Not Available is my favorite album. I have a pretty hard time picking favorites, so my "favorite" Rz albums aren't really a discrete ranking of albums but rather a vague fuzzy collection of whatever I can think of at the moment. But one thing is constant...
Not Available is my
#1 favorite album. And I don't just mean in the context of The Residents. I mean it is my
favorite album, period.
The first time I listened to this album was rather... interesting. I got it as a digital download with a bunch of other classic Rz albums when I first discovered them. And I saw from the song titles that it came in parts... so I set this album aside to experience when I was properly prepared. One day, though, I decided to just listen to it casually anyway. I slapped it onto my tablet and decided I might listen to it while I helped my sister do some fabric shopping. Now, the thing about digital downloads is that each song is its own separate file. With CD's, they're separate digital.... things, but there's still a physical order in which they are digitally etched onto the disc. When you buy files, the only thing keeping them in order is the file names and typically some ID3 tags that specify what track number the file's supposed to represent. It's up to your actual software to present those tracks in the order they were intended. Well... the default media player on my tablet had a horrible habit of randomly dropping ID3 information like album art, album title, and the most frustrating,
track number. If it somehow dropped the track number, it'd default to alphabetical order. So, the first time I ever listened to
Not Available was in
alphabetical order, half-listening to it while waiting for my sister to finish up at the fabric store. (Those of you who have gone to a giant fabric store with or as someone who loves sewing might know this could easily take up the length of an album or two...).
My first thoughts? That was weird. But interesting. I liked those piano parts. Overall the album had this interesting sound that satisfied my search for weird music. The part that stuck with me the most was that little voice triumphantly exclaiming "OKAY! OKAY OKAY!". I didn't really understand what was going on, so I thought it was some sort of weird meta part where that little voice had to sort of "reconstruct" the song. Yes, very interesting. After it played I realized that I listened to it out of order. But I already knew that I'd be returning to this album for a proper listening at some point. And I think I did listen to it once or twice after that before the album fully clicked with me.
It was Phoenix Comic Con. It was morning, in my hotel room I shared with some other convention-goers. I had just taken a shower and gotten dressed, and was now waiting for the other people in my "party" to be ready too before we head out for another day of nerdiness. I decided to listen to an album while waiting... and decided to listen to
Not Available. I had the same tablet from earlier, with the same out-of-order song list, but I made an effort to manually play them in order. I also pulled up the Residents website and read along with the lyrics. Something about this listening clicked with me. The beautiful sounds of the album. The emotional story portrayed in the lyrics. I realized how great that album was... I was almost shocked at how great it was. How was I supposed to do anything else today when I've already experienced probably the greatest thing I'll experience all day? I remember after basically thinking "that was the greatest album I've ever heard", I turned to one of my friends and said "Alright, next year at Phoenix Comicon, I want to cosplay as this..." as I pointed to a picture of the eyeball-headed Residents on my tablet.
(By the way, I've started using a new app to listen to my music on my phone, which so far hasn't forgotten any ID3 information about my songs!)
This album is beautiful. That synthesizer has this graceful sound to it... I'd say it almost has this "cosmic" vibe to it but I don't want to confuse grace with outer space. The saxophone has this rough, but surprisingly clear sound to it. I didn't even know the early Rz (or N. Senada) could
actually play saxaphone... I thought all they ever did was just mash on the buttons randomly! And that piano... that piano is so hauntingly beautiful. I think that piano steals the whole show. I didn't even know it was possible to give a piano such character. Not only does it have this pretty, little antique-type sound to it, but it moves the album along. It's tied to our little porcupine character and moves in and out of the album as he moves in and out of the story. But let's not forget the that bit of vocal cacophony before the beginning of
Making of a Soul which sounds awesome, or the weirdly refreshing flute-like instrument at the beginning of
Ship's a'going down that signals a change of scene and characters. The singers of this album bring these characters to life and I love their weird voices.
God in Three Persons gives us this nice warmth in Mr. X's voice as he narrates his tale, but there's this quality to all of
Not Available's voices which I can't quite pinpoint but that I love.
And the lyrics, oh the lyrics! I think I could sing the album from memory. Those questions were guaranteed to shake me up and they did. And falling guards and polling wards are just too many. OKAY? OKAY? Oh man... sorry, I just really,
really love this album. The words just feel so good on my ears, and those rhymes... they are just fantastic. But when we get into lyrics, we have to get into the whole... "WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?" question. I wasn't even planning on writing this part up at first because, well, someone would beat me to the conclusion I've already reached with the album. And at the end of the day, this album is about a specific personal story which I do not know nor will I ever know. But I could write about this album forever.
