This is contrasted next to footage from the 'Wonder of Weird' 40th anniversary world tour, the band now a collection of wizened old pros, yet still full of mischievousness and aiming to subvert. There is some fascinating, extremely early footage of the Residents featured (before they even had their band name or recorded an album), from when they first moved to San Francisco and would hijack their peers' hippie performances with Dada free-jazz pop nonsense. There's a lot of the history of the band that isn't touched upon or is mentioned only briefly, but considering the band's four decades of creativity this was inevitable. 'Theory of Obscurity' is a talking heads-style documentary with input from some of their famous fans, like Matt Groening, Penn Jillette, Les Claypool and members of Ween and Devo. But who the members of the band really are just isn't the point - the Residents is a concept, a creation, they aren't a group of personalities or celebrities, they're an artistic idea, a rejection of the convention of fame and ego in rock 'n' roll, and this film seeks to highlight this. Of course, to any big fan of the band (of which I am certainly one), we really do know who the members of the Residents are and for anyone new to the band that watches this documentary, it won't take a genius-level IQ to work it out either. Skull' or 'Randy', 'Chuck' and 'Bob') or anything about their personal lives. They are also completely anonymous: we don't know their names (besides the occasional offerings of nicknames like 'Mr. The Residents are one of America's greatest ever pop bands (seriously!), spanning over four decades of work and succeeding in creating interesting and unconventional avant-garde pop concept albums over and over again throughout the period, from pseudo-ethnographic field recordings of Eskimos to perceptions of human life through the eyes of different animals. Making a documentary about a subject that is intentionally and carefully shrouded in mystery (and sometimes mythology) is not an easy task, but it can be done - the excellent and quite scary 'Jandek on Corwood' from 2003 is an example.
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