Inuit Savants: The Residents’ ‘Eskimo’ (Part 1 of 2)

NOTE #1: This interview was conducted in late 2025, just ahead of a planned Residents tour commemorating their Eskimo LP. For health reasons, the tour was postponed for some six months, so the story was held back until it once again became timely/relevant. That time is now. — bk

NOTE #2: A shorter version of this feature first appeared in The Tonearm.

“The Beatles of the avant-garde.” That’s just one of the epithets hurled at the willfully obscure musical collective known only as The Residents. Since the early ‘70s – though they had been at work for years at that point – the group waggishly billed as North Louisiana’s Phenomenal Pop Combo has been turning out some of the weirdest and most intriguing music known to humankind. Multimedia pioneers, The Residents have long made music and videos that satirize popular (and unpopular) culture, while defying convention and engaging in subtle social commentary.

They’ve also poked the bear countless times, creating deeply transgressive works that focus on the macabre, violent and simply outré. The Residents have only rarely cracked the album charts, but their albums – more than 100 and counting – are often critical smashes, and their influence is considerable.

One of The Residents’ earliest recorded and released works was the narrative/conceptual Eskimo. Ostensibly based on Inuit folk tales collected by the group’s (almost certainly fictitious) mentor/collaborator N. Senada, the work features conventional ingredients – vocals, guitars, percussion and synthesizers – put to some decidedly unconventional uses. A studio album was released in 1979 to critical praise (and commercial indifference), and over the coming years the Residents would make several attempts to stage it as a performance piece. Always busy, the group became involved in countless other projects, leaving Eskimo’s promise unfulfilled.

Recent interest created conditions that the always-anonymous group found favorable, so as spokesman Homer Flynn (more on him in a moment) explains, The Residents are mounting a tour, performing the original Eskimo material with newly-added music. The group’s 2026 tour was originally planned to commence with a January 8 date in Vancouver, followed by 13 more North American dates that month. But in very early January, the group’s website announced that the tour was postponed due to “unexpected and serious health-related matter within the band’s camp.” A late May update announced a trio of September dates in Tokyo, and in June a new set of North American dates for the Eskimo tour was released. According to that update, “The shows will bring the entire 1979 classic Eskimo to the stage for the first time. In addition, they have added five new pieces based on authentic Eskimo folk tales from the late 1800s.”

One of the group’s earliest tenets was the belief than an artist does his or her best work when it’s done in obscurity. They’ve credited that Theory of Obscurity to the mysterious N. Senada. In line with that philosophy, The Residents – whose most-recognized visual image is of four top-hatted and tuxedoed figures with giant eyeballs in place of heads – don’t do interviews. They never have. Instead, they employ spokesmen who are authorized to speak on the group’s behalf. Some cynics have suggested that those spokespeople – including Hardy Fox (who died in 2018) and Flynn, the latter of whom I spoke with in December – are in reality Residents themselves. But nobody knows for sure.

Bill Kopp: The Residents have often used their work as a means of commentary on society, popular culture and the like. They seem to do so on Eskimo through their referencing of Coca Cola ads. I’m not someone who believes that anything ends up on a Residents recording if it’s not by intention; nothing happens by accident. What do you think they were trying to communicate by inserting the Coke jingle in there?

Homer Flynn: My interpretation of that they felt that Eskimo culture – Inuit culture – was an isolated and somewhat pure thing 100, 150 years ago. And they felt that it was ultimately corrupted by Western culture. So you get polar bears drinking Coke.

Bill: I understand that the original story line and concept for Eskimo were inspired by N. Senada’s expedition to the Arctic. From the beginning, was Eskimo conceived as a multimedia work, or was that an idea that came later?

Homer: I think they saw it as a multimedia work from the beginning. They played little [performances of Eskimo] here and there, but basically they’ve never really toured it or taken it out because their ambition was to do a stage production with it; more than a band on tour.

But things change over time. And they were approached almost two years ago to play an event called A Night of Ideas. This is something that was produced by the French consulate in San Francisco in conjunction with another French agency in Paris. One of the intriguing things about this performance is that they were asked to headline this show, but [the organizers] only wanted 20 minutes. [The Residents] went, “Well, yeah, 20 minutes is not that hard to do.”

Bill: But that’s not how long Eskimo is!

Homer: No, it’s not. So ultimately, they did an abbreviated version. But they felt like the fact that they only wanted 20 minutes begged for experimentation, for trying things that they hadn’t done before. So they thought, “Why not try to do more of a band version of it as opposed to a whole stage production?” That came together incredibly effortlessly, and from that point one thing led to another.

Bill: With that in mind, is this run of dates going to come down completely on the band side of things, or is it going to bridge the gap between band and stage production?

Homer: I think it’ll be a little bit of both. There are limitations as to what you can do with a band on tour. Everybody’s got to go on a bus. Whatever you’re carrying with you either has to go on that bus or a trailer back behind. But The Residents have never been shy about stretching their limitations.

I think it’s a really interesting show myself. They were invited to play a festival in L.A. called Exoticon, and that was in June [2025]. Once again, that came together fairly effortlessly. So they kind of feel, “Okay, this is what this wants to be; let’s go with it.”

Bill: Was The Residents’ performance at that tiki event – Exoticon – an abbreviated version of Eskimo, or was it the full work?

Homer: Some of the Eskimo songs were abbreviated. They felt like it needed to be abbreviated a little bit, but then it needed to be expanded at the same time. So they have also added several new songs [because] they realized that doing the album [live], it was not long enough. And [laughs] there are places in Eskimo when we don’t hear anything but wind… for a long time.

So they started doing research, and they found these Eskimo folk tales from the late 1800s, early 1900s. They couldn’t believe that they didn’t find those when they were researching it originally. But they found several books – 50 or 60 of these folk tales – and picked out ones that were particularly appealing to them. So they’ve added four or five new songs to the set.

To be continued…