Darger, the Devil and Daniel Johnston

In terms of cultural saliency, the term “outsider music” is no match for its cousin “outsider art.” There’s never been a Simpson’s episode about outsider music, for example. Maybe it’s that it’s harder to escape the musical mainstream than the artistic establishment; maybe it’s that musicmaking is a more populist endeavor than fine art, so a lack of culturally learned pretension is expected. Folk art at the New York MOMA is probably outsider art; folk music at Carnegie or CBGBs is probably, well, folk music. Outsider music has to bring something extra to the table: something even more psychologically visceral, emotionally uncanny. A touch of the devil, if you will.

A brief catalogue of my favorites, after the jump.

• The Shaggs are hard to classify. Its the kind of music I imagine would be played by girls possessed by really hip tone-deaf poltergeists. They are as bewildering lyrically as they are sonically – one song describes an imaginary friend  named Foot Foot, for example. The band was formed in the 1960s by three teenage sisters at the behest of their father, in a Jackson-5-but-much-creepier kind of way. (I’ve alternately heard that he was told by a fortuneteller to start the enterprise; and that he thought his wife prophesized the band’s future success). For me, there has always been a bizarre undertone of child abuse somehow communicated through the Shaggs’ atonality  — or maybe through lyrics that say things like:

Who are parents?
Parents are the ones who really care
Who are parents?
Parents are the ones who are always there

Some kids think their parents are cruel
Just because they want them to obey certain rules
They start to lean from the ones who really care
Turning, turning from the ones who will always be there.

- from “Who Are Parents”

People have a lot of fun reviewing the Shaggs, and I have a lot of fun reading their reviews. One commentator proclaimed that their “music has its own inner logic.” Spin Magazine states that their album Philosophy of the World “behaves as if pop conventions of structure, tonality, rhythm, meter, and harmony never existed” and aptly noted that it sounds like the drummer is “two or three rooms away.” Anyways, I think their music is fantastic, even though they really really really couldn’t play their instruments.

Recommended Songs: My Pal Foot Foot; Who are Parents?

• Abner Jay has seen terrible things. He’s a folk musician, so he sings about terrible things, because folk is terrible. That’s why he likes cocaine. Self-described as the “last working Southern black minstrel,” Jay toured the American South through the Fifties and Sixties as a one-man-band, equipped with harmonica, drum kit, two-hundred year old banjo, and the “bones”: dried out chicken and cow bones used for percussion. As a kid he performed in medicine shows, and in his later career, he played concerts from a converted mobile home that opened up into a portable stage. Vice Magazine named a recent posthumous compilation of his work one of their favorite albums of the year. Do not be deterred — his music is so full of soul, and good.

Recommended Songs: Cocaine; Don’t Mess With Me Baby

• Wesley Willis was a schizophrenic street performer who made sweet, hilarious, and disorienting music in order to quiet the “demons” in his head. When he wasn’t developing a fervent cult following, he also made highly detailed pen-and-ink drawings of the city. His upbeat mix of high school kid punk rock and Casio keyboard beats feel really current in a major-key-electroclash-ariel-pink kind of way. Content of his songs varies from the absurdity of “Suck a Caribou’s Ass” (in which he repeatedly tells the listener to…suck a caribou’s ass), to the confessional “My Mom Smokes Crack Rocks.”  I find the lyrics to “My Keyboard Got Damaged” terribly poignant, on a completely non-ironic “oh my god he’s singing straight to me” level. He was was a prolific artist: he once recorded 4 albums in 36 days, and at the time of his very sad death in 2003 (leukemia) he had recorded at least 50 albums, all way ahead of the musical curve.

  
  

Recommended Songs: Vultures ate my dead ass up; My Keyboard Got Damaged

• Daniel Johnston is a Texan singer-songwriter known for self-recording his music on a radio boom box and illustrating his own tape covers (see above).  He’s distinguishable from the rest of the artists in this column because he’s still working, and he’s had quite a few supercelebrity fans, ranging from M Ward to the late Kurt Cobain. It’s likely you’ve heard about him — he’s kind of like the Darger of the musical genre. He also has a special relationship with the devil, as the title of the documentary about his life, The Devil and Daniel Johnston, might have suggested to you. Johnston launched his career from his parents’ basement; there he recorded his first tapes Songs of Pain and More Songs of Pain, both of which were inspired by his unrequited love for a woman named Laurie who ended up marrying an undertaker.

Recommended Songs: True Love Will Find You In the End; Don’t Play Cards with Satan