub music is more than a parody of 1930s pop, just as Reich ‘N Roll is about more than 1960s pub. The Residents aren’t just making wrong-note swing; they’ll gladly stoop to a cheap laugh, but they won’t stop at one.

Swing Time

In 1930 Aldous Huxley wrote, “Simplicity of form contrasts at the present time with richness of materials and has invented many new materials to work on. Modern simplicities are rich and sumptuous; we are Quakers whose severely cut clothes are made of damask and cloth of silver.”[4] That’s also a perfect description of The Residents’ formula for Chub music: extravagant, emulator-engendered ensembles put in the service of simple melodic phrases and familiar song forms. Combine that technique with the allusions to swing, and there’s only one way to describe the Chub tunes: Art Deco music. The chub timbres – metallic textures, glossy sheens, contrasting surfaces, lurid colors – point directly to Art Deco; equally Deco-like are its symmetrical structures and its jagged yet polite melodies.

An essential Deco-ration of Chub music is its high kitsch quotient. You can read the Chubs’ decadent love of bad art simply in the cutesy-poo titles, such as “Serenade for Missy,” “Smokebeams,” and “Smack Your Lips (Clap Your Teeth).” But the Chub appetite for kitsch goes further – much, much further. For openers, its timbral tooth is unsettlingly sweet. The first cut, “Serenade for Missy,” sets the pattern for Chub music: recognizable instrumental timbres (here, piano and drums) are wrapped in echo and wedged against emulator-ersatz brass and chimes. The entire ensemble, for all the diversity of its parts, takes on a saccharine homogeneity, and the band starts to sound like something from an intermediate state between human and machine.

But why stop at timbre when kitsch can grace melodic phrasing as well? “Serenade for Missy”‘s guest soloists Norman Salant (saxophone) and Snakefinger (electric guitar, natch) pig out on garrulous, expressive pirouettes around the last notes of their solos. Of course, a little of that sort of humor goes a long way; The Residents are keenly aware of the difference between sick music and sickening music, and they’ve made sure that the chub cuts are catchy as hell. But what you remember aren’t so much hooks as tics. “Serenade for Missy,” for example, punctuates its melody with sustained tones, but they’re sustained just a hair longer than they would be in sane music. Also in that cut – and even more manically in “Mousetrap” and “Smokebeams” – is the Chub penchant for melodic phrases that ascend or descend pointlessly, as dreamily non-functional as Escher staircases.

Art Deco is also the ideal apocalyptic idiom for Chub music. It had an abrupt, almost full-blown arrival and an equally sudden departure, and in its heyday was a total design concept: They had Art Deco everything – utensils, houses, jewelry, clothes, furniture, statuary… That’s why, today, Art Deco can suggest the image of a vanished civilization, a people and a way of life we can experience only in books, films, or museums (a sensation intensified by its reliance on Egyptian and Mayan forms). And then there’s the resonances of Art Deco’s between-the-wars lifespan – revelers who refuse to see that their ballroom days are over… The utopian idealism of Art Deco’s worship of technology (an important theme in Mark of the Mole) seems now like naivete, at best; at worst, it implies a disappointment in, even a distaste for humanity. Susan Sontag may not have been overstating the case when she observed, “the fascist style at its best is Art Deco, with its sharp lines and blunt massing of material, its petrified eroticism.”[5] Which brings us back to Sade via Salò: Pasolini’s film sets Sade’s novel The 120 Days of Sodom in Mussolini’s collapsing republic, enacting the major atrocities in an Art Deco chateau.

Like Pasolini and Sade, The Residents identify with their monsters. Still sympathizing with the devil, they never let Chub music deteriorate into all invective and no invention. Their personal involvement – their respect, if you like – can be read in the fact that this music is so entertaining: It really does swing, you know. They just refuse to let you forget What It Is that’s doing the swinging. At the finale of “Smokebeams” a brass ensemble is going full tilt, and a dissonant solo trumpet suddenly starts to wail on top of their action, as if one of the musicians has suddenly gotten The Fever THIS MOTHER’S GOING CRAZY, GIVE HIM ROOM! Then The Residents spring their trap and that wild solo interlocks perfectly with the ensemble’s precise, elaborate, and well-rehearsed outro. Everyone has their inflexible place in the music’s grid – don’t go sniffing for the ozone of inspired improvisation in Chub music. These people may be as hungry for liberation as the Moles are, but no one said they had the soul or heart or guts to achieve it.

