Eskimo Album

About Eskimo

Eskimo is an album by the Residents. The album was originally supposed to follow 1977's Fingerprince; however, due to many delays and arguments with management, it was not released until 1979. Upon release it was hailed as the group's best record to date. The pieces on Eskimo feature home-made instruments and chanting against backdrops of wind-like synthesizer noise and miscellaneous sound effects. The work is programmatic, each piece pairing music with text detailing a corresponding pseudo-ethnographic narrative. While Eskimo is officially maintained to be a true historical document of life in the Arctic, the stories are deliberately absurd fictions only loosely based in actual Inuit culture, and the chanting is a combination of gibberish and commercial slogans. The album satirizes ignorance toward and mistreatment of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. more »