This band has been around for several decades. Originally created in the late sixties. The first half of their existance is a testiment of experimental, avant-garde and dadaist music. Starting in the late eighties they really started focusing on creating grand concept albums, their sound was and continues to be bizarre but also beautiful. Some of their greatest concept albums include Tweedles, Bunny Boy and God in Three Persons, the last one being the beginning of their cleaner but still strangly alluring sound. God in Three Persons, an abum I can discribe as stripped down in many places, the vocals consist of a lot of narration with some backing vocals. The musical consistancy is much more apparent on this album than any other Resident albums before it and even since.
Tweedles has similar narrative approuch and tackles similar themes. The narrator who's name in Mr X, in God in Three Persons is exploiting conjoined twins. He has felt love and loss though, and he becomes infatuated with one of the twins. In the end Mr. X comes to make a startling discovary about not just their nature but also his own.
Tweedles, is more eclectic and complicated musically, thematically the narrator is not as redeemable. Although one who listens to his story might come to understand the source of his internal struggles and the reason for his cynical outlook, the damage he causes to others not to mention himself seems to be more destructive than lost dreams and a broken childhood could excuse. He has his sympathetic moments, but his nihilism and desregard for the damage he brings on a daily basis makes him a repugnant character. Although I do appreciate that the strings of his malevelance are shown.
Bunny Boy is an album that seems less tangable than the other two, as the main character seems to be less stable and self aware than Tweedles. I'm not sure what is real and what is fantasy in the Bunny Boy album, there are several references to the coming end of the world. The narrator talks about anti-social behavior, it is implied he has difficulty relating to people and prefers the company of animals, especially rabbits. At times he comes off as completely innocent and naive. Dreams and fantasies seem to also be a consistant theme in the album. Much like Tweedles who's ambitions where unfulfilled it seems that Bunny wanted to become a butcher, but for some reason he never could. He also has a obsession which may be unconscious with voilence and gore, when grousome events are told they're almost always explained as dreams. I don't believe that Bunny ever kills anyone, but it seems that he may be capable of it despite his appaerant innocuous nature. At least that's how I feel other people might percieve him. They'd think him strange but not capable of harming others... unless he talked about how he wanted to be a butcher when he was a child, or shared his unsettling dreams with them.
It seems to me that these concept albums are very much character studies. They create individuals, Tweedles and Mr. X seem to do things that are incomprehensibly monstrous. But it attempts to explain why they behave in such horrible ways.
It does a very good job of this. As far as this subject goes The Crossed a graphic novel, is also a suburb example. The Crossed takes place after a plague suddenly infects hundreds or thousands of people. This plague turns these individuals into sado-massachistic seriel killers that are driven to murder-fuck what's left of humanity. And if someone were to survive a brutal incounter with a crossed, they will be infected and quickly become crossed themselves.
Aside from the demonic cruelty that the crossed are capable of we also witness the moral and ethical sacrifices that the survivors must take. In one story a group of surivors kills several children in cold blood rather than having to deal with the responibilities and liabailities that come with bringing them along. In many other stories survivors put up with other survivors who are almost as bad as the crossed, perhaps even worse because they are compatent. Even though they use there positions of power to rape, torture and kill others. The crossed shows us what the worst humanity has to offer not only with the plagued individuals that have the compulsion to act out the most heinous crimes we could imagine but also in the fact that what's left of humanity often finds that it must mimic those actions in order to insure survival.
I think the other thing that really digs into my gut about the crossed is that although they behave in a way that would make you think of them as other than human, they seem to retain a bit of their humanity with some ability to speak, although they seem to use that to provoke, tuant and intimadate and also with some recollection of who they once were. It's like their the same person they were, only now they are a psychopath with an infinite hunger for destruction.
Zombies aren't as horrifying. A zombies humanity is stripped away, and that might be terrifying in a way but it's easy to say that the person that zombie once was is no more. Also zombies are typically slow, rotting and they only eat their victims, which is terrible, one of my biggest fears is cannabalism. The crossed have no compunction to cannabalsim, they will happily chow down on human flesh... but it doesn't stop there. They're happy to torture, rape, murder, hunt all the while they laugh viciously enjoy every sickening second of their eternal sluagher.
So, anyone have anything light to say to counter this?
You say anarchy, I say government you say temporary, I say permanent You say disillusionment, I say wonder You say talented, I say neverhundred.
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The Residents and The Crossed
Posted by NeverHundred - November 29th, 2014
Comments
So how long is the comic exactly? and is the free version different than the other one?
Ah the humor is thrown at your face, like a clown, with the face of a clown super imposed on a penis.
Once i finish hearing the album i will wrote my impressions on it, in a second comment.
There are four volumes, each one has about twenty chapters, each chapter is... maybe twenty pages? I'm guessing on that last number there, it might be fifteen pages each or it could be thirty, I never really counted.
Online version is set in Scotland, I believe it about as grotesque as most crossed comics. It deals with similar themes of morality, survival and sacrifice that is heavy throughout the series. Each series follows a different group of survivors of varying degrees of conscious and remorse. The main character in Wish You Were Here is almost plagued by regret... but he also is adaptable and understands the tough choices he has to make.
I believe the first series, which was just called Crossed, was perhaps slightly less disturbing than others. Psychopath which is the third series might be the most nightmarish, given that the protagonist is a non-crossed sociopathic killer who flourishes in the world that is being terrorized by the crossed due to his natural understanding of the crossed's nature. If you enjoy delving into the twisted mind of a sociopath I'd recommend that one.
Oh is not that long of a series then, i somehow saw that it was 10 volumes, and was getting doubtful about it.