But hunger can have the power all its own. The best Chub cut is probably “Smack Your Lips (Clap Your Teeth),” which opens up the idiom into a toe-tapping threnody where pity and anger, self-pity and hatred, longing, resignation, and acceptance all stew together. Even if you don’t hear all that (in which case you have my condolences), “Smack/Clap” is a knockout simply (“simply”!) as the liveliest, most exciting Chub cut on Tunes. Of course, as a cover of “In the Mood,” it entered life with a silver spoon in its mouth. But it also sucks on the silverware of a bitchen Snakefinger solo that bursts from the Chub ensemble with an incongruous abrasive life all its own.

What pushes “Smack/Clap” over the top, from great Chub music into great music, is its finale. The Residents terrace everything up a half-step, the harmonies become richer and more expressive, and they begin staggering lines in the style that worked so beautifully for the conclusion of Eskimo. Character after character jumps into the fray, and their back-breaking insistence begins to take on a perverse power of its own. The harmonic foundation is introspective and even mournful, but the activity cascading over it is doggedly upbeat, until it all starts to become the played sound of desperate musicians gripped by a divine Kerouacian madness, straining to express a joy they’ve never really known and can never hope to know. A sampled La-La voice grows more rhapsodic, rhythmic clapping wells up, Snakefinger returns for the kill, the brass starts crowing – you can almost see them, all blasting on the poop deck of a midnight yacht, too fucked up and furious to notice or care that the ship’s a-headed for the falls. They are Chub society, which is to say US society: Going to hell in a bucket, and devouring each other as they go; yet each one has an eye fixed on a star, even as they bite into whatever is closest, whether it’s a Mole, another Chub, or their own flesh.

Two Of A Kind

The conclusion of Mark of the Mole superimposed two different sounds to represent the hellish co-existence of Chubs and Moles. The conclusion of The Tunes of Two Cities actually fuses the two musics: in a veiled way in “Song of the Wild,” the penultimate Chubb cut, and explicitly in “Happy Home,” the last piece on Tunes. This superimposition has to happen in a Chub cut, doesn’t it? As any true party animal will tell you, new stimuli are mandatory.

“Song of the Wild” opens with a hot and breathy tangle of vocal-like brass. This is naughty music, just as the title promised, to be played only after Chublets have been put to bed. In its middle section the piece subtly alludes to Mole music, as even more vocal-like keyboards purr over a metallic pulse suggestive of a distant anvil or machine. The most libidinous Chub music would have to have some of That Mole Sound; after all, part of jazz’s allure for white people – especially in the 1920s and ‘30s – was its link to Black people, onto whom they had projected a forbidden sexual appetite and prowess.

The Residents must have scrutinized this attitude when they researched Depression-era culture for Mark of the Mole – and it surely must have been on their collective mind when they looked over Porgy and Bess. Gershwin was trying to remind whites that Blacks didn’t represent anything, that there were human beings who had something of value – spiritually, socially, and culturally – to offer America. And he tried to make this point both theatrically and musically, while blurring distinctions between “serious” and “popular” music. Change the names and we’re talking about The Mole Show. The Gershwin covers of George & James may be the principal result of The Residents’ original research, but ideas about Gershwin and Porgy and Bess haunt the ending of The Tunes of Two Cities.

