THE RESIDENTS – Hard & Tenderly / Pain and Pleasure (1988)

The Residents are an American art collective and art rock band best known for their avant-garde music and multimedia works. Since their first official release, Meet the Residents (1974), they have released over 60 albums, numerous music videos and short films, three CD-ROM projects, and ten DVDs over the course of over half a century. They have undertaken seven major world tours and scored multiple films. Pioneers in exploring the potential of CD-ROM and similar technologies, the Residents have won several awards for their multimedia projects. They founded Ralph Records, a record label focusing on avant-garde music, in 1972. “Hard & Tenderly” is taken from their album God in Three Persons (1998)

Hard and tenderly… Hard and tenderly…

They called me “Mr. X, Indeed”, the special ones that saw so deep inside the souls of those who were so lonely. I was down beneath the bottom, when my vacant staring caught them gaily parading up and down the street, Followed by some stinking masses, freeing fumes and giving gasses to the brown and nearly worn out air.

But they had that certain presence like the ether or the essence of the cleansing upper atmosphere. Laughing, loving, and without a doubt, they simply strode about the streets that other creatures left alone. I ran across, myself compulsive, with the feeling of a pulsing drum that pounded underneath my skin.

A tingling in my tangled brain was screaming that this was insane, but it also told me, “touch it”, too. “Stand aside”, I told the masses, and with that I made my passage from the lonely to the only side. Openly they smiled to greet me, like they always knew they’d meet me somewhere walking up and down the road.

I knew I must appear as someone far beyond the common come-on, so I could not say my name was Ed. So I said, “I’m Mr. X who wants to come and who expects to help and guide your efforts to succeed”. They laughed a little bit at me, and then said, “Mr. X — Indeed”, and hugged me somehow hard and tenderly.

Hard and tenderly… Hard and tenderly…

And so my story winds on down toward an ending that’s been found to come whenever all is said and done. I’ve lived my life and taken chances and if some were strange by standards that were less important than my needs, then I guess I could be crooked, evil, bent and twisted, looking down upon the strings I tried to pull. But I see the strings extending up and down and never ending as we dance around our selves and jerk to all the tunes that only we hear and the voices only we fear each inside an island all alone. But the contact that we do make, as we give and take abuse, stays and its value only multiplies. Yes I’m alone, but not forgotten, for each comes and sees me often, sitting on a seat beside my bed, and we laugh and reminisce about a life that once was bliss before an act of passion made us part. Of course they’ll always be together, but their bond is made of leather not the flesh and blood it used to be. They’re still full of life and healing, but it has a different feeling and only for the few that seek their sort of pain and pleasure when they merge and give into insistent urgency that lives for seconds at a time. For pain and pleasure are the twins that slightly out of focus spin around us till we finally understand that everything that gives us pleasure also gives us pain to measure it by, and I also realize…that all our lives we love illusion, neatly caught between confusion and the need to know we are alive.