The Residents’ ‘American Composer’s Series‘ – Cherry Red
There are bad years for music. Then there’s 1983.
It was the year everything got airbrushed. Bowie traded Berlin’s paranoia for peroxide and pastel suits. Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ was less an album than a an attempt to allocate him his own GDP. UB40. Just…UB40. MTV had turned sound into sausages, and fashion into farting. Synths weren’t just cool, they were compulsory, a special badge that meant you didn’t have to concentrate on playing an instrument, you could get up and move about instead. People loved moving about in 1983. It was an age of gated snares, spotless hooks, and designer rebellion. Pop culture was hyperventilating and someone over yonder had sold all the paper bags. It lumbered on like this for what felt like forever, but 82-87 is a perfect snapshot of everything that could go wrong, going wrong. A lot.
Into this electro-glossed hellscape, The Residents arrived like cultural saboteurs in clown shoes.
Their ‘American Composer’s Series’, launched the following year (Frankie explodes; Duran Duran considered dangerous), was a deliberate affront. A surrealist anti-monument to the American musical canon, it begins with ‘George & James’ (1984), limps gloriously into ‘Stars & Hank Forever!’ (1986), and finally finds its full exhumed form in Cherry Red’s 3CD pREServed Edition, including unreleased sessions, the haunted (or is it vaunted?) Sun Ra suite, and a long-lost, militantly melancholy track called ‘Marching to the See.’
It’s not nostalgia. It’s necromancy.
‘George & James’ opens with a gut-punched “Rhapsody in Blue”, Gershwin‘s grandeur stabbed with an ice-pick and tossed onto the prefab roof next to the soggy tennis balls. Imagine an animatronic jazz band slowly malfunctioning while still trying to impress a ghost. Then comes Side B: ‘James Brown (Live at the Fillmore East),’ a fake concert that plays like a soul revue getting on up and then sitting back down like an ex-machina. There’s no groove, only gurns. But beneath the absurdity is reverence – they loved this material enough to warp it beyond recognition.
‘Stars & Hank Forever!’, the closest the series came to brilliance, or, perversely, to pop. ‘Kaw-Liga,’ built atop the bassline from ‘Billie Jean,’ was dangerously close to tempting mainstream music savages to declaring it one of their own. Country heartache fused with post-disco paranoia. It sounds like Hank Williams emerging from Studio 54, confused, despondant and horny. And then there’s ‘Sousaside,’ a 23-minute, Sousa-scrambled dirge that feels like the soundtrack to a military parade in purgatory. It’s deranged, committed, and utterly singular.
Why Gershwin, Brown, Williams, and Sousa? Because each represents a vision of America: the aspirational blend (Gershwin), the dream made manifest (Brown), the lonesome myth (Williams), and the bloated empire (Sousa). In a moment when music was scrubbing itself clean and gunning for global appeal, The Residents dragged these ghosts back into the light, not to mock them, but to ask what they meant in a world obsessed with forgetting.
It didn’t land. Even with the band’s fans.
The series confused fans, baffled critics, and slowly faded from memory. Some called it modest, others thought it missed the anarchic chaos of The Residents’ earlier work. But they were listening with the wrong ears. This wasn’t extremity for its own sake, it was a conceptual time bomb set to go off years later.
And it has. Demand for this has been as frenzied as any in this astonishingly reverential series of reissues.
Over four decades on, the pREServed Edition reveals a project that was never just about reinterpretation—, t was about intervention. The new material adds depth, scope, and a glimpse of what could have been. The Sun Ra sessions are otherworldly in the best way, the missing pieces that connect The Residents’ outsider critique to Ra’s Afrofuturist transcendence. ‘Marching to the See’ is pure dystopian theatre, like Sousa had a nightmare about his own legacy.
The influence is now in plain sight. From the meta-commentary of John Zorn to the barely disguised disgust of Negativland or even the ghoulish whirlwind of Mr Bungle, this series left fingerprints. In its failure to conform, it shaped something freer.
The Residents weren’t just out of step. They were dancing in a different timeline, one where culture spirals, mutates, and mocks its own myths. Now, 40 years on, that’s not just compelling, it feels prophetic. Most troublingly, is there even music bad enough to kick out at it 2025? Beige blandness survives as it merely generates apathy not rebellion.
Daz Lawrence