Who are The Shaggs?


Dot, Helen, and Betty Wiggin of Fremont, New Hampshire never wanted to be famous. Their father, Austin, dreamed it for them. He spent his family’s meager savings buying instruments and studio time for his teenage daughters, and pulled them out of school so they could practice all day. They never had a formal lesson, but despite their


lack of ability, talent, or


discernable desire to even play, their father forced them to become “The Shaggs.” They performed at the town hall on Saturday nights, and scrubbed the scuff‐marks off the floors there Sunday morning. In 1969, Philosophy of the World was recorded at a local studio, but the an hired to press the record absconded with Austin’s money and nine‐hundred of


p romise copies. Austin died in 1975, and the group fell into willful obscurity.


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Six years later, members of the indie band NRBQ, having stumbled upon the rare album, convinced their label to reissue Philosophy of the World. Rolling Stone called it “The Comeback of the Year” and “one of the 100 most influential alternative releases of all time.” Irwin Chusid


the thousand


the verse structure changes constantly. The melody is pedestrian, one note per syllable, a pattern which the uitar tries to mimic. The lyrics are possibly even ore simple, but at best strangely, profoundly true:


g m


Oh, the rich people want what the poor people’s got And the poor people want what the rich people’s got A


nd the skinny people want what the fat people’s got And the fat people want what the skinny people’s got


Perhaps the only thing Shaggs lovers and haters can agree on is that Philosophy of the World is an undeniable presence in the evolution of music. Music theorists believe that the sound of The Shaggs encourages a more progressive kind of listening, orcing audiences to focus more broadly and intently h


f on what they’re earing.


devotes a chapter to them in his book Songs in the Key of Z, writing: “It’s aboriginal rock ’n’ roll. It’s musical p rimitivism. It's three girls stumbling across the lost chords. There’s a spastic magic in those grooves.”


But many listeners don’t fall under the spell of The Shaggs. Amazon readers’ reviews proclaim, “If the smell of an old lady living in a station wagon with twenty cats had a sound, it would be The Shaggs,” and, “This album w ill sound better in a blender on chop mode than if you were to play it in your CD player.”


The only thing more confounding than the opposing responses would be the music itself. At first, it’s hard going, but the more you listen, the more enveloped you become. Something is wrong with the tempo, and


Michael David Székely, a professor of Cultural Aesthetics and Music Philosophy at Temple University writes, “Through their nearly ungraspable blend of innocent music‐making…we are led to be more creative and multi‐layered in our exploration and criticism—to some extent, in our very sense of aesthetic value.” The brain is incapable of predicting the musical pattern played by The Shaggs, so it has to ay more attention to it; his


p implication is


listening to The Shaggs can make you smarter. The Shaggs’s music


think of that is nothing if not pure, and


painfully honest. Genius cult classic or obscure trash, this is what they wanted us to hear. And if their lyrics are to be believed, they were painfully aware of what people might


their sound: You can never please anybody in this world.


— Kelly Hires, Literary R esident at Playwrights Horizons


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