The Residents

From Philosopedia

The Residents

The Residents, a band that formed in 1972, is an avant garde and visual arts group whose members’ identities have never been divulged.

In photographs and performances, they appear with giant, veiny eyeballs on their heads, crowned with top hats. The San Francisco-based group has dealt with everything from fascism to Elvis Presley, but its Wormwood (1999) specifically mocks religion. In their appearances they sometimes sing, to the tune of “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” a song, “God business is our business!” Other songs emphasize the Bible’s cruelty to women, as in the Genesis story of Dinah, whose marriage causes her brothers-in-law to kill all the men and enslave all the women of her town. Or about God’s brutality: ordering Abraham to kill his son, rejecting Cain’s offering of grain, transforming Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt.

Their female singer (Jephthah) intones, “I’m gonna die with no tears in my eyes, ’cause God digs my daddy!”

The performance might end with a disorderly version of “That Old Time Religion,” the words including, “It was good for making millions/selling platitudes to pilgrims.” The group typifies an end-of-the-century freedom to attack what previously had been called blasphemy.

{Ben Ratliff, The New York Times, 7 April 1999}