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The Third Reich N Roll

Rev. Syung Myung Me: This is one of my favorites, but it might not be the best place to start. For this album, the Residents put a medley of bubblegum pop hits on one track of an 8-track recorder, recorded stuff over the top to go along with it, and then erased the original track. The album is two suites (each taking up one side of the original LP), "Hitler Was a Vegetarian" and "Swastikas On Parade". The original album didn't have a side A and B labeled – it was just "This Side/That Side", although the recordings do separate themselves clearly into A-and-B-sides. "Swastikas" has a clear introduction and a less-emphatic conclusion, where "Hitler" has a less-emphatic introduction and a magnificent ending (the wonderful combination of "Sympathy for the Devil" and "Hey Jude", with the excellent guitar line that perfectly combines the two songs. That is basically worth the price of admission alone, but most of this album is really good. It's also the source of their first music video (and one of the first music videos in general, and one on display at MoMA), cut together from the "Land of 1000 Dances" portion of "Swastikas On Parade". (This is also a good album to put on to get people who aren't expecting such deconstructed wrecks of songs they know to go away.) The Residents also recorded a teaser single of "Satisfaction" for this album – sort of a concept-distillate that'd fit on a 45; "Satisfaction" is much darker and scarier than any of the actual album, though.