The Residents were born on Christmas. Yes, The Residents were born on the same day as Jesus but unlike him they’ve gotten to live to be 40. And to celebrate that momentous birthday they are releasing possibly the most deluxe box set in history.
That statement is not mere hyperbole. This may actually be THE MOST DELUXE BOX SET IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD.
It is called "The Residents UBS (Ultimate Box Set)." There are only 10 of them in existence and for the low, low price of $100,000 you can own one of them, too.
They come housed in a full-sized, 28 cubic-foot refrigerator, which contains everything The Residents have ever recorded or put out. First edition LPs, CDs, CD-Roms, DVDs, you even get a genuine, full-sized top hat wearing eyeball helmet! Everything from their first 45 "Santa Dog" (released on Christmas D ay 1972 and soon after mailed to Richard Nixon) to their latest releases. Hundreds of hours of music guaranteed to drive your uptight neighbors crazy! It’s the ultimate cornucopia of weirdly beautiful music.
The Residents may be the greatest combined art and music project ever coughed up by our modern pop culture. Its members are anonymous, and over the band’s history they have constantly blurred the boundaries of performance art, art brut, industrial music, and plain old rock and roll.
They used to make fun of the Beatles but by now they’ve outlived them by decades and every year they mutate further into something ever new and stranger. Their iconic eyeball heads in tuxedo costumes have become part of pop culture history but those are just one of their many disguises.
They can make a cover of a classic Hank Williams song sound like it was recorded by aliens from Venus. On albums like "Duck Stab" and "Freak Show" they have charted some of the darkest places of the human soul. Yet there is an other-worldly beauty to almost everything they do, like the music one hears in a fever dream.
The $100,000 box sets go on sale on Christmas Day and you better order fast because as The Residents’ lead singer Randy Rose assures us in the hilarious infomercial the band has produced to promote them, “…supplies are limited and they will go fast.”
THE ULTIMATE BOX SET INFOMERCIAL from The Cryptic Corp on Vimeo.
For the truly uber No. 1 fan the band will also be selling off a one of a kind mystery art object for the low low price of $5 million. Randy held up the object in a tiny question mark covered box and it’s smaller than a shoebox so it better be something amazing.
Another way the band plans on celebrating their birthday is by setting out on a 20-date tour in January called "The Residents Wonder of Weird (WOW)." Northern California homecoming stops will include both Bimbos in San Francisco on Feb. 24 and the Rio in Santa Cruz on Feb. 28.
The Residents have made some of the most unrelentingly strange and surrealistically stunning art and music of the past century. There is a good reason why the Museum of Modern Art in New York houses some of their work, in fact, I hope the MOMA buys one of these, such a thing belongs in their permanent collection.
The Residents have created one of the most beguiling and fascinating bodies of artwork in human history. It is an immense and labyrinthine creation that would take hundreds of hours to fully digest. Call me crazy, but I don’t really think this box set is overpriced. If I’d won that Powerball lottery I’d buy one in a second.
Check out the crazy infomercial (in the video clip above) the band has created for the box set where lead singer Randy Rose lays the whole deal out for ya.