Not writing this section is a disservice to the album!
Simply put, I think this album is about love, lust, infatuation, relationships, and the boundaries they form... or something. At a base level, Edweena and the Porcupine are in a relationship, the Porcupine questions the nature of their relationship, and is then rejected by Edweena. The rest of the story... is a bit harder to follow. It almost feels like it's in another language... I feel like I understand it to a point, but translating it into English is more difficult. The conflicting interpretations I've read about the story don't help much with me forming a single interpretation of it myself. I'm just going to describe small observations I can make about the album from here on out.
Let's first start with the different characters and their purposes. Edweena is the love interest. I think that's pretty obvious. Edweena starts off with a relationship with the Porcupine. This porcupine is sort of our main character. Why is it a porcupine? This may be a reference to the
Hedgehog's Dilemma ...otherwise known as the Porcupine's Dilemma, since porcupines actually have spines that hurt. It describes a metaphorical situation where porcupines would huddle together for warmth in the winter, but getting to close and intimate ends up hurting both of them due to their sharp spines. And this is exactly what happens in this album. The intimate relationship between Edweena and the Porcupine gets
too intimate and they find themselves getting pricked by their very own nature.
The questions guaranteed to shake you up are all related. They are all about Edweena and the porcupine's relationship. How much
marriage urges a windmill to pinch infinity? Is firm corn merrier under gifts of less important
love? Is a magic hide-a-bed the final home of Spanish fire? Well... that last one seems a bit confusing, but it makes sense to me. Perhaps an unveiled version of this question would be "Does our relationship only really exist in bed?" or something similar. That's how I've always interpreted it, I guess.
The ship in
Ship's a'going Down is probably a
relationship. Yeah it might be a bad pun, but I seriously think that's what it could be. I feel like the image of a sinking ship is a perfect metaphor for a relationship going awry, although I'm not entirely sure how to explain it....
Alright... those are actualy the only analytical observations of the lyrics I could think of that weren't too obvious. I would like to bring up some more general things to talk about for a bit though. First off, the Theory of Obscurity. I love the idea of the Theory of Obscurity and whenever I do weird artsy writing I try to make my art only for myself. But was the Theory of Obscurity violated by the release of this album? Obviously The Residents did not voluntarily release the album, as The Cryptic Corporation had to put out
something. And while The Cryptic Corporation was focused more on the smart management of The Residents, I feel like they've always tried to preserve The Residents' artistic visions. My feeling, similar to goatie's, is that there really is another
Not Available out there that truly has never been released. And might never be until those responsible for its creation forget about the entire thing, if it was to ever be released. And similar to CheerfulHypocrite, that maybe this Not Available is a cloaked or altered version of that original.
On a related note is the album's title. The title reflects the nature of the album itself, in that because of the Theory of Obscurity, it literally wasn't available until it was released 4 years later. But I feel like the title of the album is more than just that. To quote an idea that is not mine, that I read from an older Rz forum, if
Not Available wasn't stashed away under the Theory of Obscurity... it'd probably still be titled "Not Available". First off, the way the story of the album is constructed makes its true meaning not available to the listener. And in a less meta sense, Edweena is not available to the porcupine after he questions the nature of their relationship, while the porcupine himself isn't available during the confrontation of Part Three (only to emerge in Part Four).
Also in my random notes about the album is something someone else discovered rather recently.
This video manipulates a bit of the audio during
Making of a Soul to make a very faint monologue much more audible, which is pretty cool. I think it was hidden away because it was more personally revealing than the rest of the album, but... well, it's still pretty confusing, that's for sure. I won't theorize much about it since from what I can make out of it, it seems to just reassure what most people already think they know about the album, but it's definitely a pretty interesting.
One final note on this album is that I try to make it "Not Available" to myself even. I've learned that listening to an album too much can cause a sense of burn-out. And I have many albums which I've put on hold due to over-listening, these holds sometimes lasting months or even years. With
Not Available I try hard never to listen to it
too much, so whenever I listen to it, it's truly an event. (Though to be honest, I love this album so much and it's already so familiar to me that I'm not sure I could get burnt out on it without some serious effort). For this project of the week event, though, I did listen to it fairly often. I think I listened to it more times in the past two weeks than I did in the entirety of 2016. I click "post" on my last listening of the 2011 vinyl printing before I lock it away once more for at least a few months.
Anyway...
Not Available is great. I love it. I obviously just rambled on it for quite a lot longer than my usual Project of the Week posts. I mean... I had to for such a wonderful album! I often find myself thinking I don't have that much to add to these discussions... But I can't do that for Not Available. I can't just
not know that such an important question exists: "To show or to be shown?"