The Shaggs
Philosophy of the World (1969)
eatdogs
According to the boys from South Park, the only way to kill
a Succubus is to sing their favorite song backwards. When I listened to the 12
tracks on Philosophy of the World the
first time I thought I might lose my mind and enter into an alternate reality
where I was being tortured by aliens and forced to listen to the three Wiggin
sisters for all eternity. I also remembered that South Park episode.
The Shaggs are a sort of cult like band. Cult as in their
music that was once lost became found and with a little help from The Dr.
Demento Show, Frank Zappa, and some guy named Kurt Cobain, they were
rediscovered and have somehow stepped past the threshold of mediocrity
(awfulness really…) and evolved into a band that escapes the boundaries of
obscurity and being locked behind a circus sideshow-like persona. The kind of
stuff your buddy in college might tell you about.
You might want a different buddy…
The Shaggs were an all sister band managed by their father
who formed the band based off palm readings his mother received many years
before. Two of the readings came true and the third was that his daughters
would become a famous girl band. He used his savings and bought them used pawn
shop instruments and they practiced on their own without help. They got an
obscure record label called Third World Recordings to commit suicide and they
recorded all twelve tracks in one day.
Nine hundred of the original thousand copies of the album
vanished, and shortly thereafter their record company's producer and president
also vanished and the label quickly folded. The remaining original copies of
the album became highly sought after and you know what happens when rarity
comes into play right? (*at the time of the writing one is for sale on Discogs
for $9000.00…*)
Ok, so how does the music sound? Well… you ever suffer from
a mental breakdown and had issues with everything around you causing you major
pain in all parts of your body? You ever been water tortured? Scrape all elbows
and knees? Bit your cheek or tongue? Sat with the cannibalistic family in the
Texas Chainsaw Massacre? Well the music of the Shaggs brings to mind those
things. It’s really the suffering that stands out. This is music to play
outside somebody’s house in order to get them to leave. This is music equivalent
to going #2 in a hot steamy porta-potty by a construction site near the river.
This is the Shaggs and their debut album. This is something
AMAZING and also something very cruel. Cruel to your pets, cruel to your
neighbors, cruel to the actual people who made it, and cruel to the universe.
They ended their career playing in local nursing homes.
Think about that for a moment…
Oh, and one more thing, why didn’t Nirvana cover the awesome
“Who Are Parents” or the even more awesome-er “My Pall Foot Foot” when they did
MTV Unplugged? Who cares about the friggin’ Meat Puppets!
Do you like Trout Mask
Replica? Yip/Jump Music? Spookydisharmoniousconflicthellride? If
so you like good music.
Philosophy
of the World is
like a Tim & Eric sketch come to life, except this was actually serious.
Listen and be ‘enlightened’ by the eargasmic feels of the Shaggs’s own P.h.i.l.o.s.o.p.h.y. o.f. t.h.e. W.o.r.l.d…