Well i am curious about how twisted humans can get both in fiction and reality, but as for sociopathic behaviors and the person themselves, i don't really care, they always come as empty to me, like the most meaningless and boring forms of mind expression, they are like clinical cases without much to offer, not because of their actions, those themselves show interesting scenarios to question the limits of moral duty, but their thoughts are boring as hell most of the time, because there is no conflict in them, they lack regret, they lack a dynamic, the argument that they give is a boring one, because it is stiff, but that doesn't means that it is a solid one, anyway, if i am lucky probably the one in Crossed wont be of this kind, but that brings this thing next:
I finished listening to Tweedles, i read the scrip on the band's page, so he goes around making himself the dream partner of people deceives them and then ruins their lives? By your description i imagined something else, really, but i guess you didn't lie to me at all, i just went and created images of something else, something more meaningful, more puzzling, wishful thinking is such a nasty thing.
it's interesting however, how his discovery on "Isolation" instead of sending him towards a different path submerged him on a hedonistic carnal spiral of pleasure without any substance to it, to which he shamelessly confesses on "Mark of the Male", he is a sex-fiend, a predator, longing for contact but in the end he only knows how to fuck people... in more ways than one, chances are that he killed Mary on "Brown Cow" after he destroyed her innocence, interesting that by now we know that he goes around ruining other peoples lives but he refuses to admit this, it is never his fault, he even sees himself as a victim on "Sometimes", i now have lost all interest on the character, on his emptiness, on his fake wisdom, and on his really shallow outlook in life, i even realize that the guy would be an uninteresting character even if he managed to accomplish a working relationship, his happiness in life is still dependent on others even with that, the only improvement is that he is not using them anymore as tools for sex pleasure, and as for Tweedles (or penis, it's the same), it doesn't matters what kind of clown it is, all clowns are such appealing creations, what a fitting alter ego for him, and it seems that he also fucked skippers the dog, so not even animals are safe from him, yeah the guy is a bastard, and none of his problems are near enough to excuse him, i completely agree with you, and that is exactly my problem here, he has no back up to his justify his actions, i find that boring, specially since part of his speech is to pass himself as another victim.
The music on the other hand, has got me hooked for the most part, well a pity it is accompanied with the tales of a rapist self-explained story, which unfortunately completely gets in the way of my enjoyment of music.
Any other story you may recommend?
The music is fantastic, It's strangeness comes mostly from the way it's engineered and produced. The music isn't too complex in it's composition, yet how it's presented makes all the difference.
I got into The Residents through TISM, it was the only band that TISM ever claimed to take influence from.
I understand where you're coming from. Although sociopathic is a good word to use to describe these characters, they're also narcissistic, self centered and this inability to relate to other people and to see themselves as the center o the universe is what makes them so two dimensional. This is especially true of Tweedles, who is unable to get past himself, unable to see the world as something larger than himself except in his most reflective moments... but even then, it just comes back to how it effects him. The world is full of people like this.
There's plenty of sociopaths in movies. I can't think of any that stand out in my mind. I'm just thinking of the standards like American Psycho, but that character is classic narcissist. You could also study politics. Have you read Machiavelli's The Prince?
I realize that i am being unfair here tho, if the sociopath is a bastard admits it and is fine with it, i find it boring because it doesn't propose a problematic, but i guess the consistency is appreciated, however if the sociopath denies its status as troublesome then we not only get no problematic at all (because the guy in question refuses to admit one to begin with), but we also get a dosage of hypocrisy and contradiction. On the other hand a sociopath with a conflict that actually tries to look into it wont really pose as that much of a sociopath, however i find it interesting, these kind of character probably are not really sociopaths but amoral characters, the interesting thing for me is then to see how they try to uphold their argument, i know it can be done, it just hard to find characters like those.
They try to explore that. The Crossed has a mix of characters who are sociopaths and less sociopathic. You can try to figure out who is who. The online series, I do not believe the main character is a sociopath, I think he is fully capable of compassion. He's manipulative and self serving, but not completely narcissistic. But it' easier to justify selfish behavior when your decisions come down to life or death. You try to save or protect someone else, and it's all in vain because now you're both dead.
It makes you ask yourself, what would you do in a situation like that?
Yeah the music was really good, but the accompanying story puts me off.
Indeed his narcissism is mostly what gets in the way of furthering his development as a character.
Yeah i have read Machiavelli's The Prince (and i am currently interested on reading Arthashastra), but i was asking for stories told by The Residents.
In that sense it is similar to telltale's the walking dead, in that you pretty much are the one taking the decisions, and choosing who lives and dies, but i was coming more from the stance of a change in moral paradigm, like changing the perspective on how we see humans, and the suddenly cannibalism is as accepted as any other form of nourishment, things like that.
If God didn't want us to eat humans, he wouldn't have made them out of meat.
Yeah as long as you avoid the brain it is just fine.
That's suicide man, that's one of the ways CJD is transmitted.
Doomroar
You sir have successfully got me intrigued, got any links?
Also could you tell me more about this Tweedles character? i am particularly puzzled about him and want to hear more of his story and circumstances.
The crossed seem like a nightmarish event, but it is actually your description of the non-infected humans mimicking the crossed the one that puts the cold in the skin, i guess that is the western equivalent of ero-guro manga.
NeverHundred
http://www.crossedcomic.com/
There's a website for The Crossed. They do have a free series you can read online, as well as another that they are at the moment releasing. Much of the stories are related to traditional publications, Garth Ennis is the originator and Alan Moore has contributed to the series.
For Tweedles, I believe this has all the songs on the album, and yes the album cover is a clown face super imposed on a penis. Just throwing that out as a warning.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dcWoWgOKAc&list=PL379B7CB513BCB993