My pal’s name is Foot Foot, he always likes to roam
The Shaggs: Philosophy of the World
After listening to this a bit the last couple days, I happened to be in my favourite independent record store, where the manager and a dude I used to work with happened to be discussing Jandek. The manager talked about Jandek’s general unlistenability and utter primitiveness, his music perpetually off-key and that every song was roughly the same in its generally atonal anti-musicality. Revolutionary perhaps at the beginning of his ‘career’ thirty years ago but after all these years perhaps quaint and of little value. I argued that while to some extent he was correct, Jandek was more varied than that and would often employ others to give him a more robust bluesy sound, among other things. Primarily, however, Jandek’s significance is as an outsider artist, a self-producer who has been making albums in anonymity for decades, driven by some curious indefinable passion for the music. If he were someone well known, this would be a vanity project, but his general obscurity makes him somewhat more pure.
Which brings me to The Shaggs. The Shaggs predated Jandek by nearly a decade, and they could be his musical forebears. It would be foolish to refer to The Shaggs as ‘outsider artists’ because that would indicate a great amount of pretense that is certainly not there. Their story is simple and almost tragic when one listens to the sour chords that are ever present in the music. They are three sisters with an interest in music, somewhat pushed into the arena of recording by an over-encouraging, overprotective father. They could do no wrong, and they would become famous, noteworthy musicians. In a way, his prophecy proved accurate. The Shaggs have over the years gathered a legend of their own rather akin to the notoriety of the films of Edward D. Wood, Jr. Let’s make no bones about it, Philosophy of the World is music that is entirely incompetent. All rules of meter, structure, tone, and melody are discarded. It frequently sounds as if each of the three sisters is playing a different song – the tempos never match, the vocals are out of key, they meander about until the whole enterprise just comes to a halt. The lyrics are almost surreal in their naïveté, cheerful paeans to parents and Halloween and joys like listening to the radio or driving in cars. It is unbelievably primitive.
As with anything of this sort, such a thing attracts several different groups of people. There are those who claim it as an essential outsider art piece, and this was how it originally gained attention, as touted by Frank Zappa. There are those who come to it only to laugh at its sheer badness and absurdity, and this is what brought it into rotation with Dr. Demento’s show. However, there are also those of us who regard it as a charming oddity. I would not claim Philosophy of the World to be art. These girls were guilelessly attempting to make a pop album, like those they heard on the radio. They were great fans of The Monkees and Rick Nelson, and they were trying to make an album that sounded like them. Like Ed Wood, they were simply trying to be a part of something they loved, but their own particular shorthand for it lost something in the translation. I had heard about this album for years before I actually heard it, and it really didn’t match up to anything I’d heard said. It was the sort of thing that made me shake my head in wonder. I passed my headphones around to several of my co-workers, to share in the odd experience of it, and they similarly were befuddled by it, by its disarming innocence but also by its undeniable anti-musicality.
It’s an experience more than it is music, perhaps. It’s sad and it’s curiously charming, but it is not good music by any stretch of the imagination. It is half an hour of an otherworldly perspective on pop music, young people trying to emulate their idols with none of the training, knowledge, or skill with which to do so, none of the dialectic or even basic understanding of how music is constructed, only the tools with which to make it. My initial review of this read simply ‘wow’ and I suppose that’s about as cogent a review as I’m likely to write about it. No rating low or high can really fit, it merely lives its strange existence and I am drawn to it. ‘We do our best, we try to please, but we’re like the rest. We’re never at ease,’ Dorothy sings on the title track. Like the rest? No, not at all. Nowhere near.
So, yes, wow.
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