Day 212: The Shaggs – Philosophy of the World
There’s a distinct lack of crap on this blog. Very rarely do I listen to something and think “fuck me, that was bad”, I tend to listen to things that are regarded as good anyway. Plus it’s more fun for me to try to enjoy things and appreciate people’s art – there’s been instances where I’ve started an album and thought I don’t have a single thing to say about this, but mostly when that happens I just choose something else.
Album cover courtesy of Third World
Today I thought I’d go for something that’s just all-around bad, so I googled the worst album in history. Reader, I have somehow struck gold: I never knew that there’s a band that’s so magically bad that they’ve been dubbed the best worst band of all time.
The Shaggs were formed when the father of three teenage girls received a prediction from his palm-reading mother that his daughters would be famous musicians, so he decided to make that happen no matter what. The trio consisting of Helen, Betty, and Dorothy “Dot” Wiggin would play at the local town hall and nursing home, surely much to the chagrin of those who were forced to hear them. Their father paid for them to record an album and took them out of school so that they could focus on their music full-time.
First of all, I understand that this was the time before google, but if you should name a band consisting of your teenage daughters, I feel like there’s a vetting process that goes as follows: Step 1: Ensure it’s not anything sexual or offensive. Step 2: refer to step 1, if you do you’re probably fine. The father of these girlies failed at the first hurdle. But I’ll let it slide, it’s probably more of a British term anyway. Frankly, the name is the least of their problem.
Musically, it is horrible. You never know what’s coming, partly because there wasn’t a single person in that room with any sense of rhythm, nor did anybody think that you should tune an instrument. It’s as if you put a bunch of 5-year-olds in front of instruments and told them to go nuts, except to some extent I think that might yield more skilled results. It’s the musical equivalent of that thing with the monkeys and the typewriters where if you did it long enough you’d eventually end up with something brilliant – there was no skill or thought behind this, and yet it’s sort of great?
The thing about this is that there just wasn’t a single person involved who had presumably even heard music, along with home-schooled girls living under a horrifically strict and restrictive father who encouraged them to pursue their art without any tutelage, so the resulting album kind of sounds like if you’d described the concept of a band to aliens and told them to send you their interpretation of what they think it is. And that’s something that’s also expressed in the liner notes:
The Shaggs are real, pure, unaffected by outside influences. Their music is different, it is theirs alone. They believe in it, live it… Of all contemporary acts in the world today, perhaps only the Shaggs do what others would like to do, and that is perform only what they believe in, what they feel, not what others think the Shaggs should feel.
This lives on the mount Olympus of crap. Sure, it’s offensive to my ears, but it’s like a dadaist anti-music masterpiece. No one involved was in any way able to play their instrument, write lyrics or sing, but that somehow doesn’t get in the way of… well, not talent, but something. And if you think about it, I guess the prophecy came true, they’re now known as the best of the worst.
It’s the most difficult thing I’ve had to rank so far. It’s terrible, but it’s the best of terrible. I don’t know, maybe a 4.5/10? I’d like to say I’ll never listen to it again, but unfortunately there’s also something very magnetic about it and I could probably easily listen to it again right away. I don’t know what that was, but at the very least it was memorable.