Halcyon Magazine

The Bunny Boy: "I'm not crazy!"

TEXT BY DANIEL HARJU / PHOTOS BY GABRIEL HARJU

When the apocalypse comes to Mother Earth and her scorched surfaces can no longer sustain life, radio waves traveling through space will be the only remaining traces of this foolish human race. And if then, by any chance, some aliens tune into Earthly signals, I hope by the Gods that the first thing they hear is the Residents.

Seldom has Stockholm enjoyed a concert experience like the one the Residents had to offer Sunday night at Södra Teatern’s Kägelbanan. It is difficult not to see the Residents as a weird avant-garde band with a cult following, but don’t be so quick to disregard their music as too esoteric. Although the Residents’ music is unconventional to the point of being non-linear and almost completely de-constructed, each song presents a coherent idea that traps us like bunnies in a cage.

The Residents

The masked band has been able to maintain anonymity throughout their career, a testimony to artistic commitment but also a compromise to their own Theory of Obscurity. Set in a scary futuristic bunny environment, the Residents played for two hours, complete with a Bunny Intermission. Actually, to call the Bunny Boy show a concert is an understatement by every stretch of the imagination. What Bunny Boy actually amounts to is psychedelic and psychological multi-media musical theater that incorporates insanity, obsession, the avant-garde, humor, and pure entertainment.

Bunny Boy, the Residents latest album, was released on the Santa Dog record label in September of this year. The band describes this as yet another album about “obsession, insanity and the coming Apocalypse.” Along with the 19 songs on the album, the Resident’s latest multi-media project also includes 40 (and counting) short movie clips released on Youtube that tell the highly amusing story of Bunny Boy. Some of these clips were projected on stage, giving the old frontman in a bunny costume a chance to catch his breath.

Boxes of Armageddon

Musically, the Residents sounds like children’s songs conceived by a deranged, but genius, modern Renaissance man…. Or, like if the Melvins played Moondog’s songs on acid. Lyrically, the Residents reside in a glorious and creepy land of trippy and cryptic symbolism, dada, and ridiculous conspiracy theories. Best of all, Bunny Boy, the latest of Resident’s many concept albums, is a comment on the fragility of the modern human condition (bursting bubbles), the perils of the Internet (phishing emails from a “Nigerian banker”), and just how fine that dividing line is between sanity and insanity (watch out! the all-consuming Black is all around us).

As the Bunny Boy’s story unfolded, it became more convoluted and all throughout the audience, middle-aged men were scratching their balding heads trying to figure it out. I will now risk making a fool of myself and offer my own interpretation of the plot, a rather Freudian psycho-analysis of Bunny Boy. He, the crazed main character who dances around wearing first a hippie blanket to hide behind and then a fluffy white Bunny costume, claims to be looking for his disappeared brother Harvey. We learn through clues that Bunny Boy appears in vacation pictures from the time of Harvey’s disappearance on a Greek island, and it now looks as if he killed his own brother. But with a lovely twist, we also learn that Harvey was a casualty of the dot-com crash. He lost his online pet business, his sanity and his wife and kid as a result. They left him with his bulging cardboard boxes of Armageddon.

The Bunny Band

Here’s where my Freudian analysis comes in: Losing his business became too much for Harvey. He plunged himself into a crazy Apocalypse conspiracy land and lost his wife and daughter. Then, as a way of coping with this escalated trauma, Harvey killed himself and became Bunny Boy as a way of regressing back to a fluffy and uncomplicated childhood. He now hides from the world in his secret room decorated with bunnies and roams the Internet looking for his former self.

So in a way, Bunny Boy did kill Harvey when he ejected himself out of his own head. I think we can all relate to this story.

Tell me, does this sounds crazy?

Tags: Bunny Boy, Kägelbanan, Live, Nov. 30 2008, Södra Teatern, Stockholm, The Residents

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 4th, 2008 at 5:22 am and is filed under Show Review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.