The Talk of Creatures

I find it difficult to listen to God in Three Persons without speculating on the intentions of its authors. I feel somewhat hesitant to interpret the meaning of the album. It makes me uncomfortable, as if I have somehow violated an unspoken agreement between The Residents and its audience. I try not to think about who lies behind The Residents, and what they intend with their work. I prefer to take the art at face value. Yet Gi3P sparks me to ask what real-world event inspired this album -- assuming that the album comes from real-world inspiration, and not pure fantasy.
The album just has too much emotional content for me to take on without imagining a human being on the other side of obscurity. A thinking, living person (or persons) who wrote the words and music.
My fears might grow from a misunderstanding of The Residents. I can sidestep my anxieties and openly speculate upon the intentions of this person if I accept one thing: the people responsible for The Residents do not equal The Residents.
You cannot create The Residents. You can only reveal them. Their art has more in common with seance and revelation than it has with performance and creation, making The Residents something that belongs to the fans as much as it belong to the "creators".
Interpreting Gi3P album, looks more like mythologizing more than it looks like speculation. Even if I mythologize, say, a man in the aftermath of a crisis -- a kindred spirit -- who wrote his magnum opus sometime in the late 1980s.
I first heard Gi3P around 14 years ago, making me about 14 years old when the opening credits first graced my virgin ears. The album has taken on new meaning, and a life of its own, inside my head, since that first time. Every time I hear the album, I gain a new sense of perspective, uncovering wordplay and innuendo as I give the lyrics a closer listen, but even at the young age of 14, I sensed in the album an overarching theme of sexual transgression. Mr. X misdirects yet he also becomes Miss Directs as he acquaints himself with a he one who almost always becomes a she one.
This defying of both sex and gender, this combination of masculine and feminine, explains the title of the second track.
What other puns and innuendo can we find in the first track? Words like pulsing drum, tingling and tangled might remind us of the sexuality that positively oozes from the album, which leads us to ask what it means to go "down beneath the bottom" -- a phrase that helps us gauge the narrators emotional barometer while hinting at a dynamic yet that ties in with the title of the following track: devoting.
Yes, this Mr. X may have think he'll come out on top of the world yet he never quite gets himself out from under the bottom of things. Even when trying to con the twins, he finds himself begging, beseeching and devoting himself to them.
I think the symbolism of the next track, "The Thing About Them", doesn't require a genius to piece together. Here we find out about the he one, the she one, and Mr. X's inability to tell one from the other. We also learn of Mr. X's ambition to make the twins into what he wants. Finally, we have the cottage with the tiny door. Curious how we cannot tell who the cottage belongs to. Does Mr. X want inside as he says? Or does he want of them to go inside?
In "Devotion" we have some religious language that mentioned already -- begging, beseeching, devotion, etc. -- but in "Their Early Years" we find out first miracle. Also, I love how the twins think "they thought that we were put together randomly, just like the weather, with no uniformity in mind." It makes them seem deceptively innocent, and I can relate to that innocence.
Haven't we all had a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature rooted in our childhood? I know I have.
"Loss of a Loved One," teaches us that Mr. X has a fault line in his soul, a wound that only a miracle (like the resurrection of the dog in "Their Early Years") can heal. The language towards the end, again, makes me think of religion. It sounds like someone answering a religious call to me.

"Yes, my life was nearly ruined, till I saw what you were doing. Now I strive to keep on serving you. Life is good but I am better, for I feel at last I let her go because I finally found the truth." These lines could easily come from someone addressing a higher power, rather than some twins they hope to relegate to some sideshow act performed for profit and perversion. The Great G-Word in the sky hardly receives direction mention outside of the album title, yet we can sense "His" presence lurking over the entire album like a long and smokey shadow.
"The Touch" hints toward the perversion I mentioned before, the back and forth of their scrimmage seems innocent enough, yet foreshadows the sexual tension that builds from this point onward. M. X seems to think he comes out on top, finally out from under the bottom, or so he claims, as he insists that he pushes the twins through towns and through bushes as he describes in "The Service".