The last cut on Tunes is the Chubs’ “Happy Home,” which is subtitled “excerpt from Act II of INNISFREE.” The only clue to what that means is the music itself. The beginning of “Happy Home” sounds just like Mole music: Low-register percussion, accompanied by wooden rattlings, sounds the “people must be left alone” tune. It’s heard twice, complete with an ominous pause, before it’s cut short by a high brass-like line, which has its own razzing accompaniment. It’s a very funny surprise, recalling the flatulent backdrop that punctured the pretentiousness of Mark of the Mole’s pencil-neck scientist. The nameless Chub composer of INNISFREE (verismo opera? show music? or maybe a hybrid, like Porgy and Bess?) is being brought similarly low. The Residents obviously respect Gershwin for acknowledging that Blacks existed, and for trying to shake up and wake up whites. But he’s been weighed and found wanting too, and the flip side of their respect is a sense of irony and frustration, even contempt: Who’s this Brooklyn white boy telling us about southern Blacks? How dare some Chub climb into Mole drag and make money off of their lives and culture? Chubs only no from Chubs, and if you think you’re learning something about Moles by hanging out with Chubs, so much the worse for you. The booboisie weeps over Porgy and Bess, and then goes on being the same racist garbage it always is, only now sleeping more soundly for having paid its tithe of pity and guilt.

“Happy Home” tries desperately to evoke the tragedy of the Moles, hammering away melodically and vocally at the idea that people must be left alone unless they have a happy home. And on one level the song is a success, the most beautiful and moving music The Residents have ever created. The catch is, all the Chub can do is be piggy and boss. Gershwin’s orchestra has nothing to do with the lives of ghettoized Blacks, and the Chub machinery employed for “Happy Home” is totally inappropriate to the Moles. The few instances of realistic re-creations of The Other’s music can seem almost grotesque, sandwiched inside all that white bread. Mark of the Mole explored the catastrophic gap between intentions and results, and “Happy Home” achieves tremendous resonance through the same idea. The hamhanded earnestness of the Chubs is heartbreaking in its inadequacy, like Steinbeck’s Lenny killing the animals he’s only trying to pet. “Few things are sadder than the truly monstrous,” as Nathanael West observed.[6] I’ve listened to it many times, and I can still be blown away by the double-barreled pathos of “Happy Home.”

After some Chub tenor in Moleface phonetically fakes everyone’s favorite couplet, The Residents introduce a wordless and genderless, almost childlike chorus. The sampled voices sing an ostinato of descending chords, providing the harmonic foundation of the song. This disturbing lamentation is momentarily cut off, and a female vocalist (the ever-popular Nessie Lessons), plainly states and restates the moral, her voice haloed with an exquisite, polytonal, glassy percussion. She drops out and the chorus returns, and “Happy Home” launches The Residents’ finest staggered finale, piling up over the chorus dissonant imitation strings, periodic low percussion thuds, a motto in a high brass-like voice… They keep all this going until the piece is about ready to burst, and then swiftly fade everything down and out.

There’s a searing intensity to the high brass motto – at first. But there’s no way it can maintain that expression, which arose from the sudden impassioned effect of its appearance. As it repeats and repeats at its assigned position, this moving event becomes mechanical and meaningless, like one of those wailing automobile sirens everyone ignores. “Happy Home” brings to life the awfulness implied in the joking finale of “Smokebeams”: the introduction of the motto is a desperate alarm, an outcry of sorrow, a demand for change; its regular reiteration is an admission of hopelessness, a dead end. We’re still bound to a wheel where our own tears do scald us, just as in the conclusion of Mark of the Mole. The staticism of staggered ostinati has a sublime quality at the end of Eskimo; in “Happy Home,” it makes you feel like Edgar Allan Poe’s Fortunato, helplessly watching brick after brick being cemented into place, entombing you alive.

FOOTNOTES

1. Wordless except for its climactic reprise of the couplet that opened Mark of the Mole: “People must be left alone / Unless they have a happy home.”

2. According to the liner notes on the album.

3. Uniformity relative to me, anyway; the more familiar you are with Big Band music, the more lapidary The Tunes of Two Cities will probably seem.

4. Dan Klein, All Colour Book of Art Deco. London: Octopus, 1974, p. 11 (undocumented quote).

5. Susan Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism” in Under the Sign of Saturn. New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1980, p. 94.

6. Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust. New York: New Directions, 1962, p. 61.

Links to:

SONIC TRANSPORTS: The Residents Essay, part 6

SONIC TRANSPORTS: The Residents Contents

SONIC TRANSPORTS: Contents

For more on The Residents, see:

Film Review: The Eyes Scream

Film Review: Triple Trouble