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The Residents Meet the Weird

ABSTRACT The article discusses the notion of strangeness evoked by the works of the Residents. It situates the group’s unique use of the tradition of the weird beyond the Freudian uncanny and makes the case for viewing it in terms of recycling and appropriation. Understanding these practices as creative strategies allows us to view the collective’s artistic production as one driven by a contemporary poetics of repetition. It is also argued that the effects produced by their freakish, intermedial works, together with and the group’s conscious (and often ironic) handling of the laws governing the music business, reveal weird and eerie aspects of popular culture and capitalism itself.