Rock music is an endless parade of recycled riffs and stolen images that has been trudging on for nearly sixty years. Everyone rips off everyone else. The only real key to success is ripping off the right people, a fact that's been true since the birth of rock 'n roll itself.
Elvis Presley covered all the right delta blues singers, the Beatles copied the right Chuck Berry licks, Brian Wilson stole the right Phil Spector techniques—it's a time-honored, reliable tradition that has resulted in some of the greatest music ever made.
True originality, however, is incredibly rare, so much so that it can arguably be traced back to only a few dozen artists. While it's impossible to create art without being at least partially influenced by outside forces, this elite group of artists managed to contribute unique ideas to an art form so firmly rooted in its own past that it often seems to oppose progress of any kind.
Chuck Berry, Kraftwerk, Black Sabbath, James Brown, the Velvet Underground, the Stooges, Run-D.M.C., the Ramones, Bob Dylan—without artists like these, modern music as we know it would cease to exist.
Yet this accepted canon of legends is almost always missing one of the greatest bands in history, a group so monumentally groundbreaking that they were declared “Better Than the Beatles,” a group that rewrote the very rules of pop music and inspired legions of followers to demolish every possible musical boundary available.
The Shaggs.
Their story is truly mythic in its sweep.
Three sisters, Dot, Helen, and Betty Wiggin, created a rock band in New Hampshire at the urging of their father, Austin. Austin's mother had made three palmreading predictions when he was a teenager, claiming that he would marry a strawberry blonde woman, have two sons after her death, and start a band with his daughters. After he indeed married a strawberry blonde and had two sons, he decided to continue on and make the third premonition come true as well.
Austin promptly took his daughters out of school in 1968 and signed them up for music lessons, effectively making music their top priority without their consent. The daughters dutifully practiced their instruments, naming their band “The Shaggs” after both the “shag” hairstyle and shaggy dogs. After less than a year, Austin booked his daughters studio time, and Philosophy of the World was released to an unsuspecting world.
There has truly never been an album quite like Philosophy of the World, and there likely never will be again.
It is impossible to overstate how wonderful this album is. Every preconceived notion of rock music, everything that had been taken for granted by artists for decades, was thrown out the window on this record. A steady beat, in-tune guitars, proper harmony, established melodies—all concepts completely overthrown by a schoolgirl trio.
The Shaggs are at once horrifically dissonant and primitively beautiful. Their music is unlistenable by modern standards, lacking any of the comforts that simple song structure provides, yet their lyrics are wonderfully innocent, juxtaposed violently against the tense amusical noise spewing behind it.
“My Pal Foot Foot” ostensibly follows the tale of a missing dog named “Foot Foot,” who is found by the protagonist at the end of the song. (Or the dog died, depending on how you interpret the piece.) “Philosophy of the World” is a shockingly honest depiction of class warfare and the enormous social pressures we face every day, ending with the most honest line in the history of music: “You can never please anybody in this world.”
The album bounces between childish themes and surprisingly mature treatises on existence in an effortless fashion, effectively bringing us into the chaotic world of a Christian schoolgirl growing up in the 60s.Philosophy of the World is a snapshot in time, a perfect depiction of musical innocence created rather forcefully by Austin Wiggin.
In many respects, the Shaggs are simply the vehicle of Austin, much like Malcom McLaren took a bunch of scummy London kids off the street and formed the Sex Pistols to fulfill his punk fantasies. But just as the Sex Pistols grew into a monster even Malcom couldn't contain, the Shaggs have ceased to become a “rock band” in the image Austin wanted them to be.
Over time, they've become an embodiment of the otherness of rock 'n roll, the true freedom rock 'n roll always offered yet nobody quite took advantage of. It's more avant-garde than the Velvet Underground, more punk than the Ramones, and more poetic than Bob Dylan, on a level none of them could even fathom reaching.
Thankfully, numerous artists have taken up the challenge posed by the Wiggin sisters, including Frank Zappa, Kurt Cobain, Ida, Deerhoof, R. Stevie Moore, and countless other musicians working to further push the limits of this whole “rock music” that continues to exist in the Shaggs' shadow.
For the more daring among you, the “Better Than the Beatles” tag will ring loud and clear throughoutPhilosophy of the World. For others, this column will amount to nothing more than rock journalism at its worst. Which is sad, but understandable.
In time, however, you'll come to know the truth: “Yesterday” and “A Day in the Life” are good songs and all, but they really can't compare to “My Pal Foot Foot.”
- 4/5/11
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