Taking the Residential concept of "music about music" to its logical extreme, in 1984 The Residents threw themselves into a serious, long-term project grandiosely titled The American Composers Series.
Essentially, the concept was a musical exploration of various American composers, two at a time, juxtaposing one against the other, with each featured on opposite sides of an LP. The band would first deconstruct the music then rebuild it around the Residential values of naivete, atonal innocence and playful pretense. By breaking break down the mythology surrounding the celebrated composers and reducing the music to its essence, The Residents purposefully created the lofty goal of imposing their own Theory of Obscurity on other famous musicians. Satisfied with their new direction, the group then announced a goal of interpreting twenty different composers on ten albums over a period of sixteen years, from 1984 to 2001.
The third album in the series was tentatively titled The Trouble with Harrys, featuring the music of Harry Partch and Harry Nilsson, but The Residents unexpectedly abandoned the project in 1986. As LPs lost sales to CDs, part of the charm of the series was its juxtaposition of one composer against another, a non-existent feature on one sided CDs.
Quite a few ideas were bounced around during the planning of the abandoned series. The band wanted to include Captain Beefheart, Sun Ra, Smokey Robinson, Bob Dylan, Charles Ives, Stevie Wonder, Moondog, Barry White, Scott Joplin and Brian Wilson in the series, and actually started work on several compositions by Bob Dylan and Barry White for a volume tentatively titled Bob & the Blob.
While critics complained that the series was nothing new for the band, referring to it as "modest," "lacking ambition" and "predictable," the Cryptic Corporation has insisted the series, by design, was never intended to break new ground. Furthermore, they claimed the concept should primarily be viewed as an educational experience for the band; in addition, by binding the work with the Theory of Obscurity, the only needs to be gratified in the project were those of the artist.
Regardless, with only two of the ten projected albums completed, the question of the artists' satisfaction relative to The American Composers Series remains unanswered.