The lascivious nature of Mr. X's relationship to the twins finally comes to a head, the elephant in the room growing to unavoidable size in "Confused by What I Felt Inside". Perhaps this "inside" relates to the cottage door in "The Thing About Them". I can't help but think "smooth and shiny object  with a purpose and a job [Mr. X] recognized and was familiar with" has the same shape and use as the pink object we see Mr. X wielding in the art for Gi3P -- but perhaps that guess says more about me than it does the album. Mythology says as much about the people who create it as it says about the real world.
The narrator loads "Fine Fat Flies" to the hilt with sexual language of both an overt and covert nature. One would have to bury their head in the sand to miss the carnal message of the song, yet even ordinary actions and objects receive descriptors like "sharpness", "penetrating", and "liquid" and "lacing" to remind us of the conflict and mutability of feminine and masculine that persists throughout the album.
"I said it would be wrong to play these games of weak and strong together without me [...]and they simply were too young to understand." This moment disturbs me more than any other in the album. It touches upon the manipulative nature of Mr. X and borders on the subjects of consent and violation of consent. How young do you think he means by "too young"? I hesitate to wait for an answer.
Sonically, I think the end of this track represents the peak of this album as it builds and builds upon a throbbing, piercing rhtyhtm that finally halts leaving us overwhelmed, yet empty, unsatisfied with what we have accomplished so far, exhausted, yet craving more.
Finally, the themes of piercing and penetration begin to manifest themselves in the objects and actions of the story in "Silver, Sharp, And Could Not Care," leading to the climax of the tale in "Holy Kiss of Flesh."
Ahhh... what can I say about "Holy Kiss of Flesh"? I don't know where to begin! I guess I'll begin by stating that I find it important to note that the twins titter from the very beginning of the track as if they anticipated Mr. X's actions well ahead of time. This causes me to question if Mr. X ever had the upper hand in his relationship with the twins, and if they somehow manipulated him all along.
Then we have the first blunt sexual language of the album. Mr. X refers to his dick, and says he **** the gaping Venus between the twins, and then we have the literal "climax" of the album, when Mr X says, "There could be but one conclusion nto this sick distorted fusion, and of course it came...and so did I." Ew, right?
At last we have the denouement. Here the narrator almost hands the meaning of his parable directly over to us. A personal philosophy grounded in BDSM seems somewhat apparent in the closing words of the album.
Story-wise, we find that while Mr. X's actions seem objectionable, he does not go without sympathy. The narrator renders himself, I guess, in a way that we can all relate to.
Lets not forget that the twins remind friends with Mr. X, and each other, after he cuts them apart. I like to think that Mr. X never quite manipulated or abused them. They led him on all along, not to demean him, but to heal the fault lines in his soul. A soul does not heal easily, I guess. The twins darken the sky and bring a dog back to life without a problem, but it takes a great amount of pain and trauma for them to heal a broken soul, so much, in fact, that they split apart in bringing something else together.
What does it mean? I don't know! Sometimes I think the whole story amounts to nothing more than a masturbatory fantasy. Perhaps the narrator mythologizes as much as I have in my interpretation of the album. Maybe the crimson eruption that ends below a twin's belly button isn't the only thing that's only in Mr. X's mind.
And what of the religious overtones? Is religion just a masturbatory fantasy, too?
How about the "meta-musical" meaning of the album? The Residents persistently make commentary on the music scene. What does it mean that they borrow from other artists in the musical backing of their story? Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't their three songs that make up all the melodies on the album?
"Ooh Baby" by Sam Cooke.
"Holy Holy Holy" the Christian hymn.
"Double Shot of My Baby's Love" by The Swinging Medallions.
God In Three Persons, God In Three Songs?
I dunno.
I could be taking it too far but I find it interesting that while Snakefinger was allegedly slated to lay down a guitar track for the album, Gi3P ultimately had three parts that made up the music: the narration, the Greek chorus, and the backing music -- God in Three Persons, Blessed Trinity.